I told her that the dress, my christening dress, had fit fine and that Genevieve looked so sweet in it. We dressed her in white ruffle-butt tights and white satin baby booties and she sat placidly in the pew waiting for her time. It wasn't until after the ceremony that she got restless and wanted to nurse, but that was fine. I just snuck into the little chapel that Mike and I got married in to nurse her. It was the only place I could hear the service and have any privacy, so I didn't flash the clergy and the choir.

Then, I asked my mom about the dress. I asked if she'd made it, realizing that I remembered seeing a "Made in Phillipines" tag in it, right after I asked. I guess I asked because I remember so much of what I had when I was younger was something she'd sewn. I always had cute dresses and short sets and until I got to be about 12, I thought dresses my mom made for me were the best thing. I hope Genny thinks the same thing about the dresses I make for her. Russell liked the pants I made when he was younger and was always proud to tell people that,"My mom made these!"

But back to the story...
My mom said that no, she hadn't made the dress, but that the dress was a gift from her mother's dearest friend, Irma Webster. Irma had been incredibly good to my mother in a multitude of ways over the years. When my mother was still dating my father, Irma apparently visited in the area he was going to school in Missouri and she and her husband took my father out for what he said was "the best steak I ever ate."

When my mother was pregnant with me, my father, who'd gone to college on an air force ROTC scholarship, was sent to Vietnam to fly planes. My mother went to live with her parents in Connecticut in Milford, CT, not far from Hartford. My mother slept on the couch, which my grandparents called "the davenport." My mom said, "It wasn't much, but we made do." I remember sleeping on the same couch she did and I remember thinking that a davenport didn't seem much different than a couch.

In the evening, the family often huddled around the black and white TV to see news of the world and of course, the war. My grandmother would send my mother on errands to the store to get her away from the TV, so she didn't see the death tolls on the news. They didn't want her to get upset or worry overly in her "delicate" condition. My mom said that often the newspaper was missing for that day with no apparent explanantion, though she didn't need one.

Irma would stop in nearly daily to have a cup of coffee and talk with my mother. She often comforted my mom and gave her a shoulder to cry on. My mom claimed she didn't cry much, but that Irma gave her someone to talk to and that Irma did things to make her feel special. In the face of one's husband being away at a war that later was to spawn some of the goriest war films to hit the media, my mom needed someone to spoil her. Irma was that person.

My grandmother was a mean old biddy when I knew her. But my mom remembers this time of her life fondly. She said that when she was upset about the news from Vietnam that she was often reminded that crying wasn't good for her or the baby. I know that when I was told that when I was pregnant, it didn't provide much comfort to me, but I think having someone to say that to me did. I'm sure having her family around her when her husband couldn't be was a huge comfort.

Mom said that she'd wished she'd thanked her parents for that time. That they'd provided her with tremendous support of both the emotional and financial variety. At this point, she can thank their ghosts, as my grandmother died four months after Russell was born and my grandfather died 12 years before her.

My grandmother wasn't particularly into family traditions, according to my mother. There weren't any special pieces of jewelry passed down to my mother from generations before. So this christening dress was something my mom has saved in a dresser drawer all these 36 years, in the hopes that it would become part of a family tradition.

In 1966, Irma Webster died of breast cancer, just a few months after my brother was born, in a time when there was no such thing as a monthly self-exam. She and her husband are buried right next to my mother's parents, so that they'd be near their best friends from life.