After Losing My Mom, I Didn't Know How to Be a ‘Bride’

The dresses were whites and creams, lacy and chiffon, and a stranger stood beside me, zipping me into gown after gown. "How exciting," the stranger said. "The happiest day of your life!"

I cringed.

"Oh, beautiful," my aunts said, clapping, as I walked out to model the dresses. I spun and sashayed, blew kisses. My aunts were lovely, as were the gowns. But I already knew I’d never buy one of these things everyone had traveled so far to see me try on.

My partner and I had decided to get hitched. That was the good news: the love! But there was a lot about weddings that I didn’t understand. Changing your name to your husband’s, wearing white to mark your virginity, being “given away” to another man by your father—many of the traditions seemed more like market transactions. I told my stepdad the only way I was comfortable being given away was if he also included a herd of goats. He thought I was kidding.

In our wedding, everything will be different, I thought. All new traditions! Everything equal! All about us! We began planning. How could we avoid the wedding industrial complex? How could we remain unwaveringly clear about our core values?

I did a bunch of online research. "For a feminist wedding, give your bridesmaids different style dresses!" the advice said. Have the bride stand to the right of the altar while the groom stands to the left! Wear a cream dress instead of white! I was baffled. The suggestions seemed just one degree off of a completely traditional wedding.

I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, though I had an idea that maintaining a rigid set of principles was a cornerstone. I tried to start somewhere small. When my partner’s sister asked what her 3-year-old son, who would be in the ceremony, should wear, I said, "Let him wear anything he wants."

"You’re going to regret that," she said. I could hear the stress in her voice. Maybe the kind of feminism I wanted had to do with individual strength of character. "This is your day," the internet told me. "Stick with your gut."

And then I got a call from my future mother-in-love (her term, and how sweet). She wanted help figuring out what to wear. She sent over pictures. And did I tell her I was a feminist and she should decide her own outfit depending upon whatever values she held dearest? I did not. I told her we were thinking coastal colors, and that her dress was very, very pretty.

But I’m still a feminist, I thought. And then I thought: I’m not sure what being a feminist actually means to me.

I learned about feminism from my mom. I only know a few things about her wedding to my dad. I know she wore an antique kimono that she found in a vintage shop somewhere in Seattle. I know it was December, that they passed a giant chalice of wine between the guests. Everyone took a sip to bind the love together.

I know a bit more about my mom’s second wedding to my stepdad. I was three, so remember little, but there’s a VHS tape. It took place in a small clearing in a Redwood forest, the enormous trunks four times the width of any person. The officiant was a woman who did not follow any religious or traditional text. My mom had sewn her own dress out of the fabric she hand-painted for her business, ribbons of it, in pale pinks and purples, overlapping to the ground. She wore a crown of dried flowers.

There’s so much more I want to know about her weddings, but I can’t ask. My mom has been dead ten months.

A ritual becomes meaningful through intention and repetition. The book a father reads to his kid on Christmas. A walk in the park with your lover every Saturday. I didn’t understand for a long time that one reason the rituals used in most wedding traditions felt so meaningless to me is that they weren’t part of my family. My mom’s two funky weddings were the legacies I knew. Her sensibility was what I believed to be true. Her values. Like girl power. Rejecting the word “bitch” entirely. Never being beholden to a man for financial stability. These were the lessons my mom taught me.

As I’d begun planning, my mom’s two sisters, my lovely aunts, said they’d like to be with me while we went wedding dress shopping. I considered this, what it would signify to them if I said no. I didn’t especially want to wear a wedding dress, and the shopping tradition wasn’t important to me, but maybe it was to them. Maybe a feminist wedding included not just the things my partner and I wanted for ourselves, but a careful consideration of others as well?

We went to the mall. A very nice mall. Expensive. Not exactly what I’d classify as feminist or anti-wedding-industrial-complex, but hey. I tried on stunning dresses that cost between eight hundred and two thousand bucks. What I said to my aunts when I was done, what felt true, was that I couldn’t morally square spending that kind of money on a piece of clothing to wear once. They were baffled. Why had we come, then, to this store? Why had they driven hours to meet me here?

I couldn’t finish the second half of my desire: I wanted a cheap dress because I wanted it to come from a thrift store after a day gallivanting around with my mom. How could I say that? What I wanted was a ghost of a memory from years before. I wanted us to wander through vintage shops, picking up dolls with matted hair and missing eyeballs while we browsed, making them tell jokes to one another. I wanted to be trying on ugly hats with my mom and using rusted metal pokers to tap each other on the shoulder. I imagined her best parts, her funny, wild self, sauntering down crammed aisle after crammed aisle.

In my dress shopping fantasy, the dress was beside the point.

My aunts and I left the store empty-handed. None of this was their fault. They tried to be what they thought I wanted, and I tried to be what I thought they wanted. Without my mom around, they were trying to fill in. I loved them for that. What was a feminist to do?

One night, my aunt confessed that she and her mom, my grandmother, had never really known what to do with my mom. She was always so different than they were, a painter, a non-sorority-sister, a weirdo, an adventurer.

Maybe they thought I could be a more understandable stand-in for the daughter and sister they lost. On the surface, I was. I’d tried to blend in while my mom tried to stand out. Encouraging me to have a more traditional wedding might be a way to make me someone they could connect to.

But leaning into the weird, into the invitations we painted and Trader Joe’s flowers we wanted to use—that’s who I was. My mother’s daughter.

The months leading up to the wedding were rough, full of holes and shadows and my inability to tell anyone what I actually wanted or, really, to understand it myself. My partner was loving and flexible, willing to talk through whatever came up, eager to forego any traditions that didn’t feel good. Still, I was nervous for the actual day. I thought I may hide beneath the bathroom sink, weeping.

I told a few friends this. I was so consumed by who wasn’t present that I didn’t really pay attention to the five or six very good friends who checked on me often, asked if I needed help planning. I wish I’d paid better attention to them. Let their love through my cracks. There’s no right way to be sad, but my head was buried so deep in the sand of grief, I forgot sometimes to even tell my partner how glad I was to be committing to him. No other person has brought me more joy, even through what felt like a desert of loss.

When the day arrived, my partner and I walked down the aisle hand in hand. I made bouquets from Trader Joe’s flowers with girlfriends I adored, drank boxed wine.

We had pie for dessert and no champagne toast. I kept my name. Our mixed gendered wedding crews wore coastal colors, and my new adorable nephew donned a bowtie. Our officiant was a tree scientist. I wore one of those beautiful off-white lacy dresses I tried on—purchased once it went on super sale.

One aunt arranged a string of bay leaves and yellow-orange roses on a little altar we’d made, and built table centerpieces in old silver pitchers. They were stunning. The other aunt led us in a women’s prayer. Just before the ceremony, twenty-five women, friends and family, stood with me in a circle. They offered advice and love and jokes and wisdom. Look around, my aunt said. I did. The faces of so many people I loved shone back. I could feel something physical, tangible, like taking a deep breath in the mountains after a long hike. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I think it had to do with the power of so many incredible women bound together, however temporary. We are here to support you. If you ever forget that, we will remind you.

In the end, the wedding was wholly us in a wild, expansive, compromised hootenanny of love and hilarity. What feminism meant to me changed. It began as hard-lined abstract principles with me in the center, and came to mean something bigger, more complicated, something about strength with flexibility. Of doing whatever felt right for us, while still remembering that no matter what, we were lucky enough to be within the circles of incredible women and men in our lives. I smiled the whole damn day.

I’m still not sure what kind of feminist I am—a mediocre one, probably. But I’m trying. My mom taught me that. Even though she wasn’t there, she was everywhere.

Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir In Death-Defying Acts, which chronicles the season she spent in a circus sideshow as well as her memories of the mother who taught her how to live fearlessly and on her own terms.