I get a rush of pleasure every time I purge unwanted and outgrown objects. I tend to be unmoved by sentimentality; I have given away the onesie that one of my babies wore home from the hospital as easily as I’ve tossed a random pair of paint-spattered leggings with two holes in the knees.
Though I find a meditative joy in organizing, I also experience a parallel, visceral unhappiness thinking about all the time I have spent corralling our things. My children seem to attract free garbage every time they leave the house, despite my lectures about materialism. This week, as I went through a junk drawer, throwing out soiled sticky wall climbers and broken plastic disc launchers, I briefly fantasized about moving off the grid, where prizes from Dave & Buster’s might never reach me again.
I have desired a minimalist home for as long as I can remember. When my parents moved out of my childhood house, I saved only a couple of items, in part because I had no room for all my juvenilia but mostly because I just didn’t care. I feel strongly that I do not want to be owned by my things.
One of the few belongings I saved was my bat mitzvah dress, which sat patiently in the back of my closet until last weekend. The garment’s 30-year arc has made me rethink some of my hardhearted feelings about the power of objects.
The dress is a black, crushed-velvet Betsey Johnson number. It has covered buttons down the front, and a flouncy skirt. The most expensive thing my mother had ever purchased for me, it had a fabric that made it feel grown up, while the ease of the cut allowed me to move like the child I was, without added self-consciousness. I am sure I was drawn to the dress because my favorite show was “My So-Called Life” — the most perfect depiction of teenage angst ever committed to television — and the main character wore a burgundy crushed-velvet dress with bell sleeves to a pivotal school dance. This was the closest I could get.
If you were looking for a special-occasion dress in the suburbs of New York City in the year 1995, Betsey was it. In a profile of the designer that The Times published in 2015, the actress Anjelica Huston described a black Betsey Johnson jumpsuit she wore endlessly as a young woman in the late 1960s. Huston said that the designer spoke to “that wonderful, magical, Peter Pan moment before girls become adults.”
I made the decision to keep that dress years before I became a mother. I don’t remember much about the day, but I must have felt that the dress was a talisman, a snapshot of a moment in adolescence when I felt beautiful and accomplished. Maybe I hoped it would vanquish other memories of that period, when the primary emotion was the kind of exquisite embarrassment that only a teenager can manage. But the dress survived subsequent cutthroat closet purges, after I had my girls, because I hoped that one day, one of them might want to wear it.
Over the summer, I put the dress in my older daughter’s closet. I did not tell her I had placed it among the sweatshirts and floral dresses that she favors. I knew that if I made a big deal out of it, she would never even agree to try it on. Any aggressive recommendations from me are rejected out of hand. As a fellow contrarian, I respect this.
I knew she had a bar mitzvah to attend last weekend, and the weather did me a solid, because the forecast for Saturday was blustery. I casually mentioned that the velvet dress could work, and she took the bait; she hadn’t even realized it was in her room. I didn’t get to see her put it on because she got ready at her friend’s house, but when I saw the photos of her, grinning with her auburn hair cascading over her shoulders, I burst into tears.
She was the image of almost 13. I could picture her girlfriends curling her hair while they gossiped, and smell the Sol de Janeiro wafting from the bedroom. In my day, it was Elizabeth Arden’s Sunflowers, but the effect is the same giggly magic. She wore Doc Martens with the dress, while I had accessorized with Mary Janes. I thought her version was better.
Looking at the pictures of her also offered a moment of redemption. She gave me a reason to meditate on the good parts of becoming a teenager, the curiosity and exuberance, even if I didn’t feel them all the time while I was living through it.
The degree to which I treasure this dress has made me soften my always-be-purging stance a little bit. It’s not necessarily a contradiction to take good care of a few, beloved items while also torturing my children about the perils of overconsumption. Now, I’m just plotting about how to convince her younger sister to wear the dress when it comes time.
End Notes
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This Wall Street Journal article explaining the beauty pageant to MAGA politician pipeline is fascinating. The pageant world is not just about conventional attractiveness (though obviously that’s part of it), it’s also about poise and a comfort with public speaking.
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This report in The Cut by Melissa Dahl, about the women in menopause who take testosterone supplements to ease their symptoms, often in the form of pellets, was both frightening and informative. Frightening because these pellets exist in a regulatory Wild West: “Pellets are often made by compounding pharmacies. Drugs created in this way are not reviewed by the F.D.A. for efficacy, safety or quality, which means dosages can be inconsistent. Like all unregulated supplements, testosterone pellets and cream may deliver a higher or lower dose than advertised,” Dahl explains. But I’m glad I learned about this trend because, as Dahl notes, so many women feel their health needs aren’t being met by mainstream doctors, and I am thinking a lot about how that might be fixed.
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In my Wednesday newsletter, I misspelled the given name of a Slate writer. He is Mark Joseph Stern, not Marc.
Feel free to drop me a line about health and wellness, or anything else, here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
The post My Daughter, a Vintage Betsey Johnson Dress and Me appeared first on New York Times.
