The dress

 We went to my great great Aunt's 90th birthday party on Sunday. I was rummaging through Samantha's closet for something for her to wear when I passed this dress.

It's been hanging in her closet for 6.5+ years.

Before that it hung in my laundry room for a few years.

As I put it on her I told her that I bought this dress for her before I was even pregnant with her.

You see this is *the dress*.

I bought this dress in a goodwill one day when Jack was about 4 or 5. I was smack dab in the middle of an infertility nightmare - having one miscarriage after another. I was sure I was never going to manage to have another baby. So why on earth would I buy this dress? I don't know really.

I had been having some email conversations with a friend who was also smack dab in the infertility nightmare and she mentioned something she learned in therapy called "magical thinking." It stuck with me, because that is a real thing...thinking that somehow buying a book or a bottle will cause you to lose a pregnancy and never have a baby. It lasts a damn long time too. Like forever. For me it lasts until the moment the kids are born.

So, I see this gorgeous SIZE 5 GIRL dress in a goodwill and I carry it around a bit. I ponder it. I stew on it. I commit and buy it.

I bring it home. I hang it up. It taunts me a little.

Will it ever get used?

But I hang on to that hope. I cling. I pray.

And 6.5 + years I have a little girl to put it on. A little girl who declares it "the loveliest dress ever! It's very old fashioned mommy."

 And I pull over on the way to the birthday party to take her picture because here we are. Three kids, one dress, 9 years later.

I spend a lot of time these days telling others they are not forsaken. I will have a canvas made of her in the dress, because once, long ago, I was not forsaken either.