Battle of the Dress

In the movie A Christmas Story there are a couple of battles going on with in the family. The first is the main plot of the movie Ralfie the older boy wants a Red Rider bb gun with a compass in the stock and a thingy that tells time, his mother doesn’t want him to have one. The other fight is over a lamp shaped like a woman’s leg in fishnet stockings that the father wins and displays in the front window. He believes it is a major award, while she believes it is disgusting. Eventually the mother accidentally nocks the lamp over and it breaks. Everyone can relate to these scenes because I think this is a normal part of family life. People clash over small silly things all the time. I think it is a funny cycle that everyone gets caught up in from time to time. Say a teenager wants a car, or a college student wants to move out of the dorm, possibly parent want the kids to accomplish something, whatever it all out campaigns can be waged the dominate ones personal story for entire periods.

My wife and I think take this to a high art. Her parents are always campaigning for something, she is always campaigning for something, and I am generally trying to defect these tactics as best I can. The latest one though I had to relent and give in. RG’s sister is getting married this coming winter. At some point when RG decided to move to the UK for a while she asked if I could get buy her dress for the wedding. She is going to be the maid of honor and her sister told her to buy whatever she wants. I of course said this would be no problem and we could spend probably x dollars. Well that was a mistake. Not saying that we can buy the dress, no, that wasn’t a big deal. It was assigning a possible amount. My wife’s razor sharp mind kicked right in and she committed the number to memory. I, as I usually do, promptly forgot about the whole matter.

One weekend after she had moved to the UK she said she wanted to go into the Karen Millen outlet that shares a parking lot with my apartment building. I didn’t think anything about it, it is one of the few stores she actually likes to browse in. So we went in and she started looking at dresses. So she found some she liked and said she was going to try them on. What I didn’t know is that she was looking for the above mentioned Maid of Honor dress. Not that I minded, I just didn’t expect it was so pressing as the wedding was still 6 months away. So she found two that she like and both of them were priced well under the amount we had talked about, and I had promptly forgotten some time before. So asked is she could get both, together they were still under the budget.

Of course this isn’t the way I think. I remember talking about A dress not an amount. Of course the amount seemed about what I would agree to but my silly thinking is we could just keep the difference. After a little chatting she picked one, we bought it, and we left the store.

Not a day went by before she started her campaign to get the other dress. Using lines like “don’t you think I look pretty in the dress”, “aren’t I worth another dress”, “it is still under the amount for the dress”, and any other thing she could think of. Then she started to say things like “I know what you want to do, buy me that dress” and so on. She couldn’t go a day with out bringing it up. Of course what she didn’t know was I figured it would be a good Christmas present, bought it when she was napping, and hid it. So I kept trying to get her to drop it. The problem with this is that she is almost as hard headed as I am. We have incredible tests of will on regular basis. I win some, I lose some. So I kept persisting with arguments against buying the dress. Saying the store sold the last one, or that it wouldn’t be practical for winter, and so on. Of course these efforts fell on deaf ears.

This went on for at least 3 full weeks, and would have gone on longer, except I really didn’t have a good place to hide the dress and I was getting sick of hearing about it. So on the wife’s birthday even though she already received a very nice gift early, and a dress for her sister’s wedding, I gave her the other dress. She wore it that night to dinner at a fun little Greek place down the road, and I suppose she feels she one that one. I hope she feels that way at Christmas when I wrap the dress up in a box and give it too her again!