It is Sunday morning and I am not at church! Not going to church on Sunday morning is something I will never get use to not matter how long I am Catholic. Tom had mass last night – for Catholic’s Saturday night mass counts for Sunday, so if you go on Saturday night you don’t have to go on Sunday. Tom has mass tonight so I will go then also. BUT not going to church on Sunday equates in my previously protestant mind as a sin.
Getting up and getting ready for church on Sunday morning was a production when I was a kid. Mother spent hours on Saturday getting her “outfit” ready. I have seen her spend an entire week working on a new “Sunday go to meeting” dress. My Mother was always a dresser. I know that many of you that know me will find that hard to believe since jeans and a T-shirt are my dress clothes. This is not in any sense of the word my Mom’s fault, she tried. You see she spent equally as much time on my “outfit”. She would go into town whit her sketch pad in hand and draw a picture of the dress she wanted to make for me, come home and cut a pattern then make the exact dress. For me every minute spent trying on those dresses was torture. It seemed that Mom always choose to call me in to try one of them on when I was right in the middle of a great adventure.
Sunday morning would come and we would get all gussied up. Picture if you will a little girl that rather be in the woods with her dog putting on a frilly dress. Then there were the crinolines, many many crinolines. Do you remember the one that your Mom would stretch out flat on a table and spray with starch? I would have to wear so many that my dress would stand straight out. This would call for a pair of panties with ruffles on them, just in case. Then there was the ruffled socks, ruffled gloves and to top the whole thing off there was that dang hat. I hated Sunday “outfits” and would often pitch a fit of my own about having to wear them. It was to no avail because you did not miss Sunday morning church and you were not going to go looking like a heathen. Dad knew how I felt and would always give me one of those knowing looks but he did not dare cross Mother on this issue.
Then we would all pile in the 1950 Ford pickup, the boys would ride in the bed of the truck. Back then riding in the back of a pickup truck was considered a rite of passage. You had to be at least 4 or 5; I was allowed to ride in the bed of the truck but not on Sunday. There was a whole list of things I could not do while I had my Sunday “outfit” on. Most of them had something to do with behaving like a lady and not the tom boy that I was. Man I hated Sunday “outfits”.
The only thing worse than putting on that Sunday outfit and going to church was being told that the preacher was coming for “Sunday Dinner”. This meant that I would be in the monkey suit all day! If I got wind early enough that the Preacher was coming to our house I would beg one of my friends to let me go home with them. This did not work very often because Mother insisted that I be home when the Preacher came. This was long before GameBoys were invented and we did not have a TV so I had to sit for hours in this get up.
To this day the back of my neck itches when I wake up on Sunday remembering all those “Sunday Outfits”. Yes, Mother was a dresser. She set the standard by which all the other ladies at church tried to achieve. I am sorry to admit she never succeeded in turning me into the frilly little girl or woman that she hoped for. I hope that I made her proud in other ways because I never came up to her mark with it came to the way I dressed.
Thank you Lord for a Mother that not only cared about how she looked but also tried to dress me equally as nice. And Lord when I see Mom in heaven for the first time could you make sure I am dressed in a real frilly “Sunday outfit”, but I sure hope you will not make we wear it throughout eternity.
