"Lady in Red"

On the first Friday of each February, many people wear red as a way to show support of fighting heart disease in women. I couldn't think of any better day than today to share my own story of a red dress. For more information on how to Go Red For Women click here.

 Of all the clothes in my over-crowded closet it is, without a doubt, the oldest article of clothing...a simple red dress from the early 1990's. There's really no way to properly describe how out of date this size 14 red dress is. This dress is just old and sad looking and full of countless 90's era fashion mistakes including: Shoulder pads (shudder), big huge white collar (double shudder), gold and pearl-like buttons (I know, stop you're killing me). I couldn't even begin to tell you the fabric it's actually made of.

I know you must be thinking, 'this dress couldn't be that bad'? Oh, really? Well here.....maybe a picture would help you visualize (but please don't say I never warned you).

 Are you still with me? Told you it was bad. Still this wrinkled, red monstrosity of a dress has resided in closets all the way from Johnson City to Knoxville...back to Johnson City and then to Asheville and finally here in Knoxville..again. I've been asked countless times to get rid of this dress (even though no one would ever want it) by relatives. But try as they might to convince me to get rid of this dress there is one simple truth about it: You would have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands for me to do that. Despite it's many shortcomings- it's a style that  fashion has forgotten, a size that is too little for me currently and it will probably never fully be free of wrinkles, this red dress was one of the last things my mother ever bought for me on what would be one of our last shopping trips together.


 My mother was a beautiful, funny, incredibly smart woman who was strong, strong-willed and self-sufficient. Because she had been a single mother, there is nothing she couldn't do or hadn't tried and if she couldn't do something, she darn sure found a way to get it done.  I have personally witnessed her standing up to everyone from a politician to a truck driver to a state-employee with so much confidence that you'd swear she was going to be the next President and yet, I would also see her be sensitive enough to rush to the aid of any of her girlfriends who needed it.  She could be my fiercest ally one minute and my worst enemy the next. We had a classic mother-daughter relationship.

I was in college at the time we bought this red dress and at the time, it was show-room new. I had just received an internship that would require me to do some on-camera reporting. My mother, upon hearing this news, looked at my college appropriate clothing of a sweatshirt with holes and jeans with even more holes and said ,"You'll want to get something presentable to wear" so off we went to the Johnson City Mall to try on clothes.

I hated trying on clothes with my mother because she was the type who, despite being legally blind, could see almost every imperfection the clothing brought out in you and then broadcast it loudly enough for all of the women in the dressing room to hear.

 I don't know how we came across this red dress but somehow we did and when I walked out of the dressing room and over to where mom was sitting, she looked me over and smiled and said "That's it". 

 Neither of us had any way of  knowing this at the time but it turns out this would be the first and last time my mom would see me in this dress. Not long after we bought it, she lost her eyesight completely.

 After that, things went down hill....fast.  The illness she had fought her entire life ultimately was too much for her to beat.

  The death of my mother was hands down, the most defining moment in my entire life and something I still struggle with almost 14 years later.

  My mother herself had battled a weight problem once and it was always something she and I fought over constantly. I lived with relatives while she was at a school for the blind and gained a considerable amount of weight. When I went to live with her again in a new town, during my teens,  the topic of my weight was like pouring gasoline on a fire.

  During her last years alive, my mother was in and out of the hospital countless times. During one stay, she came out of a somewhat comatose state and suddenly it was like she was her old self again. If you've ever seen the movie "Awakenings", you would get the idea of what it was like. Though she couldn't see any of us, she had the mental clarity and communication skills enough to talk (for the first time in months...maybe even years) to myself, my step-father, the doctors and nurses like nothing had ever happened. Thrilled, I was calling all of her friends from church and rushing to get one of her best friends (who also had a vision problem) to bring her to the hospital to witness for herself this amazing turn of events.   We all crowded into her tiny room as she talked to each of us as if she had just only left the room for a minute and hadn't been in a bed ridden, overly medicated state.  We laughed at her jokes again, we told her how we had been doing. I truly believed it was a miracle from God.

 I told my mother I had to leave and to keep up the good work and I left the room to take her friend home but something told me that I should go back for one last time. My mother, who couldn't see and thought I had left, was talking with her friends about weight (which is what women do) and she said "I wish Lee Ann could lose some weight".  I played it off with my traditional eye roll and grin because I was still on an emotional high from seeing her back to her old self.   I  took my mom's friend home and came back to the hospital only to find my mom back in her original state, unable to communicate and screaming in pain. She would never come back to us like this again. The miracle from God now seemed like a  cruel joke.
 Up until these past few months, it bothered me that the last sentence I heard my mother say was about my weight. Today, I see it as a rallying cry to do better.

 I've thought a lot of my mother during this whole process of being on the Covenant Health Biggest Winner weight loss challenge. I don't know what she would say to me sharing this story with everyone, I hope she wouldn't mind. I'll really never know..but I do know that she'd be thrilled  that I was taking steps to finally get control over my weight and to hopefully live a healthy life for the first time ever.

 Knowing her, she'd say something funny like "I don't want to drive 13.1 miles...much less walk it".

 Oh and the dress...how could I forget it? If you're wondering if this story is to set up a statement like "I'm going to wear the dress again" here's your answer: Heck yeah it is! I AM going to wear that dress again and I'm going to twirl and laugh and take lots of pictures. I just won't wear it out in public.

"I Can Do All Things Through Christ Who Strengthens Me"

Philippians 4:13