Prom dress shopping can make or break the mother-daughter bond

Late April.

Like millions of mothers throughout the land, I did my workouts the previous week. I ate well. I said my prayers. I commiserated with friends, meditated and deep-breathed as I prepared to join my comrades standing at attention outside the dressing-room doors of the local Prom Dresses Department.

"Ew, Mom," came a muffled whine from behind one of the doors.

The door opened — not enough for anybody to see inside — just enough for a lime green bundle to fly into the arms of the dutifuly mother, who quickly passed another fabric mass through the opening before the door slammed shut again.

"When am I going to get to see one of the dresses?" said the mom. "I want to see something on you."

"Ugh. When something looks good."

Prom dress shopping, like weaning, toilet training, etc., is a necessity and a rite of passage. It is also a duty and a responsibility over which the mother has limited control, which at the same time can't be accomplished without her car, her money and sometimes, if she's lucky, her opinion.

For the woman standing next to me, it was torture.

"My daughter and I hate doing this. We just want to get in and get out. But it never works that way," said the mom, her arms piled high with rejects.

The event is, from the get-go, complicated.

There are hundreds of stores, each stocked in early spring with hundreds of dresses. There is blue tulle over green satin with a bow at the waist and pink tulle over yellow satin with a bow at the back. There is slink; think Lady Gaga. There is sweet; think Mary Kate before the eating disorder. There are sequins, rhinestones, dresses that look like what everybody else will be wearing and dresses that don't look anything like what a 17-year-old girl should be wearing until her wedding night.

Gathering up the right armload of dresses from the sea of textiles, trying them on, and then choosing the dress that says "Dude!" becomes an hours-long endeavor for the consensus-oriented female. In this case, of course, we are talking about two females whose legendary clashes are the stuff of such self-help books as "How To Survive Your Daughter's Teen Years" and "Don't Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship." Trying on clothes is fragile enough territory for any female, without her mother's "That's too short. That's too tight" and the most odious of all: "Do you think you might need to go the next size up?"