I spent the weekend plus last night shopping for a graduation dress. But Laura, it’s March. Why on earth are you looking for a graduation dress in freaking MARCH??

So glad you asked.

Let me preface this with we like our kids’ school. We chose to move them for a number of reasons, the most critical one being this and this. Fair warning, they’re not lighthearted reads but I don’t have the spoons to go back through it here. If you don’t have those spoons either then short version is we moved them for 1) safety reasons and 2) academic opportunities.

Back to shopping months ahead of time.

Our son graduated last year. This school doesn’t do robes so he was required to wear a black suit. Easy peasy.

Our daughter graduates this year and is required to wear a nice white dress. Challenging to find in general but then you’ve got the addendum. She needs a nice white dress that meets dress code. Sweet Jesus above, I cannot with the freaking dress code…now you see why we started in March.

It needs to be a white dress. It must have sleeves or straps that are at least three inches wide. It also has to fall below your fingertips when your arms are at your side. I imagine the unwritten rule is that it also can’t be see through which anyone should realize is challenging since they’ve chosen the most see through color imaginable but whatever. WE SHALL OVERCOME.

This season white dresses seem to come in several options: white spaghetti strap let’s celebrate summertime! delights, strapless let’s knock them dead at the formal event! extravaganzas, and longer ones with sleeves and lower halves reminiscent of prairie skirts from the 70s. None of which would work.

We hit three local stores on Saturday. Three-ish hours, zero luck. Yesterday we left our house at 4pm and drove thirty minutes to a nearby city. After four or five stores we started to lose hope. Well, more accurately hope was far off in the rearview mirror as I started imagining the endless rotation of mail order dress deliveries and returns in our very near future. There was some cussing. There was a good deal of fussing about this oddly specific attire requirement to receive a diploma.

We decided to hit one more department store. The Belk in our hometown is trash – sorry, not sorry, it’s a red hot mess in there – but we had hopes for a city level Belk. There may have been some emotional bartering in the parking lot that stopped short of pledging my daughter’s soul but perhaps included multiple good deeds if we could FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THING HOLY find at least three white dresses meeting above criteria to try on. Don’t judge me, it was hour three of shopping and I was done.

On the plus side it was indeed a great Belk. Beautiful aisles, nicely laid out, plenty of nice clothes. On the down side we found precisely two options to take to the dressing room. Sigh. Imagine my delight when one of those choices turned out to be our unicorn.

Now I just have to fulfill those parking lot promised good deeds and we’ll be set.