Wedding dress bonds seven women across three generations

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No one who meets her today would believe it, but Lambie used to be a shy one.

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Though headstrong like her mother, she was a wallflower in adolescence, never sure of herself. But when a recruiter persuaded her to attend Berry College in Georgia, she came alive in a way no one expected. “I found out that actually I am a leader,” she says.

She also found out how it felt to fall in love. Chris Renner was her opposite. He met her fiery drive with laid-back flexibility. “He wasn’t afraid of me, and he wasn’t afraid to let me be me,” she says.

After graduation, she told her parents she was staying in Georgia, where Chris was working at a lumber mill to save for optometry school. That Christmas, she announced she was engaged. Her parents seemed thrilled.

But they were nervous that it would fall to Lambie to support Chris through school. Months later, Rita asked Lambie to move home to plan the wedding. When Lambie arrived, her mother told her there wasn’t going to be a wedding. “Sorry, but there’s a lot to talk about here,” Lambie remembers Rita saying.

“I thought, ‘She’s marrying a stranger!’ ” Rita recalls. “And you know how my mother was? Well, I’ve got a little bit of that in me, too.”

Lambie’s heart sank. “Does she have my best interest at heart? Yes. But does she at some point in her life have to stop controlling mine? Yes,” she remembers thinking.

Lambie was angry and ready to marry in spite of her parents’ concerns, but Chris refused to elope. “You may think now that you are willing to walk away from your family and be estranged from them,” he said. “But I can see how important your family is in your life, and I can’t let you do it.”

Chris traveled to Baltimore and sat down across from Bob and Rita. “What would it take for us to get your blessing?” he asked. They laid down three requirements: that Chris own a house, that he be able to pay for school himself and that Lambie prove she can earn enough to support them.

By the next year, with a little help from his parents and student loans, Chris returned with their requirements fulfilled. Rita started planning the wedding.

Without much forethought, Lambie asked if she could wear her mother’s dress. “I don’t know if the turmoil to get to this point contributed to my wanting to wear the dress sort of as a peace offering,” she says. “I don’t feel like I was the one who needed to offer any peace, but maybe as a child who wants to please her mother and make her happy, I did.”

The morning of her wedding, in 1983, Lambie put on the dress and danced around the kitchen with her sisters singing “Chapel of Love.” The day was a dream. “It was the biggest celebration of life that you can imagine,” she says. “I think I struggled so hard to finally have this day — a day I was sure my mom was going to deny me — that when it really was there and everything did line up right and she really did agree, it was amazing.”

Rita eventually regretted not trusting her daughter’s judgment and now considers Chris “one of the most wonderful men I’ve ever met.”