fair trade first communion

If I were a visual artist (instead of a "Draw Binky" drop-out) this essay would be a photographic collage. There would be sepia-toned shots of earnest, pretty girls in their fussy white first communion dresses. Maybe I would sneak in a self-indulgent picture of my own daughter, dressed like a little bride of Christ. All around those angelic girls would be photographs of the over-worked Chinese women who sew first communion dresses in factories a thousand miles away from the department stores where mothers like me go to buy them for our daughters who will wear them the first time that they are permitted to hold God in their outstretched hands.

It would probably be too much to try to depict the women who risk their health to bleach the fabrics to that unearthly white that my daughter and every other Catholic girl I know have come to associate with the "princess for a day" style of dress that is now a prerequisite for an American first communion.

I would want the piece to be subtle, not preachy. I would need to obscure in some artful way the bald reality that a lot of misery gets sewn into the clothes we wear. People suffer and get sick and live away from their families so that American children can have closets full of cheap, flashy clothes. You just can't hit your viewers over the head with that information. They will turn you right off. You've got to dance around the truth, have some compassion for your audience.

So, a collage. Well-fed, laughing girls in tiaras and shiny white satin, posing with well-fed priests, and well-fed aunts and uncles and bewildered, well-fed parents, who seem saddened by how very natural their daughters look dressed as brides, even at eight years old. Add a few bits of lace; we'll call it mixed media. And then the garment workers. Thousands of them, no, millions of them (maybe I need to re-think the dimensions of this piece). Grainy photographs of thin, dark-haired women and teenagers crammed into small rooms. Let them stare down the camera. How to show that they work seven days a week and cannot sleep or use the bathroom when they need to? Maybe a picture of the cots in the dormitories where they live and bathe and rest during the few hours when they are not sewing sequins on my daughter's clothing? Can I say that they make less per month than I spend on my daughter’s piano lessons? Or that some of them are living as indentured servants? This is asking a lot from a collage.

My daughter will make her first communion next month. She will hold Jesus in her hand. Body of Christ, the priest will say to her. Amen, she will say, just like they told her to in rehearsal. My father will take a picture of it, even if they tell us no pictures.

My mother wanted to buy her a first communion dress. She wanted to give my daughter a special shopping trip where they tried on a dozen dresses and my daughter chose The One, the very best One and whirled around admiring herself in it and said, oh thank you Nana, it's beautiful. I wanted that too, I suppose. But the collage wouldn’t stop taking shape, and my innocent, dewy daughter's face kept getting juxtaposed onto other, less innocent, less hopeful, but still beautiful faces.

I said to my girl, "Sweetie, you know the first communion dresses that you see at the store, well, a lot of them are made by people who don't get paid enough money to live, and who don't have a safe place to work, and have to work way too much, and..."

and she interrupted me and said,

"..and if we buy those dresses, it's like we're supporting it. "

That made me proud, I won't lie. I guess she's been paying attention. I started looking for a first communion dress that was not fashioned from the mistreatment of poor people--people who, Jesus says in the Bible, are really just him in disguise. The irony of it is about as subtle as a hit in the head, no?

I found a nun in Cleveland who trains women from poor parts of the city to sew organic clothing and to participate in a worker-run cooperative called Esperanza Threads. She said they used to make fair trade first communion dresses that didn't hurt anybody, but nobody wanted them because they were not dazzling white and shiny and poufy like every girl's Barbie fantasy first communion (okay, I added the Barbie part, but that's what she meant).

Then I called my brother, who works at a Catholic church and I said let's find a source for fair trade first communion dresses and we'll get all the churches on board because who wants their kid to receive the body of Christ while she's wearing sweatshop clothes and,.... and he said that no congregation he knew would be willing to make that kind of shift in their thinking, even if they understood about the sweatshops and the bad karma in the dresses, and how the workers can't go to the bathroom and maybe I should think about more practical kinds of clothing.

And so I found myself staring at a website that specialized in first communion dresses--dozens of shiny, poufy, sparkly, shimmering, lacy, dreamy dresses and it said that some of them were made in the USA. I wrote to the company and asked about how they treated their workers and where in the USA did they make their dresses? They wrote back assured me that their non-imported dresses are sewn in their well-lit facility in Idaho, and it is heated in the winter and cooled in the summer and the workers make above minimum wage and the family of owners works right there too and everybody is happy happy happy. I don't know if this is true, but I wanted it to be true, and my daughter needed a dress.

Of all the fancy dresses pictured on this website, my daughter was only allowed to choose from the ones that were manufactured in the United States. That reduced the pool considerably, but she found one she liked. It had a name. It was called Shaylee. Shaylee cost twice as much as the same kind of dress from J.C. Penney. My mother is going to pay for it. As best as I can tell, the women who worked on Shaylee were paid an hourly wage that is probably not great, but not shameful. I am assuming that they were able to use the bathroom when they needed to and to return home at night to their families. That's what I think, but I'm not sure. Someday I’ll visit them in Idaho and see for myself, and I’ll say thank you for your fine work on these lovely dresses and I’m wondering, can you tell me, which way is the bathroom?