WOMEN HELPED FRIEND SAY YES TO THE DRESS, NO TO THE MARRIAGE
They jokingly call themselves “the hot moms.”
Formed nearly three years ago, the group makes a point of getting together each month for fun, friendship and support. And so when one of the friends was facing the next transition in her life, from wife to divorcee, and grappling with whether or not to hole up alone the day she got the final papers, the notion of a gettogether arose. Another friend ran with the idea, and a party was born.
When the day arrived, shortly before Christmas, six friends arrived with the usual munchies and bottle of wine in tow — and the not-so-usual array of wedding gowns. Yup, the friends pulled their wedding gowns out of storage, then pulled them up over bodies that, in some cases, have been re-shaped with time and babies. They actually got them zipped up all the way. Mostly.
And then they reminisced and laughed and posed for photos, including one re-enacting a famous wedding scene from the television sitcom Friends, right down to the bowl of snacks in the lap, bottles in hand and one with a hand on her tummy (as did Friends’ Phoebe in the original).
What came after Eoanna Tatoulis shot those photos and submitted a few along with the story behind them to a U.S.based website called Love What Matters has been even more surprising than the divorce party. Since they hit the website last week, Tatoulis and Nicole Niesner, for whom the party was thrown, have been inundated with media interest from around the world — Sudbury, Denmark, Britain, Sweden, Australia, and the United States to name a few — and their story and pictures have gone viral. There are even rumblings of a possible smallscreen appearance of their own on a U.S. talk show.
“It’s crazy,” says Tatoulis. “We’re just a bunch of Prairie girls. Nobody knows where Regina is. And now people in Denmark and Sweden are writing about us.”
They weren’t even going to call it a divorce party initially. “We wanted to call it something more positive,” Tatoulis explains — but then it blew up.
At 36, Niesner told me she was trying to focus on that next chapter of her life. She admits all the attention has been overwhelming, but as with the party itself and her outlook on life, she’s focused on the good, rather than the negative.
For her, the party had little to do with her ex, and much more to do with a group of women who have been there for each other in the good times and the bad, kind of like a marriage when it works well.
Tatoulis never dreamt her photos would travel much beyond her own Facebook page. And while the whole aftermath has been admittedly a bit of a shocker, it’s also an opportunity. “Divorce is devastating,” she says, and they never lost sight of that with their gathering. But they wanted to show a good group of friends can help put the focus on the future.
If you look at those photos, you’ll see Tatoulis in at least one. She’s wearing black, not a white wedding gown. She offered to take the photos. In the midst of a separation of her own, she was going through her own rough patch on that day — and couldn’t bear to put on her gown.
“I came there really upset, and by the end of the night, we were laughing and joking. And we just felt amazing,” recalls Tatoulis.
Because that’s the power of a good group of friends.