Читать книгу Autumn Light - Edwina Norton - Страница 7

Like many Americans attracted to Zen and other Eastern religions, I sought refuge in Buddhism from a difficult life situation. I was thirty-nine. Trauma in childhood had prepared me to need the equanimity of Zen and then much later in adulthood, once I found it, immediately to recognize its benefits. That childhood trauma distorted my understanding of myself and others for much of my long life. Buddhism regards distortion as a delusion, one of the three causes of suffering, along with greed and hatred.

The summer I turned thirteen, my dad noticed my back was crooked. I had inherited the same scoliosis that had caused my mother’s back pain and weakness. Dad took me to his osteopath, who recommended an orthopedic doctor. Both parents accompanied me to the specialist, who examined my back and then took us all into a brightly lit exercise room. He told me to disrobe in an adjacent cubicle, removing everything but my panties, then return to the exercise room. There, he instructed me to push down my panties to just above the pubic area so that he could easily see my hip line. He said to stand in front of a mirrored wall, facing him, Dad and Mother, and a man with a big box camera on a tripod. I can still feel the hot flush of blood that blurred my vision as I stood, essentially naked, before Dad and the two strange men. I was mortified.

I stared at the floor so I wouldn’t see the adults staring at me. I followed instructions to face first toward everyone, to one side, to the other, then to the mirrored wall, where I couldn’t avoid seeing my nakedness. The photographer snapped pictures of all positions. A nightmare.

Afterward, Mother followed me back to the dressing cubicle where I burst into tears. “Why, what’s wrong, dear?” she pleaded. I was mortified that she didn’t understand how humiliated I felt, physically now a young woman, to be seen and photographed naked.

This was the first and most traumatic of many episodes in which well-meaning but ignorant people inquired about my condition as if my body were separate from me. “Oh! Look at that. Is it painful? Will it go away eventually?” I soon learned to disguise the abnormality as much as I could. I wore loose clothing, avoided turning my back to others, stood and sat erectly. I wanted to avoid being treated as an oddity. . . the monster I was convinced I had become.

I was measured for a brace. In a small, musty office at the prosthetics factory, again I was told to remove all clothes except for bra and panties. Again it was a man, a stranger, who examined me (with Mother present). The pale, near-sighted, gray-haired man was a little shorter than I was. He stood two or three inches away, stepping slowly around my body, measuring tape in hand. He placed the tape delicately on and around my upper chest, breasts, waist, hips, side chest, shoulders, front, and back. He stood so close that his sour breath washed over me again and again.

I was to wear the brace during all my waking hours. The only saving graces were that I did not have to sleep in it, and I could wear it under my outer clothing. I was grateful for the latter dispensation because it was an ugly contraption. Steel struts up the sides and back were attached front and back to a creepily skin-colored, leather-padded circle at the hips and padded slings for under the arms. The hip circle rubbed on my pelvic bones, and the arm slings chafed my armpits. Over time, I learned to shrink inward and upward to reduce contact with these parts of the brace. This compression strategy worked, but it also caused me to be chronically tense, and over time, anxious.

The brace was hinged in such a way that I could open and get into it, close it and, secured with some buckles, be entrapped in its rigid form. Its purpose was to correct and hold the spine straight, as presumably, I continued to grow, an outcome I think it achieved fairly well. It leveled and aligned the hips and extended the lower back so that the middle back became less laterally curved. But because it held the torso so rigidly, it prevented the spine from flexing naturally. I could bend forward from the hips, but if I curled forward from the thoracic spine, the padded arm slings poked out rudely from my back, making me look freakish. I was self-conscious about this when seated at my school desk, where I had to bend forward slightly to read or write. I learned always to remain upright, though this rigid posture was itself unnatural. I felt deeply ashamed to inflict the sight of me on my schoolmates.

I was grateful I didn’t have to wear the ugly thing outside my clothing, even though worn inside, I looked twenty pounds heavier. At night, I hid the brace in the closet; it was unbearable to see first thing each morning. Later that school year, once I had learned the posture the brace created, I faked wearing it on mornings when Dad cooked breakfast. He didn’t notice that I wasn’t wearing the brace, and I got away with going to school without it for a couple of months. When I entered high school, I refused to wear it anymore.

At age thirteen I was like most adolescents, desperate not to be different. So navigating eighth grade in that ugly brace was a major test of character. The first challenge came in P.E. where we girls were required to “suit up,” changing in small, individual cubicles that were curtained to protect our modesty. This was 1948, long before women’s locker rooms were open and privacy no longer a priority. The doctor said I could take the brace off for P.E., but this meant I had to leave it in a changing cubicle. It was such an ugly thing, I was ashamed for anyone to see it. Miserable, I waited in a cubicle until the other girls had gone to the gym. When I came out, the teacher was nearby, and seeing my distress, she asked, “Why, what’s wrong?”

I burst into tears. “I don’t know how or where to hide my brace.” She patted my shoulder and said, “You can put it in my changing room.” I was so grateful to her for her understanding, which she quietly offered throughout that difficult school year.

That year the girls ostracized me. They taunted me with reports of slumber parties to which I pointedly had not been invited. They devoted entire “Slam Books” to me—stenographer’s pads in which girls wrote anonymously what they thought of other girls. At recess they insisted that I read their mean remarks aloud while they stood around, snickering. They stipulated that I could have only one girlfriend at a time and appointed and rotated the girl every few months, ostracizing her too for the duration of her “term.” I wondered at the time where that clemency came from. One of the leaders said, with sham sympathy, “Even you deserve to have one friend.” I was so cowed by the gang’s tyranny that I accepted whatever girl was selected as a “consolation friend.” I hung out with her until someone new was appointed. I came to believe I deserved nothing more. After all, I was defective.

Days at school that year were a torture of taunts and humiliations, received and dreaded. I was grateful everyday for the final school bell that signaled escape to go home or on the city bus to my weekly piano lesson. My music teacher, a sensitive and artistic woman, never asked about school. But she no doubt could see how miserable I was, and she did her best to console me with Bach and Beethoven. I became devoted to her and to the piano. At home, Mother routinely asked me how the day had gone. When I could not report it had been fine, her only counsel, repeatedly, was to “Rise above it,” advice that fell well short of my need for emotional support.

I don’t remember what I told Mother about how the girls at school treated me. Probably I didn’t reveal much. I didn’t trust her. She had not intervened in the humiliating photo shoot at the doctor’s office. Now I’m not sure what she could have done. In those days the medical profession knew little about the needs of adolescents. Patients (and parents) just did what the doctor told them to do. Plus, as I realized in psychotherapy many years later, Mother did not know how to interpret people’s unspoken emotions. Born in 1900, she had been raised by two profoundly deaf parents along with seven boisterous siblings. She had no models for sensitively reading the feelings of others. Determined forbearance was the only legacy she could offer.

Having no one to whom I could express my gut-grinding panic and despair became the source of lifelong distortions about myself: My peers’ rejection was entirely my fault and responsibility to rectify. I could not expect consideration from other people. These conclusions would adversely affect important decisions with regard to my future relationships and endeavors. Shouldering such grief and fear was a heavy burden to carry into young adulthood.

I did find emotional support when my parents became members of a Presbyterian Church and I went with them to Sunday services. The minister was a welcoming, loquacious man whose rich baritone voice was comforting as he delivered his sermons, chiefly on Christian ethics. His practical lessons on the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, his disquisitions on Loving Thy Neighbor as Thyself and Turning the Other Cheek percolated in me as I tried to fathom my girl friends’ cruelty.

Eighth grade was the crucible that shaped my behavior in relationships for nearly my entire life. When I suffered rejection, I struggled to rise above it—turning the other cheek. Though I often despaired of acceptance, because I believed in the Golden Rule, I never stopped aspiring to it. I could not believe my classmates could be so cruel just because I had to wear a brace. Hindsight suggests it may have been easier for me to feel confounded than to accept the shame I must have felt but suppressed.

I made it through eighth grade in one piece—at least physically. The psychological price I paid was that mentally I split off from my emotions. I separated my shame and confusion from my determined ambition to be accepted. I became two girls, one outwardly smart and seemingly self-assured, who could cope with rejection, and the other, inwardly crushed and fearful. This would be my strategy well into maturity, in fact, until I discovered Zen.

The next year when I went to high school, I was found perfectly acceptable and even sought after. The student body was about three hundred students from our town and a neighboring island, so the mix of students was both older and new to all of us. We freshmen were thrown back onto a level plane, each of us having to find our place among new students and teachers. In this larger context, we formed new alliances and roles, effectively ending the girl gang’s power. They no longer dared to bully me publicly.

I enjoyed my classes and teachers. I joined several extracurricular activity groups—Pep Club, Ski Club, and Honor Society. I made new friends and started dating. By the end of freshman year, socially cushioned by this unexpectedly positive reception, I was elected one of three school cheerleaders. It seemed I was on my way, free at last from bullying.

The early summer between freshman and sophomore years passed quietly. I babysat, rode horseback, swam in Lake Washington and enjoyed the welcome Northwest summer sunshine. One evening in July I was babysitting down the street with the two little kids I often sat for. At dusk, I heard a knock at the front door. When I opened it, there stood eight or nine girls with mean looks on their faces—the gang from eighth grade. Among them were two girls I considered good friends that first year in high school. I asked what they wanted. They sniggered they were having a slumber party nearby (to which I hadn’t been invited), and they thought they’d “pay me a little visit.” They pushed their way into the house and stood around in the small living room, joking and poking each other. I asked them to keep the noise down so they wouldn’t wake the children asleep upstairs.

Suddenly, several girls grabbed me, knocked me down, and started rubbing lipsticks on my face, neck and chest. I struggled, but more girls held me down and scribbled on my arms and legs. Panicked, with a surge of adrenalin, I wrenched free and vaulted into the nearby tiny bathroom, slamming and locking the door before they could follow. Trembling and sobbing, I gasped for air and looked in the mirror. I was covered with red and pink lipstick marks. What would the children’s parents think when they returned home?

I spent the next half hour scrubbing the lipstick off with soap and a washcloth, shaking with fear and anger. When I could get no more lipstick off my now roughed and reddened skin, I put an ear against the bathroom door to hear what the girls were doing. Hearing nothing, cautiously I peeked out. They were gone and had left the front door wide open. I closed it and staggered into the den. Exhausted by the attack, I lay down on the day bed there and fell asleep.

Some time later—I don’t know how long—I woke with a start to see the girls again in the house, surrounding the bed, glaring down at me. I had forgotten to lock the front door.

I leaped up from the day bed, pushed violently through the surrounding girls and dashed into the bathroom, locking the door. I sat shaking, trying to figure out what to do next. Soon, with loud taunts and laughter, the girls left again. Once I felt certain they were gone, I ran out, shut and locked the front door, and checked on the children upstairs. All was well.

I was in shock, drenched in shame. There had to be something wrong with me to have stimulated such fury. I couldn’t tell anyone about the attack, not parents, not girlfriends. How to explain such an event? Even though I believed I did not deserve bullying, I feared some flaw of mine had invited it.

As I look back at that painful time, I wonder if Mother’s counsel to “rise above it” was the very thing that perpetuated the bullying. Maybe my continuing composure and uncomplaining response to their bullying had only further incited the girls. I could understand they might have been infuriated that once in high school I was “safe” from further public humiliation. Thus, this final private bullying session. Little did they know how fully defeated I already felt. Or how, from that time on, I was convinced I was unworthy of acceptance.

I had been consoled by my Presbyterian minister’s sermons, but as I matured, institutional Christianity’s emphasis on the essential sinful nature of humankind troubled me. Though I continued to feel undeserving as a person, I couldn’t define myself as fundamentally sinful. Hadn’t I been punished enough? I could not bear to be further denigrated. For the next twenty-some years I rejected church going even though I longed for compassionate teachings, which ultimately I would find in Zen Buddhism.

I did grow stronger and more independent in high school. I listened more to my heart and less to the dictates of peers, despite the lingering fear that I might again be ostracized. I began to make important decisions independently. One of those was choosing to attend a different college from the one my closest friends chose. Theirs was a better school than mine, but I needed to start anew. Unconsciously I must have feared continuing to associate with hometown friends. So I moved on. I became a very good student in college, and I got a good education. The independence and determination I developed the hard way in adolescence would enable me many years later to recognize Zen Buddhism as my path, despite how different it was from my American middle-class upbringing.