Autumn Light. Edwina Norton
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