Autumn Light - Edwina Norton

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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.

      Chapter 2

      A Family Tragedy

      Fast forward thirteen years. After graduation from college, marriage to college sweetheart, birth of wonderful son, Alec, graduate school, unraveling marriage, divorce, single parenthood, dating and remarriage, second wonderful son, Dan, our family moves from Seattle to California. There I witness the richness and turmoil of the Sixties in the Bay Area: The Summer of Love, the Free Speech movement, the Vietnam War, and the transformation of bucolic Santa Clara Valley into high tech Silicon Valley. Struggling with an increasingly unhappy second marriage, I find myself at a turning point:

      “Either I quit teaching high school or you and I get a divorce,” I declared in a clear, firm voice. “I can no longer handle both you and a bunch of 15-year-olds.”

      It wasn’t that I didn’t love my husband, Dave. When we met I was immediately drawn to him physically and emotionally. I was captivated by his wit and dark humor, his wide knowledge of literature, music, and politics. He combined the steadiness and quiet assurance of my father with the intellectual acumen my education had taught me to appreciate.

      Over the several years since we’d married, what I’d thought during courtship was social drinking had developed into a drinking problem, a serious one. I wasn’t yet able to name it alcoholism. This was the late 1960s when people still thought alcoholism was a shameful character flaw, not a pernicious disease. But alcohol was seriously damaging him and us.

      I’d tried to persuade him to control his drinking. I drank with him to encourage him to stop after a couple of drinks. I stopped drinking altogether in hopes he would stop, too. I repeatedly begged him to stop. When begging only made him devious, I looked for ways to work around his condition: I covered for him when he missed appointments and, occasionally, work. As much as possible I kept Alec and Dan (five years apart in age) out of his way to reduce the harm his bad moods might do them. He was never physically abusive to them or to me, but our family’s emotional life grew increasingly chaotic. Over the fourteen years of our marriage, I had gradually assumed most of the responsibilities for our home and family. I became what is termed the co-dependent spouse. I unwittingly enabled Dave’s addiction.

      Two or three years prior to my ultimatum, in desperate moments, we’d talked about divorce. Because ours was a second marriage for each of us, we were reluctant to go that way again. There seemed to be no solution. He continued to blot out his unhappiness with drink, which only worsened what had become depression. I kept us afloat by being responsible for everything at home and working

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