Standing Up Straight

One hot summer day when I was ten, my mom and my grandma and I were out shopping when my mom said in a horrified voice, “Ugh, look at your posture! It’s terrible! You’re all hunched over. Do you know what you look like? ” She then made a grotesque face and hunched her back like a question mark, jutting her head out like some sort of hideous vulture. Shame flushed my already hot face. “Stand up straight,” she commanded. “I don’t know how,” I retorted, embarrassed that my mom was criticizing me in front of my beloved grandma, who smiled meekly and told me how lovely I looked when I stood up straight. That day began an ongoing fight that would last until I left home for college.

In 6th grade she had me tested for scoliosis, and I prayed that I had it. Then at least there would be a medical reason why I was not to blame. But the nurse who checked me said, to my despair, “Nope. You’ve just got bad posture is all.” Frequently throughout my young teenage years, my mom would come up behind me and run her finger up my spine to straighten me up, or would imitate my slouch and hunched gait. My response was always one of embarrassment, shame, anger, and yelling back, “It hurts to stand up straight!” or “I don’t know how!” It wasn’t that I wanted to slouch. When I saw pictures of myself slouching or caught myself in the mirror, I was disgusted by how I resembled my mom’s grotesque imitations. I would stiffen up, pulling my shoulders up around my ears, tightening every muscle in my back, and willing myself to be stiff and upright. Within minutes my back would start to ache from the effort, and subconsciously I would slip back into the same old hunch.

I began to believe that it would become just another defining characteristic, like being overweight…something I couldn’t fight, something I was doomed to become. No guy would ever be attracted to a hunched over fat girl. Throughout high school well-meaning grownups would tell me “You’d be so beautiful if you just stood up straighter.” I resented them bitterly for saying it, and resented myself even more for not being able to stand up straight. When I left home for college, I thought about it less because no one was criticizing me, but it still echoed in my mind. Slouch, hunchback, no self-control, no strength: these were the words I used on myself. I tried everything I could think of to fix it, but every effort ended with pain and failure, always resorting to a curved back and hanging head. One boyfriend, when I told him how unhappy I was with my posture, suggested I try yoga. He had found yoga to be a good way to be aware of one’s body. But body awareness did not help me stand up any straighter. It only made me more unhappy with being unable always to maintain the uprightness that I could achieve in class.

It occurs to me that there’s a correlation between the way I carry myself and the way I think about myself. I’ve been every bit as burdened, shy, awkward and embarrassed as my posture looks. My head hangs, I look at the floor and I feel uncomfortable in my skin. And I can’t will myself to be different. I don’t want to have low self-esteem; who does? But all my attempts to rid myself of it ended up as painful and useless as my attempts to stand up straight. And I’ve often believed that God feels the same way about me as my mom feels about my posture: disappointed, disapproving, mortified, and expecting me to fix it. I imagined God watching my moral slouching—lies I told, hateful thoughts I savored, lustful fantasies in which I indulged—with a curled lip. I felt embarrassed and ashamed of myself, and so tried to be morally upright, to stand up straight before God. I always knew how to put on a good show. I went to church and youth group faithfully, was always praised by adults as being very spiritual and mature, not caught up in the worldly vices so common to teenagers. I kept a long list of “thou shalt nots.” But these efforts, these strainings to stand up tall for God wore me out and I would find myself, whether consciously or subconsciously back to all of my slouching behaviors and attitudes. I knew that God would never leave me or forsake me, and that I could not wear out his love; I knew he would never leave me, just as my mother would never leave me. But like her, I assumed that he would always be able to find a reason to be disappointed in me, and that though I would always be saved, it would always be a grudging and eye-rolling relationship, the kind that had come to sum up familial love for me. We love each other because we have to.