I was told by the Trolls*over and over again not to act up in school, not to act out in school, to be “good,” to be quiet, etc. I tried very hard to control myself and not let the festering rage out. Sometimes, early in my schooling, I slipped and it happened anyway. I got furious and would physically attack one of the kids at school. Sometimes I stood in the middle of the classroom and screamed. The Trolls were called and I was beaten and sometimes poisoned at home for being angry again. I started to develop a way to not let my anger out. I had a death grip first on crayons and then on pencils. I broke most of the crayons in the box at school by holding them too tightly and then I started breaking pencils to keep my anger “under control.” No one seemed to notice just how many pencils I broke during a school year. (Try it sometime to see just how hard you have to hold a regular #2 pencil in one hand before it snaps in two.) I also pressed down so hard on the paper that I ripped more sheets than I actually wrote on for a while. I was always tense from trying to keep my rage at them inside me to be “good.” The teachers after third grade, because I was usually an exemplary and quiet student, didn’t seem to think I had any problems and I am sure none of them who looked at me saw an abused child. They saw a “good” student who was not making any trouble. What they didn’t realize was my self-control was well beyond what it should have been and they never saw the patterns of an abused child. Straight A students who don’t make loud problems are not seen as abused, but I was. They merely told me they had enjoyed having me in their class and wished me well. I want my story told because even now there are “model students” that are abused and overlooked because they don’t fit the pattern of the “classic” abused child. In my case, the abuse went on for 18 years until I went to college more than six hours away from them. Even then, though, I still could not tell anyone what had happened to me. My partner deduced that I must have been abused but she didn’t push a lot at first. It was years before I started to talk about any of it and then only the barest of comments and events. It wasn’t until fairly recently (earlier this year) that I could even admit that he had been molesting me. It still freaks me out that he did it and that I so completely tried to put the memories out of my head. Mrs. Troll repeating to me over and over again about how bad I would feel if I remembered, thought about, or talked about anything that hurt me in the first place. The memory would hurt and keep hurting, according to her, every time I thought about it. Not only was it going to hurt, it was going to hurt worse every time I thought about it. She also told me if something hurts or bothers me, don’t look at it, pretend it isn’t happening. I tried to push all of my horrible, painful memories out of my head. They don’t go anywhere until I look at and deal with them. The “advice” she gave me was only ever intended to make me more of a victim, not to help me out of a very bad situation because if it “wasn’t happening,” there was nothing to fight against or escape from. The less I fought him, the easier I was for him to molest, the more he left the others (especially her) alone.

When we first moved to Michigan, we started going out to restaurants. As he was still starving me, Mr. Troll* almost always told me how much and what I could and could not order from the menu when we went out to eat: “That’s too much for you,” “That’s too rich for you,” “You don’t want to eat too much and get fat,” “You won’t like it,” “You’re not that hungry,” etc. If it was a new restaurant, he told me at the restaurant what I could order. Before we left the house to go out to eat, he always warned me to listen to him. He said he knew better than I did what would be good for me to have. If we had been there before, he often told me on the way to the restaurant what I could have and repeated it again at the restaurant. He wanted to make sure that I never had enough food and this was one more way for him to control me. I knew that if I didn’t follow his dictates about what I ordered or ate, he would get very angry and beat me later. There were times when he ordered my food for me, telling the waiter I was too shy to order for myself. I hated him. On another evening during the visit when at Grandma Troll’s house when I was ten, we all went out to dinner at a very nice restaurant and I was too tense with his dictates of what I could and could not order, what I could and could not eat, to actually want any food. I was too sick with tension to eat and, even though I was starving, the thought of food made me ill. They all ordered and I did not. Seeing my distress made Mr. Troll laugh over dinner. Every time he looked at me, he laughed again. I knew I was hungry but even the smell of other people’s food was more than I could stand. My stomach felt like it was cramping and I thought I was going to throw up (or, in my case of an empty stomach, dry heave). After their food all came and they had been eating for a while, I suddenly had to run to the bathroom. I had been constipated with the tension and suddenly it all came flooding out of me. I don’t know how long I was in there but when I came back out I was suddenly feeling much better and less stressed. When I came back to the table, I was starving. I asked if I could order some food and Mr. Troll told me no, they were almost done eating and they didn’t want to take the time for me to order, have the food prepared, and wait for me to eat. He was laughing again as he said this. I hated him and his laughter. I had to sit through the rest of their meal, starving, waiting for them to finish when I was weak from hunger, knowing I would not be allowed any food once we got back to Grandma Troll’s house. That night after everyone else was in bed I snuck down to her kitchen very quietly, hoping to find something quick to eat that no one would notice missing in the morning. I found some leftovers in her fridge and ate a little bit of some of them, thinking no one would know just how much there had or hadn’t been or attributing the loss to someone else eating them. I was at least right about that. I had been in the habit of trying to sneak food since I was old enough to reach the food in the Troll house. I had gotten good at judging how much I could take that wouldn’t really be noticed and doing it very quietly so I wouldn’t get caught.

It was still not enough food and every doctor that I saw growing up commented to Mrs. Troll about how thin I was, didn’t I eat? Mrs. Troll, who always accompanied me to the doctors’ offices, always told them, of course she eats, she’s just thin. At fourteen years old, when I was about to enter high school, I had a physical. I was about 5’6” tall (my full height) and weighed 86 pounds, you could see my ribs sticking out and I looked like a concentration camp victim. I had developed body hair consistent with that of an anorexic (a disease as yet not really well diagnosed when I was a teenager): without enough body fat to keep me warm, my body developed hair all over to try to conserve body heat. (At this time I do not yet have the financial means to get it all removed.) It still stands out in my mind that Mrs. Troll always forbid me to talk with the pediatricians and doctors who examined me, she would talk to them for me and she told them I was “too shy to speak.” I remember as far back as starting kindergarten and being examined by the pediatrician. Before we went to his office, Mrs. Troll impressed upon me by shaking me the need for me not to say anything to the doctor. She would speak to him for me. When he asked his first question, Mrs. Troll gripped my hand hard and answered him. When he mentioned I seemed a bit underweight, Mrs. Troll told him I had a healthy appetite and was eating well (lie!!!). I knew if I said anything about being hungry all the time, Mrs. Troll would tell Mr. Troll and Mr. Troll would beat me. Then I would start to feel sick and panicked again (from his poisoning me) and Mrs. Troll would impress again by yelling at me that I was not to talk to the doctor, probably shaking me as well.

Over the summer when I was ten years old, we spent the July 4th holiday week at Grandma Troll’s* house in Ohio (his mother). It was the Troll practice to spend this week with her ever since we moved back from Alaska. I always had the sense that his family was afraid of him. No one argued with him and they didn’t look at what he was doing too closely. This is the summer that I developed heat sickness (probably related to stress) on top of everything else. Mrs. Troll discovered I needed extra salt in my diet and encouraged me to eat potato chips. She also found out that cool/cold baths would help reduce the effects of being overly warm. Because I didn’t have much energy, they often left me alone at Grandma’s house while they all went out to King’s Island or over to our cousins’ house. It got very bad one evening when our cousins had come over. Downstairs where everyone else was, Mr. Troll acted concerned about my condition and told them he was going to take me upstairs and run a cold bath for me. As we went up the stairs, he seemed to transform more and more with each step he took away from the crowd. I didn’t want t be alone with him for any length of time regardless of who else was in the house. I knew I couldn’t cry out or scram or he would beat me for that later in addition to whatever he was going to do now. As he ran the water in the tub, he was stripping my clothes off me, running his hands over my skin (which was crawling) and telling me he was going to help me in the tub. I wished I had something in my stomach to throw up on him. He put me down in the tub and started “washing” me. REVOLTING! He put his hands all over me, touching my skin and pinching me. He put his finger inside me telling me he had to make sure I was clean. Mrs. Troll had told me to try not to think about what he was doing so that I wouldn’t remember it later. I told myself not to think about what he was doing. I put it out of my head for a long time afterward as I did all of his molestation.
*That side of the family has more Trolls than you can shake a stick at but it isn't really their name.