May 31, 2008
When I was about two years old, I received a wooden dolphin toy as a gift from my maternal grandmother, a woman I hadn’t met. It had brightly colored rings that went on a stick and could be taken apart and put back together. I had so few toys that were “mine” but this one was my favorite one and I carried it with me all the time. When they were moving to Michigan, Mrs. Troll* would not let me take it with me no matter how much crying and screaming I did to take it with me. She said it had to go into a “special” box. After arriving in Michigan, I could not find it or anything else that had been put into her special box. I looked for it everywhere; maybe it had gotten packed in the wrong box. It wasn’t anywhere. I was heart-broken. To be four years old and lose your favorite toy is devastating. I don’t know how long I cried about it. I still cry and scream about it and the other losses. Mrs. Troll yelled at me to be quiet. Mr. Troll shook me and yelled at me. I couldn’t stop crying that it was gone. I didn’t realize that they were starting a pattern of destroying, “losing,” selling, and/or stealing things that were important to me. Either Mrs. Troll or Princess* was responsible for most of what was lost. Every time something else disappeared, it hurt worse as the losses that I did not express accumulated and nothing was done to replace what was lost.
One day when I was six, I came home from school to find my favorite and only stuffed animal, a white teddy bear, was gone. Mrs. Troll told me at the time that she had given it a way to charity and I shouldn’t cry because I was too old for stuffed animals anyway. Later I found stuffing bits in the living room and trashcan and surmised that in one of her fits she had destroyed the bear. Either way, it was still gone and it hurt. Telling me I was too old for it hurt more, she tried to deny the pain I was in and told me my pain was wrong, bad. At the garage sale they held before they moved that summer, Mrs. Troll put my Fisher-Price dollhouse out to be sold. When I screamed I wanted it still, she told me it was too big to move. Then she told me if it didn’t sell I could keep it. When some woman bought it for her daughter I ran inside and cried and cried and cried.
Then because the new house wasn’t ready, we spent the summer on a lake. Princess took my card deck that my maternal grandmother had given to me and destroyed it in the sand. My grandmother had given me her old broken in deck to play with. Because my hands were so small, shuffling a new deck was difficult to manage. We had used that deck when she taught me how to play cribbage and rummy and gin. Those are some of my only positive childhood memories. When I discovered what Princess had done, the pain was intense. I grabbed hold of her, yelling at her while I was trying to kill her “I hate you!” Mrs. Troll pulled me off her yelling at me “She’s your sister. You don’t hate her, you love her!” Nothing could have been further from the truth at that point (or any other, really). She might have been my biological sister but nothing ever convinced me I should love her because of that. She stole and destroyed dolls, shirts (even though she was a year younger, due to my starvation and malnutrition, we were the same size), books, and toys that were supposedly mine. “You shouldn’t be selfish. You should share with your sister.” Even though Princess was never told that she had to share with me and was often told everything that was supposed to be ours to share was “hers.”
Mrs. Troll started telling me that the things weren’t that important. I shouldn’t let myself be hurt by them. If I didn’t care about them, then they wouldn’t hurt when they weren’t there. I tried not to let the losses hurt anymore. When I was ten I received a remote control car for Christmas that I thought was the best present ever. I played with it all the time when I first got it. Princess got her hands on it and completely ruined it. It was in pieces when I got it back from her. I just stood there numb. I knew it was going to happen and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. I tried to force myself not to show anything about how much it hurt. I tried to convince myself it didn’t hurt. Nothing stopped the intensity of pain I felt, not even biting my hand or banging my head on the wall. I repeated to myself like a mantra that it was just a toy and it didn’t hurt. I tried to convince myself I really didn’t want to kill Princess, that it wasn’t her fault. I hated her with everything I was and still do. I tried not to care about anything again after that point because caring hurt too much when it was destroyed. I either pretended I didn’t care or tried to convince myself I didn’t care so that when it happened again (and it always happened again) it wouldn’t have the power to hurt me. In high school they had a set of Christmas ornaments that I thought were beautiful. I called them mine. I was told they had been packed carefully away when we took down the tree. The next year when we went to set up the Christmas tree, all of “my” ornaments had been crushed. I cried myself to sleep that night, not wanting to care about anything again because it was just too much pain. I am still crying over these losses.

*Trolls is what they are