John

Just as I was entering the first grade my family moved from a very small town in the northwest corner of Iowa, to a modestly small town in western Illinois. I was aware that my mother had been so depressed in the small Iowa town that she lay on the couch crying for days and even went to the hospital for awhile to get better. In my five year old mind I knew that she was sad and sick and I was scared. I remember feeding her as she lay on her side in our family room on the horribly patterned burnt orange couch so popular in the late 70's and I thought she might die.

The town we relocated to was called Galesburg. I remember two things quite distinctly from those first few weeks in our new home. First, the school district wanted to place me in a rural grade school instead of send me to the school a few blocks away from the duplex we moved into because the class size was supposedly already over capacity. My parents were irate and they had to fight with the school district and school board to send me to Rose Hoben Welch Grade School. Eventually, they won. The second thing I remember is my very first day in first grade. I was already a tall, overweight, and awkward looking little girl with bright red hair that seemed to glow in the summer sun, matched in intensity only by the connecting bright freckles all over my face. My new teacher had me stand at the front of the class to introduce myself. It was a disaster. Kids snickered and whispered to each other and for some reason I chose to share that my kindergarten class used to have a bathtub in the corner surrounded by books that kids could choose to read during play time. It is true that there was a bathtub in my kindergarten class. It is also true that this may have been the most stupid thing to share with my new cohort as they could not stop laughing and I can't really blame them. I nearly cried.

Across from our duplex was a family that included a young boy named John who happened to be in my same grade at my new school. My mother and his mother became fast friends and our families spent a lot of time together, our parents often trading childcare duties and entertaining each other on the weekends. I do not remember exactly the first time that it happened. I know it was sometime in those first few weeks as everything was so new and exciting. John had a play area in their partially finished basement with a toy chest and what seemed like hundreds of miniature cars, action figures, and toys and games. Bean bags were all the rage at the time and there were a few of those down there too. I remember toys inside of me, flashlights shone at my private parts as all the lights were turned off, and John trying to put his penis in my mouth, my hands, my vagina, and anywhere else he could think to try. I don't think I ever said no or was particularly forceful in an attempt to make him stop. This would come to haunt me in my post-Oprah therapy as I worked to piece things together and assign blame and responsibility for these episodes. I do know that I was scared...scared we would get caught, scared that I didn't understand what was happening, scared that it often hurt, scared that it sometimes felt good. I also quickly became adept at blocking it all out and simply floating away until it was over. My therapy also later taught me that this is called dissociation, something that I got so good at over the years that I couldn't stop even when I wanted to.

These sexual episodes with John continued with near daily frequency while we lived across the street from his family for the next three years or so. Our families went on vacations and day trips together. There were times that John had sex with me in a shared hotel room on a trip, and put his penis in my mouth in the back of our station wagon while our mothers and my older brother were in the car. The near daily underwater assaults and touching at the country club swimming pool we went to faithfully in the summer for years would leave me terrified to be in the water for some time afterward. When we did move it was only about a half of a mile away from the duplex but it was enough space to make access a little more difficult for John. There were still times he would initiate sexual contact in the tires on the playground, or whenever our families would visit each other, but it was dramatically less by the end of 4th grade.

I didn't tell a single soul about any of it. My mom was finally happy and my dad seemed to always be at work. My older brother was old enough that he was rarely around and we weren't very close. I was completely ashamed and felt responsible and dirty and didn't feel as though it made any sense to ever acknowledge it to anyone. Instead, I chose to eat and avoid my feelings. I don't actually know how much I weighed at that time but the pictures show that I was likely around 175 lbs by 5th grade. My mother took me to weight watchers, had me eat Ayds (a terribly named dietary aid which went off the market as AIDS became a well known disease), dragged me to aerobics classes with her (all the rage at the time), and tried to motivate me to eat less by telling me I was fat. That paradoxical intervention is never really successful when one is attempting to stuff their feelings and avoid any kind of sexual interaction with anyone by becoming as large as possible. These are the seeds of my lifelong battle with obesity.