Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. We
Speaker 1: start tonight with a man hunt in Tulsa, a murder
Speaker 1: suspect considered armed and dangerous. That victim died this morning,
Speaker 1: and we hear from a witness who says she tried
Speaker 1: to save his life. The tornado warnings have expired, thankfully,
Speaker 1: but left behind plenty of flooding in the area. Look
Speaker 1: at that impact. That's Stephen Romo, a thirty three year
Speaker 1: old TV news anchor based in Houston, Texas. To look
Speaker 1: at Stephen is to see a dapper young man, handsome,
Speaker 1: clean cut, as they say, often wearing a jacket and
Speaker 1: tie or a neatly pressed collared shirt. He's well put together,
Speaker 1: in consummate control. But, as is so often true, what
Speaker 1: we see tells us only part of the story. We
Speaker 1: easily judge others based on appearances are our own fantasies
Speaker 1: of what someone's life must be like. In Steven's case,
Speaker 1: you might think he had a traditional, comfortable, simple childhood,
Speaker 1: and you would be wrong. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
Speaker 1: is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 1: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from ourselves. I grew up in the late eighties
Speaker 1: in a suburb just to the south of Dallas, and
Speaker 1: I had an older brothers three years older than me.
Speaker 1: My dad wasn't still is a big rig driver. My
Speaker 1: mom was a stay at home mom at the time.
Speaker 1: And growing up, I hear a lot of people say
Speaker 1: they didn't realize that their family wasn't normal until they
Speaker 1: were older, but that wasn't true for me. I realized
Speaker 1: very early on that my family was not quite typical.
Speaker 1: Through watching TV and just visiting neighbors. I realized that
Speaker 1: my home life was something to hide. It was a secret.
Speaker 1: It was something that I was ashamed of. One of
Speaker 1: my first memories is standing on a kitchen drawer that
Speaker 1: I used to pull out so I could reach the
Speaker 1: counter and grabbing a jar of peanut butter and looking
Speaker 1: inside and just seeing it was full of roaches scurrying
Speaker 1: over each other and dropping it and letting it roll away,
Speaker 1: and that is that's one of my first memories. And
Speaker 1: I knew that wasn't normal. I was disgusted by it
Speaker 1: and angry at my parents for it, but I knew
Speaker 1: it wasn't normal. So that was the situation in our
Speaker 1: home for a long time, but my mom and my
Speaker 1: dad went bankrupt and the bank foreclosed in our house,
Speaker 1: so we had to move into the home of my
Speaker 1: great uncle, my mom's uncle, and it was a duplex.
Speaker 1: It's sort of out of nowhere. My mom decided that
Speaker 1: we needed to get dogs. It was like a necessity,
Speaker 1: she mentioned, so we would know if anyone was going
Speaker 1: to break into the home. It started off with to
Speaker 1: Chihuaha's and they had their own family, and it was
Speaker 1: six chihuahuas at one point. It was it was really
Speaker 1: hard to keep up, so we gave them away and
Speaker 1: we collected others we always had heard of, mostly chouaa's.
Speaker 1: It's funny too, because you think about what one might
Speaker 1: think of as a guard dog, and you don't immediate
Speaker 1: You don't immediately go to chihuahua. Yes, I yeah, it
Speaker 1: doesn't make a ton of since they did. I mean,
Speaker 1: we always knew anyone was anywhere close to our house
Speaker 1: because they yapped and I don't even want to call
Speaker 1: it a park. It was just yap NonStop. And I
Speaker 1: love those dogs so much. I feel like my childhood
Speaker 1: would have been much more empty without them. That they
Speaker 1: dogs just accept you and and love you and to
Speaker 1: get excited when you come home. And I didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: get that from my parents. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: they were the source of so much consternation. They never
Speaker 1: went outside. They just the carpet was their bathroom. Eventually
Speaker 1: we had to rip up the carpet because it was
Speaker 1: so you're in stained, and that just made the roaches
Speaker 1: seem like nothing to have to deal with that. The
Speaker 1: roaches were just just a slight distraction compared to them.
Speaker 1: Did your great uncle know what was going on in
Speaker 1: the other part of the duplex? And did did he
Speaker 1: have any response to any of that? Strangely, no, he
Speaker 1: didn't have much of a response. That His presence was
Speaker 1: always a sort of a few for my mom, and
Speaker 1: I didn't understand why. For a long time he had
Speaker 1: a key to the house. Obviously, and sometimes we would
Speaker 1: come home and my mom would tell my dad that
Speaker 1: she could smell my great uncle's cologne and that set
Speaker 1: her off into I don't want to say hysterics. That
Speaker 1: sounds extreme, but she was deeply bothered by it. And
Speaker 1: of course that made sense later on, but at the
Speaker 1: time it didn't. It also didn't make sense why he
Speaker 1: would see the way the house was and not be
Speaker 1: livid that we were destroying that house. My brother Um
Speaker 1: started punching holes in the walls when he was about
Speaker 1: thirteen and ripping the doors. Were cheap plywood or particle
Speaker 1: would doors and he would tear them down. Eventually we
Speaker 1: had no doors in the house and there were giant
Speaker 1: holes in the walls. And my great uncle saw this
Speaker 1: and never said anything about it. We saw him at
Speaker 1: family gatherings, there was never any mention of it, which
Speaker 1: was bizarre to me, and it stood out even though
Speaker 1: I couldn't really put together why until later on. Why
Speaker 1: was your brother Why do you think he was punching
Speaker 1: holes in the walls? I think he was angry at
Speaker 1: our home situation too, and my parents just we just
Speaker 1: sort of were on our own, handling things in our
Speaker 1: own way. And my dad is a is a smaller guy.
Speaker 1: He's about five six and my brother and I I'm
Speaker 1: six ft tall, and i've been I've been taller than
Speaker 1: my dad. I think I was about fourteen. It was
Speaker 1: the same thing for my brother, so he could control
Speaker 1: us fine when we were smaller than him, but as
Speaker 1: soon as we got bigger, it was just Um you know,
Speaker 1: do whatever you want. You're on your own, So sort
Speaker 1: of like that for my brother, and he expressed his
Speaker 1: anger by destroying our house, destroying our walls. Well, it's
Speaker 1: so interesting because it sounds like your house was sort
Speaker 1: of being destroyed anyway, So you know, how could the
Speaker 1: anti be uped in some way? That's true. One of
Speaker 1: the things that I always find so interesting in thinking
Speaker 1: about family secrets is when it seems like a couple
Speaker 1: develop or conspire to keep something hidden or secret together.
Speaker 1: Does it begin with one of them or is it
Speaker 1: sort of something that grows with both of them. Did
Speaker 1: it start with your mom or your dad or was
Speaker 1: it something that wouldn't have happened if each of them
Speaker 1: had been with somebody else, but it happened because they
Speaker 1: were together. I thought a lot about it, and I
Speaker 1: really do think that it is they were just sort
Speaker 1: of the perfect storm together to make this environment happen.
Speaker 1: I think if either of them had been with another partner,
Speaker 1: I don't see how this it could have happened. My dad,
Speaker 1: he's the eighth of nine children, and his mother died
Speaker 1: when he was twelve years old, so his home life
Speaker 1: was very erratic. He was mostly raised by his older siblings.
Speaker 1: My dad is Hispanic, and some of his older siblings
Speaker 1: and his father spoke Spanish, and he barely speaks Spanish.
Speaker 1: They literally spoke different languages. He was on his own
Speaker 1: a lot as a child. My mother was raised by
Speaker 1: her grandmother and her mother after her parents divorced, and
Speaker 1: she never felt loved. What I was mentioning about the
Speaker 1: great uncle I found out later from my mother and
Speaker 1: she sort of tearfully admitted to me when I was fourteen,
Speaker 1: admitted to me as if it were her something that
Speaker 1: she had done wrong. She told me that that great
Speaker 1: uncle had sexually abused her, starting when she was nine
Speaker 1: years old. While my aunt was watching my mom. He
Speaker 1: would come home on his lunch breaks and she would
Speaker 1: be pretending to be asleep often and he would wake
Speaker 1: her up and take her to a different part of
Speaker 1: the house and abuse her. A lot of stuff clicked
Speaker 1: into place because of that, why she was the way
Speaker 1: she was. Did something precipitate her telling you at this
Speaker 1: point when she told you you had been living in
Speaker 1: that great uncle's house for some period of time, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: for a few years. At that point. What I think
Speaker 1: precipitated it? I was complaining a lot more. I had started.
Speaker 1: I had a younger sister, she's four years younger than me,
Speaker 1: and I started telling my mom that I was going
Speaker 1: to call child protective Services if we didn't move, and
Speaker 1: I was a smartass. Just to be frank about it.
Speaker 1: I couldn't go along with it anymore. I um. I
Speaker 1: would say things like, you feed the roaches better than
Speaker 1: you feed your own kids. And I was just a
Speaker 1: constant critic of my father too. He was gone a lot,
Speaker 1: but when he was there. Name calling was a huge
Speaker 1: issue in my house. My parents called me names, I
Speaker 1: called my parents names. It was just a thing that happened.
Speaker 1: Right before my mom revealed that to me, I decided
Speaker 1: my dad wasn't going to call me names anymore. The
Speaker 1: word at the time was faggot that he kept calling me.
Speaker 1: Excuse the use of the word that I hate, but
Speaker 1: it was that word. I decided it was never going
Speaker 1: to happen again. So I sort of charged at him
Speaker 1: and you know, looked down at him because he was
Speaker 1: so much smaller than me, and told him that he
Speaker 1: was not going to call me that word ever again.
Speaker 1: And he shoved me, and I shoved him back and
Speaker 1: knocked him down and he walked away, and that was
Speaker 1: the end of that. My mom, she would have been
Speaker 1: at a grocery store. She got home and my dad
Speaker 1: told her what happened, and she came into my room crying,
Speaker 1: and instead of talking about that fight at all, she
Speaker 1: sort of abruptly told me about the sexual abuse with
Speaker 1: her uncle. I've got the impression at the time she
Speaker 1: was telling me, sort of to say that she had
Speaker 1: enough going on, that we were living in his house
Speaker 1: and she was going through enough turmoil that she just
Speaker 1: wanted me to just stop being so obstructionist and arguing
Speaker 1: and disagreeing with them. I think that's why she revealed
Speaker 1: it to me. Did she ever draw any kind of
Speaker 1: connection from her having been abused as a child to
Speaker 1: the way that she kept her home as an adult,
Speaker 1: Oh no, not at all. So it was really it
Speaker 1: was unconscious. I definitely think it was unconscious. She my
Speaker 1: parents both would blame us, the kids and the dogs,
Speaker 1: thing we didn't help, and we took food in our
Speaker 1: rooms and in all these sort of lame excuses that
Speaker 1: I never believed. But she, no, it was never conscious.
Speaker 1: I don't think that that's what she was doing. We'll
Speaker 1: be back in a moment with more family secrets. Stephen
Speaker 1: goes to school dressed in mismatched clothes, dirty clothes, and
Speaker 1: sometimes the roaches hitch a ride in his backpack crawl
Speaker 1: out of his lunchbox. Other kids notice, of course, but
Speaker 1: Stephen invents stories around why that's the case. I was
Speaker 1: just a liar, and I thought I was really good
Speaker 1: at it. But now looking back, it just seems ridiculous
Speaker 1: the stuff I would say, But it was anything too
Speaker 1: disconnect me from the way I was growing up. I
Speaker 1: watched so much TV as a kid, uninterrupted hours upon
Speaker 1: hours of TV any and everything. We didn't have cable,
Speaker 1: so it's just what I could get on the antenna.
Speaker 1: But because of that, I invented so many stories that
Speaker 1: were just completely made up about trips to Europe and
Speaker 1: stuff that would have never happened in a million years
Speaker 1: with enough detail. I thought that I was completely tricking
Speaker 1: all these kids to think that I was actually like
Speaker 1: one of them, or just wealthy. And I was made
Speaker 1: to dress poor because my parents wanted to keep me humble.
Speaker 1: Just just ridiculous stories that I made up just to
Speaker 1: try to defend myself, and I was made fun of
Speaker 1: of course, because that's what happens when you're a kid.
Speaker 1: But I really feel like the kids were easier on
Speaker 1: me than they could have been. I could have had
Speaker 1: it much worse than I did. You know, it's interesting
Speaker 1: the whole idea of education through TV, you know, and
Speaker 1: and through reading as well, and the way in which
Speaker 1: I mean so often on this podcast I think about
Speaker 1: my guests stories and the way that if the story
Speaker 1: had been playing out during a time when the Internet existed,
Speaker 1: where there was so much readily available information, you could
Speaker 1: look something up, you could call it by its name,
Speaker 1: you could find out what it was, you could connect
Speaker 1: with other people who might be going through something similar.
Speaker 1: And there are things that are not so great about that,
Speaker 1: but there's so many things that are that really pierced
Speaker 1: people's sense of isolation. Whereas when you were growing up
Speaker 1: that didn't exist, and so your education was Mr. Rogers neighborhood.
Speaker 1: That's such a ordered, gentle kind place, a place where
Speaker 1: there would never be a cockroach, a place where there
Speaker 1: would never be anything out of place or out of order.
Speaker 1: Did you find all of that? It was like sort
Speaker 1: of part of your coming of age. Absolutely, I can't
Speaker 1: imagine what my childhood would have been like without television.
Speaker 1: It's how I knew that the way I was living
Speaker 1: was unacceptable and would made me start as a young
Speaker 1: child trying to fight against it, trying to force my
Speaker 1: parents to allow us to move. Was just from the
Speaker 1: story that I saw on TV. They made me feel
Speaker 1: less lonely. I felt more connected to the characters on TV. Mr. Rogers,
Speaker 1: Neighborhood and even shows that weren't actually geared towards me was.
Speaker 1: I was a super young child watching the Oprah Winfrey
Speaker 1: Show and seeing people who had gone through trauma had
Speaker 1: come out just fine. It was not geared toward nine
Speaker 1: year old boy, but watching it made me realize that
Speaker 1: if these people can overcome horrible things that happened to them, uh,
Speaker 1: this and could be true of me. And then getting
Speaker 1: a library card and reading diary of Anne Frank and
Speaker 1: seeing like this is nothing that I'm going through. This
Speaker 1: is nothing compared to what some people have survived. It
Speaker 1: was invaluable that connection. I feel like stories really did
Speaker 1: save me. I think That's why I'm a a storyteller now.
Speaker 1: It did create dissonance for me as I was growing
Speaker 1: up and moving on in my career that my job
Speaker 1: was to seek out the truth and to tell people's
Speaker 1: stories as truly as I could. While I sort of
Speaker 1: just pretended to be the boy with no history that
Speaker 1: I completely tried to cut myself off from my past.
Speaker 1: There was a dissonance there. And it's only been in
Speaker 1: the last year or so that I've realized the importance
Speaker 1: of being honest about where I came from and sort
Speaker 1: of the power in the telling of the story. So
Speaker 1: how did you get out, Like walk me through you
Speaker 1: graduate from high school? And did you know that you
Speaker 1: wanted to become a journalist? What was your path initially?
Speaker 1: Your path away from that home and that environment. Well,
Speaker 1: eventually I I kept sort of fighting with my parents,
Speaker 1: and I dropped out of high school and I kind
Speaker 1: of fight with my dad. I think it was I
Speaker 1: got a job setting up for a church nearby. Church
Speaker 1: they met in a Y and c a. So I
Speaker 1: had to go and set up chairs and you know,
Speaker 1: gymnasium and make it into a church. And I get paid.
Speaker 1: I think it was fifty dollars a weekend when I
Speaker 1: did that Saturdays and Sundays, and I didn't have a
Speaker 1: checking account because I was sixteen years old. So I
Speaker 1: would give my parents the checks and they were supposed
Speaker 1: to give me the cash, but after they had three
Speaker 1: fifty dollars, they would not give me the money. And
Speaker 1: so that of course caused a fight and I just
Speaker 1: got sofa hit up that After that fight, I moved
Speaker 1: down my great grandmother for a little while, and then
Speaker 1: I started renting a room. And I had been out
Speaker 1: of high school for about a year. I went ahead
Speaker 1: and took some entrance exams and got into community college
Speaker 1: and stayed there for a couple of years and then
Speaker 1: transferred to A and M. And it was it sounds
Speaker 1: crazy to say it's so simply right now, because it
Speaker 1: seemed impossible what I was trying to do to escape,
Speaker 1: and it was very hard, and there was a lot
Speaker 1: of struggle, and just to sum it up to a
Speaker 1: few sentences seems it seems so crazy, But that's what happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's always the in between, right. I teach writing,
Speaker 1: and occasionally I give my students this exercise where I
Speaker 1: asked them to write a list. Um, it's a sailing term,
Speaker 1: but like the tacking points in their life, like where
Speaker 1: when you sail from point A to point B. You
Speaker 1: don't go in a straight line. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: you the boat, you know, sails into the wind or
Speaker 1: away from the wind. And then after they've done that,
Speaker 1: I asked them to take two of these attacking points
Speaker 1: that are side by side and fill in the middle
Speaker 1: because it's always the middle, right, Like what you're describing
Speaker 1: is like, yes, you're summing it up, but you did.
Speaker 1: I mean, ultimately you went from having dropped out of
Speaker 1: college and being this really tough position two finding your feet.
Speaker 1: You know, that's it's it's it's a messy process, but
Speaker 1: you found your feet. Yeah, i'd like to think so
Speaker 1: when I was in college, my mom because my mom
Speaker 1: died and so that was definitely another attacking point. It's
Speaker 1: it's hard, and we didn't have a resolution. Really she
Speaker 1: died sort of it I wouldn't. I guess it's it's hard.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's always it always feels sudden when someone dies,
Speaker 1: if feel like but she had asthma and several health
Speaker 1: problems from just the way she sort of lived her life.
Speaker 1: She was I think she was addicted to prescription painkillers.
Speaker 1: She would argue otherwise they were prescribed to her by
Speaker 1: a doctor, she would say, so they're not. She wasn't addicted,
Speaker 1: but basically her organs started shutting down. And I drove
Speaker 1: up from Texas A and M It's like a three
Speaker 1: hour drive to the hospital, and really wanted to to
Speaker 1: talk to her. And she had a breathing tube. She
Speaker 1: was conscious when I went in there and aware, but
Speaker 1: she couldn't speak, so and the the doctors had told us
Speaker 1: that things didn't look good. It was really hard for
Speaker 1: me to believe that she could actually die. She was
Speaker 1: forty three, but I tried to push myself to be
Speaker 1: more sincere I have the habit of trying to make
Speaker 1: jokes or being sarcastic, but I really tried to have
Speaker 1: a moment with her and speak to her and tell
Speaker 1: her that I wanted her to get better, and that
Speaker 1: no matter what had happened between us, that she was
Speaker 1: a part of us and that she belonged to us.
Speaker 1: And she couldn't say anything, but she grabbed my arm
Speaker 1: almost like she thought she could sort of compel her
Speaker 1: whatever she was trying to say into me, and she
Speaker 1: just stared at me h and cried. And then visiting
Speaker 1: hours were over, and so I sort of got pulled
Speaker 1: out of there. But having to to face that, having
Speaker 1: to sort of realized that there would never be the
Speaker 1: reconciliation that I always thought would happen with her sort
Speaker 1: of made me confronted. I had to sort of find
Speaker 1: my own reconciliation. So I think that's sort of made
Speaker 1: me more aware of it too. Now Stephen's working in
Speaker 1: a TV station in Houston. He's embarked on his successful
Speaker 1: adult life, and what he does is push his past away.
Speaker 1: He doesn't lie about it. Lying making up fantastical stories
Speaker 1: is a thing of his past. He simply omits. He
Speaker 1: doesn't talk about his family history, not with his friends,
Speaker 1: not with anyone. And then one day he's in the
Speaker 1: newsroom on a break when he gets a text from
Speaker 1: his sister was a link to a news story. So
Speaker 1: my sister and I talked about the way we grew
Speaker 1: up a lot, and um, she sent me a story.
Speaker 1: She knew I was on the newscast, so she she
Speaker 1: sent it, and I assumed we would talk about it
Speaker 1: later and I wouldn't read it right then. But as
Speaker 1: soon as I saw what the headline was about children
Speaker 1: living in the roach infested at home, I couldn't help it.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's two minutes left in our commercial break.
Speaker 1: But I clicked on it and um started reading it,
Speaker 1: and UM, I didn't just read the article. I violated
Speaker 1: my own rule of not reading the comments and read
Speaker 1: the comments and people just expressing their disgust at the situation,
Speaker 1: but they're also just their hatred for these parents who
Speaker 1: clearly had to been going through something for them just themselves,
Speaker 1: and more than anything, it was just the sense of
Speaker 1: of shame that I remember, and I thought about it.
Speaker 1: It was their young girls in this home. I was
Speaker 1: just thinking about those girls. The oldest was thirteen, and
Speaker 1: I was remembering what it was like to be a
Speaker 1: thirteen year old in a house like that, and imagining
Speaker 1: if there had been a news article about it, how
Speaker 1: mortified I would have been. It just something hit me
Speaker 1: that by omitting where I came from, I was perpetuating
Speaker 1: that same secret that I had been carrying since childhood.
Speaker 1: And also, of course, with secrets is often shamed, so
Speaker 1: I was also just experiencing that same shame. And if
Speaker 1: if I could just to that one family in Idaho,
Speaker 1: that was those girls who were going through this, but
Speaker 1: I could just make them feel better or less alone,
Speaker 1: it seemed worth it just to share some of what
Speaker 1: I went through. So then one thing that struck me
Speaker 1: is the break is over and you've got to go
Speaker 1: back on the news. The cameras are rolling and your
Speaker 1: co newscasters looking at you like are you okay? And
Speaker 1: the camera start rolling and you know your your teeth
Speaker 1: up to go, and you do, which is something that
Speaker 1: I I see again and again and I also really
Speaker 1: relate to, because you have sort of metabolized that trauma
Speaker 1: for all those years and just packed it away and
Speaker 1: put it somewhere, and it wasn't even particularly conscious for
Speaker 1: you or visible to you, so it was possible to
Speaker 1: function at this really high level and just finish up
Speaker 1: the news. No one looking at you would ever have
Speaker 1: known what was going on inside of you right at
Speaker 1: sort of the story of my life, right no one
Speaker 1: could even tell if there's anything wrong. I think that's
Speaker 1: the story of so many people whose lives have been
Speaker 1: haunted by family secrets. We live in a sort of
Speaker 1: split screen existence. On one side of the screen you
Speaker 1: have the secret, and on the other side we pack
Speaker 1: that secret away so that we can function at a
Speaker 1: high level in the world. And when you're on the
Speaker 1: high functioning side. It's almost like the secret doesn't exist,
Speaker 1: except of course it does. It never goes away. It
Speaker 1: can recede for a period of time, but it never disappears,
Speaker 1: not completely. Around the same time as Stephen's sister sent
Speaker 1: the link to that news story, Stephen's producer had sent
Speaker 1: a request of all the news anchors for childhood photos
Speaker 1: old school photos, a fun promotion for that back to
Speaker 1: school time of year, so that viewers could see what
Speaker 1: the anchors look like as kids. That emailed to the
Speaker 1: producer saying, and actually been sitting in my inbox for
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks. I just finally I decided to
Speaker 1: sort of take it on. And I have a bunch
Speaker 1: of photos on my phone. A few years ago, my
Speaker 1: sister was moving and I she had a big box
Speaker 1: of photos, and so I just sort of use my
Speaker 1: phone to take pictures of them all and hadn't looked
Speaker 1: at them in a really long time. So I made
Speaker 1: myself go through and I included some of those in
Speaker 1: the essay. It's amazing to me how many, I mean,
Speaker 1: the photos of the worst of it never survived, Like,
Speaker 1: who's going to want to take pictures of roaches in
Speaker 1: the corner, you know what the dogs leave behind, so
Speaker 1: they weren't even as bad as I remembered that being
Speaker 1: it's not an ideal childhood, but I had to go
Speaker 1: through and and choose one. And normally with that entails
Speaker 1: as me trying to crop out anything that, you know,
Speaker 1: if my my jeans were rapped or my shirt is stained,
Speaker 1: or I mentioned in there, the bugs leave behind this
Speaker 1: amber colored dust on everything, which really, for some reason
Speaker 1: just stakes to photos and it's really hard to to
Speaker 1: move around it. I'm trying to crop all that out,
Speaker 1: but I just sent one in without doing all that treating.
Speaker 1: And I always thought that if I did that that
Speaker 1: someone would ask, you know, what it was, or someone
Speaker 1: would inquire about it. But no one, of course even
Speaker 1: noticed it, or if they did, they didn't say anything
Speaker 1: about it. It was not at all a big deal.
Speaker 1: So maybe next time I can save myself the trouble
Speaker 1: and just send in a photo. Amber colored dust the
Speaker 1: stuff cockroaches leave behind. Stephen and his siblings referred to
Speaker 1: this when they were children as bug dust, sort of
Speaker 1: like fairy dust, only not really not so. Stephen is
Speaker 1: looking at these photos and thinking about the news story,
Speaker 1: and he just doesn't want to pretend any longer. The
Speaker 1: fakeness of social media, the pretense. He doesn't want to
Speaker 1: be a part of it, not at this moment. In
Speaker 1: an essay he later wrote in the Huffington's Post, he says,
Speaker 1: honesty keeps us connected, it's pretense that closes us off.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want to curate himself, he doesn't want to pretend.
Speaker 1: So there he is sitting in the middle of a
Speaker 1: multimillion dollar news set, and something just kind of cracks open.
Speaker 1: You do something really interesting, you send out a tweet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: news all the time, so it doesn't seem like a
Speaker 1: big deo. I'm sure it sounds like nothing. Just so
Speaker 1: he tweeted something. But I didn't just tweet news. Here's
Speaker 1: Stephen's original tweet. He wrote, we cover a lot of
Speaker 1: horrible things, but this one really hit home. It sounds
Speaker 1: almost identical to the house my siblings and I were
Speaker 1: raised in. I wish I could tell these kids, especially
Speaker 1: the thirteen year old, they're not to find by their
Speaker 1: parents mistakes. And he tweeted it just like that. So
Speaker 1: often my co workers and other people I have to
Speaker 1: interview politicians and officials, they just assume that my background
Speaker 1: is not too different from theirs, and I don't fault
Speaker 1: them for that. It's absolutely what they would expect. What
Speaker 1: was the feeling in the moment when you did that?
Speaker 1: Did you sit back and think about it for a
Speaker 1: while and then tweet? Was it impulsive? Was it just
Speaker 1: something that sort of you just did and then you know,
Speaker 1: I thought like, oh, I am sort of a compulsive overthinker.
Speaker 1: I analyze and just ponder stuff like I'm very careful,
Speaker 1: very self protective naturally, But for that, I wrote it
Speaker 1: and sent it very impulsively, which is very unlike me.
Speaker 1: I am very careful about what I tweet and posts
Speaker 1: and just put out there. So there was as soon
Speaker 1: as I sent it out, it was sort of like, well, there,
Speaker 1: there it is. It's it's up there. I purposefully did
Speaker 1: not look at my phone for a while, which is
Speaker 1: also very rare for me. I could feel the vibrations
Speaker 1: of getting alerts and I had I just couldn't bring
Speaker 1: myself to see it for a little while. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until I was in my car about to go home
Speaker 1: that day that I made myself look at the reaction.
Speaker 1: And people were very kind, people I knew and people
Speaker 1: I didn't know extremely kind, so it was pretty impulsive.
Speaker 1: I would like to say that I was just being
Speaker 1: brave and didn't have any fear, But I've always been
Speaker 1: afraid that if the people who were in control knew
Speaker 1: where I actually came from, that maybe it would limit
Speaker 1: career opportunities. You know what, network's gonna want some anchor
Speaker 1: in a high profile role to be the roach kid. Like.
Speaker 1: That's always been a fear. And I would love to
Speaker 1: tell you that it's not fear right now, but in
Speaker 1: the back of my mind it's it's still there. But
Speaker 1: there's a risk in being honest about where I came from.
Speaker 1: But the reward seems so much better just for myself
Speaker 1: just to own where I came from, but in for
Speaker 1: other people going through it as well, that the connection
Speaker 1: I mentioned is so much more valuable than the pretense.
Speaker 1: Because if we can't be humans, and I'm speaking mostly
Speaker 1: about journalists, if we we try to tell other people's
Speaker 1: stories and sort of just float from story to story,
Speaker 1: from tragedy to tragedy and don't take a moment to
Speaker 1: connect to the humanity of it, I feel like it
Speaker 1: is just not worth anything. After his story comes out,
Speaker 1: Steven starts hearing from people, including some who he's interviewed
Speaker 1: as a journalist. A woman he had interviewed who had
Speaker 1: lost her daughter in a hit and run crash, sends
Speaker 1: him a message letting him know that she could tell,
Speaker 1: even through the polish and veneer of his teeth, the
Speaker 1: anchor presence that he'd experienced trauma, that he was connecting
Speaker 1: with her as someone who had also been through really
Speaker 1: hard times. How long has it been since that tweet?
Speaker 1: I think it's either late July or early August last year,
Speaker 1: so it's a matter of months, right, Yeah, not very
Speaker 1: much time at all. A simple tweet, a moment of
Speaker 1: reckoning that opens the door to a whole new vista.
Speaker 1: As you said earlier, where there are secrets, there's almost
Speaker 1: inevitably always shame. That is what is keeping that secret hidden,
Speaker 1: you know, unspoken, unset, unshared, And you know there's the
Speaker 1: shame that you talk about of just you know, fearing
Speaker 1: that you'll be seen as damaged or that people couldn't
Speaker 1: possibly understand, or that it will limit your opportunities or
Speaker 1: have people see you differently, when in fact, almost in
Speaker 1: every Doblee the opposite happens, and you know, people feel
Speaker 1: that they can connect even if their experiences radically different.
Speaker 1: You're showing yourself in your own humanity, and that's a
Speaker 1: gift to everyone who experiences that, because then it allows
Speaker 1: them to be more profoundly human, whatever that means. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's absolutely been the case since the essay was posted.
Speaker 1: I can't even count how many people have contacted me
Speaker 1: saying they went through something just like I did, or,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, not really at all like either, but
Speaker 1: the feeling, the isolation and the shame reminded them of
Speaker 1: something that they had gone through. That's why I mentioned
Speaker 1: that the pretense is not worth it, and the risk
Speaker 1: of being honest has proved so worth it and over rewarding.
Speaker 1: And U sort of Since then, I've written I don't
Speaker 1: really know what it started off as, but it's become
Speaker 1: as sort of draft as a as a memoir, and
Speaker 1: it's made me realize so much of it helps you.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I'm sure you've written several that
Speaker 1: helps me to contextualize the way things are. And I've
Speaker 1: realized a lot of stuff about my parents, and people
Speaker 1: have asked that question, how can you forgive your parents
Speaker 1: and how can you continue my mom's past obviously, but
Speaker 1: I have a relationship with your father. When you live
Speaker 1: that way, yeah, it just begins to open the door.
Speaker 1: And also, as you say, by writing about it, that's
Speaker 1: its own process of discovery. It's not just about setting
Speaker 1: down what happened. It's really discovering what happened and how
Speaker 1: it connects and what belongs to what. And it's made
Speaker 1: me realize through this whole thing, which would not have
Speaker 1: happened if I had not been honest enough to tweet
Speaker 1: that that my parents they couldn't take care of themselves,
Speaker 1: like of course they couldn't take care of us. I
Speaker 1: couldn't expect them to give me something they lacked, so
Speaker 1: it wasn't even necessarily forgiving them. And it's just accepting
Speaker 1: the way it was. All of these sort of epiphanies
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have had if I had not just been
Speaker 1: open about that secret. I'd like to thank today's guest,
Speaker 1: Stephen Romo. You can find Stephen on Twitter at Steven Romo.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagin
Speaker 1: is the supervising producer, and Julie Douglas and beth Ann
Speaker 1: Mcaluso are the executive Producers. Special thanks to Derek Clements
Speaker 1: for his help with this episode. If you have a
Speaker 1: family secret you'd like to share, you can get in
Speaker 1: touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast Come.
Speaker 1: You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryter,
Speaker 1: Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod.
Speaker 1: For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.