Bug Dust

old TV news anchor based in Houston, Texas. To look at Stephen is to see a dapper young man, handsome, clean cut, as they say, often wearing a jacket and tie or a neatly pressed collared shirt. He's well put together, in consummate control. But, as is so often true, what we see tells us only part of the story. We easily judge others based on appearances are our own fantasies

of what someone's life must be like. In Steven's case, you might think he had a traditional, comfortable, simple childhood, and you would be wrong. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I grew up in the late eighties in a suburb just to the south of Dallas, and I had an older brothers three years older than me.

My dad wasn't still is a big rig driver. My mom was a stay at home mom at the time. And growing up, I hear a lot of people say they didn't realize that their family wasn't normal until they were older, but that wasn't true for me. I realized very early on that my family was not quite typical. Through watching TV and just visiting neighbors. I realized that my home life was something to hide. It was a secret.

It was something that I was ashamed of. One of my first memories is standing on a kitchen drawer that I used to pull out so I could reach the counter and grabbing a jar of peanut butter and looking inside and just seeing it was full of roaches scurrying over each other and dropping it and letting it roll away, and that is that's one of my first memories. And I knew that wasn't normal. I was disgusted by it and angry at my parents for it, but I knew

it wasn't normal. So that was the situation in our home for a long time, but my mom and my dad went bankrupt and the bank foreclosed in our house, so we had to move into the home of my great uncle, my mom's uncle, and it was a duplex. It's sort of out of nowhere. My mom decided that we needed to get dogs. It was like a necessity, she mentioned, so we would know if anyone was going to break into the home. It started off with to Chihuaha's and they had their own family, and it was

six chihuahuas at one point. It was it was really hard to keep up, so we gave them away and we collected others we always had heard of, mostly chouaa's. It's funny too, because you think about what one might think of as a guard dog, and you don't immediate You don't immediately go to chihuahua. Yes, I yeah, it doesn't make a ton of since they did. I mean, we always knew anyone was anywhere close to our house because they yapped and I don't even want to call

it a park. It was just yap NonStop. And I love those dogs so much. I feel like my childhood would have been much more empty without them. That they dogs just accept you and and love you and to get excited when you come home. And I didn't necessarily get that from my parents. But at the same time, they were the source of so much consternation. They never

went outside. They just the carpet was their bathroom. Eventually we had to rip up the carpet because it was so you're in stained, and that just made the roaches seem like nothing to have to deal with that. The roaches were just just a slight distraction compared to them. Did your great uncle know what was going on in the other part of the duplex? And did did he have any response to any of that? Strangely, no, he

didn't have much of a response. That His presence was always a sort of a few for my mom, and I didn't understand why. For a long time he had a key to the house. Obviously, and sometimes we would come home and my mom would tell my dad that she could smell my great uncle's cologne and that set her off into I don't want to say hysterics. That sounds extreme, but she was deeply bothered by it. And of course that made sense later on, but at the

time it didn't. It also didn't make sense why he would see the way the house was and not be livid that we were destroying that house. My brother Um started punching holes in the walls when he was about thirteen and ripping the doors. Were cheap plywood or particle would doors and he would tear them down. Eventually we had no doors in the house and there were giant holes in the walls. And my great uncle saw this

and never said anything about it. We saw him at family gatherings, there was never any mention of it, which was bizarre to me, and it stood out even though I couldn't really put together why until later on. Why was your brother Why do you think he was punching holes in the walls? I think he was angry at our home situation too, and my parents just we just sort of were on our own, handling things in our own way. And my dad is a is a smaller guy.

He's about five six and my brother and I I'm six ft tall, and i've been I've been taller than my dad. I think I was about fourteen. It was the same thing for my brother, so he could control us fine when we were smaller than him, but as soon as we got bigger, it was just Um you know, do whatever you want. You're on your own, So sort of like that for my brother, and he expressed his

anger by destroying our house, destroying our walls. Well, it's so interesting because it sounds like your house was sort of being destroyed anyway, So you know, how could the anti be uped in some way? That's true. One of the things that I always find so interesting in thinking about family secrets is when it seems like a couple develop or conspire to keep something hidden or secret together. Does it begin with one of them or is it

sort of something that grows with both of them. Did it start with your mom or your dad or was it something that wouldn't have happened if each of them had been with somebody else, but it happened because they were together. I thought a lot about it, and I really do think that it is they were just sort of the perfect storm together to make this environment happen. I think if either of them had been with another partner,

I don't see how this it could have happened. My dad, he's the eighth of nine children, and his mother died when he was twelve years old, so his home life was very erratic. He was mostly raised by his older siblings. My dad is Hispanic, and some of his older siblings and his father spoke Spanish, and he barely speaks Spanish. They literally spoke different languages. He was on his own a lot as a child. My mother was raised by her grandmother and her mother after her parents divorced, and

she never felt loved. What I was mentioning about the great uncle I found out later from my mother and she sort of tearfully admitted to me when I was fourteen, admitted to me as if it were her something that she had done wrong. She told me that that great uncle had sexually abused her, starting when she was nine

years old. While my aunt was watching my mom. He would come home on his lunch breaks and she would be pretending to be asleep often and he would wake her up and take her to a different part of the house and abuse her. A lot of stuff clicked into place because of that, why she was the way she was. Did something precipitate her telling you at this point when she told you you had been living in that great uncle's house for some period of time, yes, yes, for a few years. At that point. What I think

precipitated it? I was complaining a lot more. I had started. I had a younger sister, she's four years younger than me, and I started telling my mom that I was going to call child protective Services if we didn't move, and I was a smartass. Just to be frank about it. I couldn't go along with it anymore. I um. I would say things like, you feed the roaches better than you feed your own kids. And I was just a constant critic of my father too. He was gone a lot,

but when he was there. Name calling was a huge issue in my house. My parents called me names, I called my parents names. It was just a thing that happened. Right before my mom revealed that to me, I decided my dad wasn't going to call me names anymore. The word at the time was faggot that he kept calling me. Excuse the use of the word that I hate, but it was that word. I decided it was never going

to happen again. So I sort of charged at him and you know, looked down at him because he was so much smaller than me, and told him that he was not going to call me that word ever again. And he shoved me, and I shoved him back and knocked him down and he walked away, and that was the end of that. My mom, she would have been

at a grocery store. She got home and my dad told her what happened, and she came into my room crying, and instead of talking about that fight at all, she sort of abruptly told me about the sexual abuse with her uncle. I've got the impression at the time she was telling me, sort of to say that she had enough going on, that we were living in his house and she was going through enough turmoil that she just wanted me to just stop being so obstructionist and arguing

and disagreeing with them. I think that's why she revealed it to me. Did she ever draw any kind of connection from her having been abused as a child to the way that she kept her home as an adult, Oh no, not at all. So it was really it was unconscious. I definitely think it was unconscious. She my parents both would blame us, the kids and the dogs, thing we didn't help, and we took food in our rooms and in all these sort of lame excuses that I never believed. But she, no, it was never conscious.

I don't think that that's what she was doing. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Stephen goes to school dressed in mismatched clothes, dirty clothes, and sometimes the roaches hitch a ride in his backpack crawl out of his lunchbox. Other kids notice, of course, but Stephen invents stories around why that's the case. I was just a liar, and I thought I was really good at it. But now looking back, it just seems ridiculous the stuff I would say, But it was anything too

disconnect me from the way I was growing up. I watched so much TV as a kid, uninterrupted hours upon hours of TV any and everything. We didn't have cable, so it's just what I could get on the antenna. But because of that, I invented so many stories that were just completely made up about trips to Europe and stuff that would have never happened in a million years with enough detail. I thought that I was completely tricking all these kids to think that I was actually like

one of them, or just wealthy. And I was made to dress poor because my parents wanted to keep me humble. Just just ridiculous stories that I made up just to try to defend myself, and I was made fun of of course, because that's what happens when you're a kid. But I really feel like the kids were easier on me than they could have been. I could have had

it much worse than I did. You know, it's interesting the whole idea of education through TV, you know, and and through reading as well, and the way in which I mean so often on this podcast I think about my guests stories and the way that if the story had been playing out during a time when the Internet existed, where there was so much readily available information, you could look something up, you could call it by its name, you could find out what it was, you could connect

with other people who might be going through something similar. And there are things that are not so great about that, but there's so many things that are that really pierced people's sense of isolation. Whereas when you were growing up that didn't exist, and so your education was Mr. Rogers neighborhood. That's such a ordered, gentle kind place, a place where there would never be a cockroach, a place where there would never be anything out of place or out of order.

Did you find all of that? It was like sort of part of your coming of age. Absolutely, I can't imagine what my childhood would have been like without television. It's how I knew that the way I was living was unacceptable and would made me start as a young child trying to fight against it, trying to force my parents to allow us to move. Was just from the story that I saw on TV. They made me feel

less lonely. I felt more connected to the characters on TV. Mr. Rogers, Neighborhood and even shows that weren't actually geared towards me was. I was a super young child watching the Oprah Winfrey Show and seeing people who had gone through trauma had come out just fine. It was not geared toward nine year old boy, but watching it made me realize that if these people can overcome horrible things that happened to them, uh,

this and could be true of me. And then getting a library card and reading diary of Anne Frank and seeing like this is nothing that I'm going through. This is nothing compared to what some people have survived. It was invaluable that connection. I feel like stories really did save me. I think That's why I'm a a storyteller now. It did create dissonance for me as I was growing up and moving on in my career that my job was to seek out the truth and to tell people's

stories as truly as I could. While I sort of just pretended to be the boy with no history that I completely tried to cut myself off from my past. There was a dissonance there. And it's only been in the last year or so that I've realized the importance of being honest about where I came from and sort of the power in the telling of the story. So how did you get out, Like walk me through you graduate from high school? And did you know that you

wanted to become a journalist? What was your path initially? Your path away from that home and that environment. Well, eventually I I kept sort of fighting with my parents, and I dropped out of high school and I kind of fight with my dad. I think it was I got a job setting up for a church nearby. Church they met in a Y and c a. So I had to go and set up chairs and you know, gymnasium and make it into a church. And I get paid.

I think it was fifty dollars a weekend when I did that Saturdays and Sundays, and I didn't have a checking account because I was sixteen years old. So I would give my parents the checks and they were supposed to give me the cash, but after they had three fifty dollars, they would not give me the money. And so that of course caused a fight and I just got sofa hit up that After that fight, I moved down my great grandmother for a little while, and then I started renting a room. And I had been out

of high school for about a year. I went ahead and took some entrance exams and got into community college and stayed there for a couple of years and then transferred to A and M. And it was it sounds crazy to say it's so simply right now, because it seemed impossible what I was trying to do to escape, and it was very hard, and there was a lot of struggle, and just to sum it up to a few sentences seems it seems so crazy, But that's what happened. Yeah,

it's it's always the in between, right. I teach writing, and occasionally I give my students this exercise where I asked them to write a list. Um, it's a sailing term, but like the tacking points in their life, like where when you sail from point A to point B. You don't go in a straight line. It's like, you know, you the boat, you know, sails into the wind or

away from the wind. And then after they've done that, I asked them to take two of these attacking points that are side by side and fill in the middle because it's always the middle, right, Like what you're describing is like, yes, you're summing it up, but you did. I mean, ultimately you went from having dropped out of college and being this really tough position two finding your feet. You know, that's it's it's it's a messy process, but

you found your feet. Yeah, i'd like to think so when I was in college, my mom because my mom died and so that was definitely another attacking point. It's it's hard, and we didn't have a resolution. Really she died sort of it I wouldn't. I guess it's it's hard. I mean, it's always it always feels sudden when someone dies, if feel like but she had asthma and several health problems from just the way she sort of lived her life. She was I think she was addicted to prescription painkillers.

She would argue otherwise they were prescribed to her by a doctor, she would say, so they're not. She wasn't addicted, but basically her organs started shutting down. And I drove up from Texas A and M It's like a three hour drive to the hospital, and really wanted to to talk to her. And she had a breathing tube. She was conscious when I went in there and aware, but she couldn't speak, so and the the doctors had told us that things didn't look good. It was really hard for

me to believe that she could actually die. She was forty three, but I tried to push myself to be more sincere I have the habit of trying to make jokes or being sarcastic, but I really tried to have a moment with her and speak to her and tell her that I wanted her to get better, and that no matter what had happened between us, that she was a part of us and that she belonged to us.

And she couldn't say anything, but she grabbed my arm almost like she thought she could sort of compel her whatever she was trying to say into me, and she just stared at me h and cried. And then visiting hours were over, and so I sort of got pulled out of there. But having to to face that, having to sort of realized that there would never be the reconciliation that I always thought would happen with her sort of made me confronted. I had to sort of find

my own reconciliation. So I think that's sort of made me more aware of it too. Now Stephen's working in a TV station in Houston. He's embarked on his successful adult life, and what he does is push his past away. He doesn't lie about it. Lying making up fantastical stories is a thing of his past. He simply omits. He doesn't talk about his family history, not with his friends, not with anyone. And then one day he's in the newsroom on a break when he gets a text from

his sister was a link to a news story. So my sister and I talked about the way we grew up a lot, and um, she sent me a story. She knew I was on the newscast, so she she sent it, and I assumed we would talk about it later and I wouldn't read it right then. But as soon as I saw what the headline was about children living in the roach infested at home, I couldn't help it. I mean, there's two minutes left in our commercial break. But I clicked on it and um started reading it,

and UM, I didn't just read the article. I violated my own rule of not reading the comments and read the comments and people just expressing their disgust at the situation, but they're also just their hatred for these parents who clearly had to been going through something for them just themselves, and more than anything, it was just the sense of of shame that I remember, and I thought about it. It was their young girls in this home. I was

just thinking about those girls. The oldest was thirteen, and I was remembering what it was like to be a thirteen year old in a house like that, and imagining if there had been a news article about it, how mortified I would have been. It just something hit me that by omitting where I came from, I was perpetuating that same secret that I had been carrying since childhood. And also, of course, with secrets is often shamed, so

I was also just experiencing that same shame. And if if I could just to that one family in Idaho, that was those girls who were going through this, but I could just make them feel better or less alone, it seemed worth it just to share some of what I went through. So then one thing that struck me is the break is over and you've got to go back on the news. The cameras are rolling and your

co newscasters looking at you like are you okay? And the camera start rolling and you know your your teeth up to go, and you do, which is something that I I see again and again and I also really relate to, because you have sort of metabolized that trauma for all those years and just packed it away and put it somewhere, and it wasn't even particularly conscious for you or visible to you, so it was possible to function at this really high level and just finish up

the news. No one looking at you would ever have known what was going on inside of you right at sort of the story of my life, right no one could even tell if there's anything wrong. I think that's the story of so many people whose lives have been haunted by family secrets. We live in a sort of split screen existence. On one side of the screen you have the secret, and on the other side we pack that secret away so that we can function at a high level in the world. And when you're on the

high functioning side. It's almost like the secret doesn't exist, except of course it does. It never goes away. It can recede for a period of time, but it never disappears, not completely. Around the same time as Stephen's sister sent the link to that news story, Stephen's producer had sent a request of all the news anchors for childhood photos old school photos, a fun promotion for that back to school time of year, so that viewers could see what

the anchors look like as kids. That emailed to the producer saying, and actually been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks. I just finally I decided to sort of take it on. And I have a bunch of photos on my phone. A few years ago, my sister was moving and I she had a big box of photos, and so I just sort of use my phone to take pictures of them all and hadn't looked at them in a really long time. So I made myself go through and I included some of those in

the essay. It's amazing to me how many, I mean, the photos of the worst of it never survived, Like, who's going to want to take pictures of roaches in the corner, you know what the dogs leave behind, so they weren't even as bad as I remembered that being it's not an ideal childhood, but I had to go

through and and choose one. And normally with that entails as me trying to crop out anything that, you know, if my my jeans were rapped or my shirt is stained, or I mentioned in there, the bugs leave behind this amber colored dust on everything, which really, for some reason just stakes to photos and it's really hard to to move around it. I'm trying to crop all that out, but I just sent one in without doing all that treating.

And I always thought that if I did that that someone would ask, you know, what it was, or someone would inquire about it. But no one, of course even noticed it, or if they did, they didn't say anything about it. It was not at all a big deal. So maybe next time I can save myself the trouble and just send in a photo. Amber colored dust the stuff cockroaches leave behind. Stephen and his siblings referred to this when they were children as bug dust, sort of

like fairy dust, only not really not so. Stephen is looking at these photos and thinking about the news story, and he just doesn't want to pretend any longer. The fakeness of social media, the pretense. He doesn't want to be a part of it, not at this moment. In an essay he later wrote in the Huffington's Post, he says, honesty keeps us connected, it's pretense that closes us off. He doesn't want to curate himself, he doesn't want to pretend.

So there he is sitting in the middle of a multimillion dollar news set, and something just kind of cracks open. You do something really interesting, you send out a tweet. Yeah, news all the time, so it doesn't seem like a big deo. I'm sure it sounds like nothing. Just so he tweeted something. But I didn't just tweet news. Here's Stephen's original tweet. He wrote, we cover a lot of horrible things, but this one really hit home. It sounds almost identical to the house my siblings and I were

raised in. I wish I could tell these kids, especially the thirteen year old, they're not to find by their parents mistakes. And he tweeted it just like that. So often my co workers and other people I have to interview politicians and officials, they just assume that my background is not too different from theirs, and I don't fault them for that. It's absolutely what they would expect. What was the feeling in the moment when you did that? Did you sit back and think about it for a

while and then tweet? Was it impulsive? Was it just something that sort of you just did and then you know, I thought like, oh, I am sort of a compulsive overthinker. I analyze and just ponder stuff like I'm very careful, very self protective naturally, But for that, I wrote it and sent it very impulsively, which is very unlike me. I am very careful about what I tweet and posts and just put out there. So there was as soon as I sent it out, it was sort of like, well, there,

there it is. It's it's up there. I purposefully did not look at my phone for a while, which is also very rare for me. I could feel the vibrations of getting alerts and I had I just couldn't bring myself to see it for a little while. It wasn't until I was in my car about to go home that day that I made myself look at the reaction. And people were very kind, people I knew and people I didn't know extremely kind, so it was pretty impulsive.

I would like to say that I was just being brave and didn't have any fear, But I've always been afraid that if the people who were in control knew where I actually came from, that maybe it would limit career opportunities. You know what, network's gonna want some anchor in a high profile role to be the roach kid. Like. That's always been a fear. And I would love to tell you that it's not fear right now, but in

the back of my mind it's it's still there. But there's a risk in being honest about where I came from. But the reward seems so much better just for myself just to own where I came from, but in for other people going through it as well, that the connection I mentioned is so much more valuable than the pretense.

Because if we can't be humans, and I'm speaking mostly about journalists, if we we try to tell other people's stories and sort of just float from story to story, from tragedy to tragedy and don't take a moment to connect to the humanity of it, I feel like it is just not worth anything. After his story comes out, Steven starts hearing from people, including some who he's interviewed

as a journalist. A woman he had interviewed who had lost her daughter in a hit and run crash, sends him a message letting him know that she could tell, even through the polish and veneer of his teeth, the anchor presence that he'd experienced trauma, that he was connecting with her as someone who had also been through really hard times. How long has it been since that tweet? I think it's either late July or early August last year, so it's a matter of months, right, Yeah, not very

much time at all. A simple tweet, a moment of reckoning that opens the door to a whole new vista. As you said earlier, where there are secrets, there's almost

inevitably always shame. That is what is keeping that secret hidden, you know, unspoken, unset, unshared, And you know there's the shame that you talk about of just you know, fearing that you'll be seen as damaged or that people couldn't possibly understand, or that it will limit your opportunities or have people see you differently, when in fact, almost in every Doblee the opposite happens, and you know, people feel that they can connect even if their experiences radically different.

You're showing yourself in your own humanity, and that's a gift to everyone who experiences that, because then it allows them to be more profoundly human, whatever that means. Yes, it's absolutely been the case since the essay was posted. I can't even count how many people have contacted me saying they went through something just like I did, or, as you mentioned, not really at all like either, but the feeling, the isolation and the shame reminded them of

something that they had gone through. That's why I mentioned that the pretense is not worth it, and the risk of being honest has proved so worth it and over rewarding. And U sort of Since then, I've written I don't really know what it started off as, but it's become as sort of draft as a as a memoir, and it's made me realize so much of it helps you. I mean, you know, I'm sure you've written several that

helps me to contextualize the way things are. And I've realized a lot of stuff about my parents, and people have asked that question, how can you forgive your parents and how can you continue my mom's past obviously, but I have a relationship with your father. When you live that way, yeah, it just begins to open the door. And also, as you say, by writing about it, that's its own process of discovery. It's not just about setting down what happened. It's really discovering what happened and how

it connects and what belongs to what. And it's made me realize through this whole thing, which would not have happened if I had not been honest enough to tweet that that my parents they couldn't take care of themselves, like of course they couldn't take care of us. I couldn't expect them to give me something they lacked, so it wasn't even necessarily forgiving them. And it's just accepting the way it was. All of these sort of epiphanies I wouldn't have had if I had not just been

open about that secret. I'd like to thank today's guest, Stephen Romo. You can find Stephen on Twitter at Steven Romo. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer, and Julie Douglas and beth Ann Mcaluso are the executive Producers. Special thanks to Derek Clements for his help with this episode. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast Come.

You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryter, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.