Running from childhood terrors

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald on September 25, 2008. The young woman I interviewed is a student in my English class. Her story touched my heart.

In July 1975, her new baby sister arrived, she said, “in the guise of a chubby cherub wrapped in a pink fuzzy blanket.”

Eyes peeking out, round as the July moon, the new baby stole all the attention from the two-year-old sister.

“I’d become invisible even to my favorite aunt,” said the 30-something woman who lives in the Tri-Valley and who asked that her name not be published. “And this aunt usually hugged and kissed me and twirled me around in her arms each time she came to visit.”

As time passed, she grew to love her little sister, playing together from dawn to dusk in a home full of sweet aromas, of herbs, garlic, onion, and tomato sauce. A blend of music and languages made up the background of their childhood—French, Spanish, Croatian, German, and sometimes even English, though English was never spoken in a complete sentence.

“It was fine with us,” she said, “because my little sister and I had our own language.”

But among today’s memories lurk dark recollections of sexual abuse.

“We’d take refuge under our bunk beds, hand in hand, our hearts pounding as our father walked past with his dirty black steel-toed boots looking for us,” she said. “Either one of us would do if he found us.”

Another memory is of palms-up punishment, red welts rising from sticks whipped across hands for slamming the back screen door or running in the house or other small infractions.
“If a tear was shed, we’d get double,” she said.

What haunts her most is the memory of the nightly ritual when her little sister would scramble up the side of the bunk bed to join her. Together they would wait for the sound of keys in the front door, then the opening and closing of the refrigerator door and the cracking of beer cans one after another.

“Five, six, seven,” she said, “as we held our breath.”

Next came staggering feet and wicked laughs echoing down the hallway outside of their room. On cue, they would plunge into the safety of blankets, plugging ears so hard it hurt, plugging and unplugging for hours, checking for the sound of soft whimpering of their mother from the bathroom.

Then snores from the living room would signal the terror that night was over.

“In the morning we’d run to check on our mother,” she said. “We often found her in the kitchen washing a single dish over and over, staring out the window as if in a trance.”

Daylight brought playtime in the park, being kids again, a mother in dark glasses, swings flying up and away from the night before.

“One night, when I was about 10, I decided I wasn’t going to allow this any longer,” she said. “My father was chasing my mother through the house with a gun.”

From a crack in her bedroom door, she watched, and then warned her sister to hide in the bed as she ran to the kitchen for a knife.

“I draped myself over my mother, who had fallen and was crying,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what to do next, but as he sneered at us, something snapped.”

Her anger came to a boil and wielding the knife a voice emerged she hadn’t known she possessed.

“If you’re going to kill her, you’re going to have to kill me first.”

She doesn’t remember what happened next, but she does faintly remember her father locked in the basement, and paper bags of possessions being quickly loaded into a station wagon. She remembers her mother driving them to her aunt’s house, where little girls didn’t have to plug ears, where the anticipated nighttime sounds now were crickets and frogs.

“Many people have looked at me in shock when I say I wish I’d never had a father,” she said. Yet today, assisted with therapy, she strives to replace the devastation of her childhood with positive thoughts. In fact, she occasionally speaks with her father, a man whom she has come to realize was no doubt abused himself as a boy. Growing up in a foreign country, he’d married and brought her mother to the United States to run away from his own childhood terrors, to purse a dream that became a nightmare for a mother, two innocent girls, and for a lonely man still struggling for a better life in America.
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Trainer is a saving grace for horses

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald on September 16, 2008.

When Lucinda Romero was little, she lived with her mother and two sisters in Idaho with no electricity or running water 20 miles from the nearest town. They shopped for clothing only once a year, just before the start of school. For firewood and fences, they cut down trees on their property.
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But as tough as it was growing up poor, some of this rural childhood brought pleasure. “We always had horses,” said Romero, 31, who trains horses and lives in Livermore. “I’ve loved horses, probably since before I was born, and can’t remember a moment when I wouldn’t think about them, even to this day.”

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This love Romero inherited from her mother, who trained horses and dogs to make ends meet, and then began raising Tennessee Walking Horses after she remarried when Romero was eight.

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“My dad brought new bloodlines to the breeding program and a new style of training,” said Romero. “We had a blend of horses. My mom’s eye for the old style, strong, sure-footed, strait legs, and good overall conformation blended well with my dad’s eye for what’s flashy in today’s show ring.”
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Together, Romero’s parents produced several outstanding horses with natural talent, and trained them for show using legitimate methods that develop muscle strength to perform at a high level, just like a human athlete.
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Such methods contrast with illegal shortcut training techniques that many horse trainers used in the 1980s and are occasionally seen today. Called “soring,” trainers use chemicals such as mustard oil, diesel fuel, or kerosene to burn a horse's front legs around its hooves. This causes the horse to quickly lift its legs as it steps, creating an accentuated gait or prance.
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Because soring is illegal, trainers hide the burns and scarring by using dye or kicking dirt onto the horses’ legs before entering the show ring.
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Growing up, Romero witnessed soring and saw its damaging effects. Even a few years ago at a show she came upon “a beautiful Palomino stallion with his mane hanging nearly to the ground,” she said. The horse stood back in a stall as still as a rock. While most horses come forward to be petted, Romero said this one stood frozen, hoping he wouldn’t be noticed.
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“You can’t understand the look until you see it,” she said. “It’s like an empty shell that looks like a horse from the outside, but when you look deeper, it’s a lost soul.”
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Romero hadn’t intended on becoming a horse trainer. Even with her love of horses, she watched her parents work many long hours on their ranch. So when she turned 21, she bought a one-way plane ticket to California and started a new life. “I wanted to wear a suit to work, live in the big city, have a fancy car, and wear nice shoes,” she said. “Remember, I only got one pair of shoes each year. Imagine cleaning horse corrals and then wearing the same shoes to school the next day.”
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But she missed the horses terribly, and after a couple of years she bought a black colt from her parents. Then, a few years later, she learned about a 2-year old Tennessee Walker for sale in Kentucky.
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“I bought the horse for just $1,500,” she said, explaining that the mare—who comes from a bloodline in which one stallion sold for one million dollars—had gone lame from soring. The people who owned the horse, whom Romero named Gracie, simply want to get rid of her.
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“When I purchased Gracie and saw how much damage had been done to her, that’s when my crusade began,” she said.
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Romero rehabilitated Gracie over the next year and began showing her. “We did well at our first show and were crowned Champion Mare at Halter and Grand Champion Halter horse,” she said.
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Then one day Romero was at the stable and gave a little girl a few tips about riding. Soon, she found herself spending more time training riders and horses, and in 2005 she opened Symmetry Stables, located in north Livermore at the Cayetano Ridge Equestrian Center on Dagnino Road.
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“That was three years ago,” said Romero, whose blue eyes brighten as she reflects on her life. Her training program “takes a lot of time to build muscle and strength, physically and mentally,” she said, “but the horses are happy in their jobs and competitive in the show ring.”
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Romero and her clients enter their horses in shows in northern California. They still encounter sored horses, but are seeing fewer. Still, Romero hopes that one day no horse will be mistreated.

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“I guess you could say I’ve gone back to my roots,” she said. “Even though I swore I wouldn’t train horses for a living, I still ended up here. My parents were believers in leading by example, and now I’m doing exactly that. I’m content to live this life and make the world a better place.”
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To see pictures of Gracie and Romero, visit www.symmetrystables.com. Romero invites visitors to come and meet Gracie at the stables, who will come forward to be greeted.

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