'Foretold' podcast Episode 2: 'A Certain Kind of Education'

By The Foretold team

April 18, 2023 4 AM PT

We go back to where it all began: Morro Bay. Paulina shows Faith her hometown, where she recounts a childhood in a tightknit family, vibrant parties and an education cut short.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript below.

Follow 'Foretold' wherever you get your podcasts:

See all episodes and extras.

Paulina Stevens: So we are on Main Street in Morro Bay, and we’re near Pizza Port, and they usually have rosemary growing on the sidewalks in front of there. And so my mom would make me pick off some rosemary so she can cook with it, and I’d get so embarrassed because I was on the sidewalks. I’d pretend to tie my shoe and then take the rosemary.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina spent most of her childhood in Morro Bay, a sweet little fishermen’s town on California’s Central Coast, about halfway between San Francisco and L.A. Morro Bay is one of those names that people see on a freeway sign as they’re driving by. The main attraction is Morro Rock, a big, beautiful volcanic peak in the middle of the water. There’s a marina, stacked with colorful kayaks, and lots of little tourist attractions, like gift shops and seafood restaurants.

Paulina Stevens: This place we used to come to all the time, the shell shop. And then we’d feed the seals over here.

Faith E. Pinho: There are about 10,000 people who live in Morro Bay. They have farmers’ markets twice a week. Around breakfast time, regulars crowd into the local coffee shop, where everyone seems to know somebody. People in Morro Bay seem to just go about their lives like they’re living in a postcard of some Americana seaside town.

Paulina’s family no longer lives in Morro Bay, but she still considers it her hometown. And so on a gray day in July, Paulina showed me around.

Paulina Stevens: It’s always foggy too. It’s like you’re just driving under the cloud. But, I mean, there’s so many good memories here.

Faith E. Pinho: Touring Morro Bay with Paulina, I was getting two different versions of who she was as a child. On one hand, she lived this easygoing childhood in this idyllic small town. But she was also living in her own world, one with different rules and expectations: a Romani world she had to carry around like a secret.

Paulina Stevens: I wanted to say, “I’m a Gypsy.” So I wondered, why? Why can’t we tell anybody?

Faith E. Pinho: This is “Foretold.”

Morro Bay was where Paulina would watch her mother and elders give readings. Where she’d collect those New Age books on spells and dream interpretations. And it’s where she honed her craft, practicing on adults while just a little girl.

Paulina Stevens: This is where I got my first customers.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina’s family was one of the few Romani families — or maybe the only one — in Morro Bay. And they ran the only psychic shop I know of in town.

Paulina Stevens: I would go down to Main Street and I would pass out cards and I’d be like, “Come to my shop,” or “Come to my parents’ shop.”

Faith E. Pinho: As a preteen, Paulina was already becoming a master at observing people’s body language. She’d draw them in by saying they looked familiar, or it seemed like they were going through something, before inviting them back to her mom’s shop for a reading.

Paulina Stevens: We would come back and then I’d do a tarot card reading and then introduce them to my mom or something.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said her family was always hustling for new clients. Fortunetelling can be a pretty fickle business, especially in a sleepy fishermen’s town like Morro Bay. Oftentimes, despite their charisma and salesmanship, Paulina said she and her mom rarely had enough customers to fill an entire day.

Paulina Stevens: It was kind of slow. It wasn’t that busy.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina told me that to save on costs, her family lived in the psychic shop.

Paulina Stevens: I mean, you can see it. It’s like a little store.

Faith E. Pinho: They’d greet customers and hold readings in the little room in the front, and then they’d eat and sleep on blowup mattresses in the back.

Paulina Stevens: And at the time, it wasn’t just my family and me living there. It was also my dad’s — one of his sisters, her husband and their kids, too. So it’s like two families living in this one little room.

Faith E. Pinho: Was there a kitchen and stuff?

Paulina Stevens: No. My parents actually ended up building a shower in there and then added a sink. They just did a lot of construction to it and added to it. But it didn’t last very long.

Faith E. Pinho: It didn’t last long because Paulina moved around Morro Bay a lot.

Paulina Stevens: So that was one house there. We also lived in this house.

Faith E. Pinho: Driving around with Paulina, I lost count of how many childhood homes she showed me. Sometimes they were shops, sometimes they were houses. Sometimes, Paulina said, when money was tight and housing costs were up, the family would have to leave Morro Bay altogether for months at a time. They’d go stay with relatives for a while in Las Vegas or L.A.

Paulina Stevens: Sometimes it would be a month. Literally we would come back, like, no lights, no this, no that, because we were just we were out. So we were like, “We don’t need to pay the lights.” You know, we weren’t home. It was a really free — um, gosh. It wasn’t carefree. But it felt like it was.

Faith E. Pinho: Oftentimes when Paulina and her family got out of town for a stretch, they’d move with their entire extended family. Like when one of her family members had cancer treatments, everyone moved to be with him.

Paulina Stevens: The whole family moved to San Francisco and it was just this huge support.

Faith E. Pinho: Aunts, uncles and cousins poured in from Utah, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, all over.

Paulina Stevens: And at the same time, there was a level of difficulty because these people had to stay with us and this place is really small. And I’m sleeping in a bed with, like, 10 of my girl cousins and we’re all hanging out. It was actually really fun. If anything, I felt like I wanted to be surrounded by all the people that I love.

Faith E. Pinho: And Paulina was always surrounded by people she loved. Constantly. Even when they’d go back to Morro Bay, where there really isn’t much of a Romani population, Paulina’s life was her family.

Paulina Stevens: If my dad was home, I was with my dad. If my mom was at work, I was with my mom. There was no time that I had to spend away from them. If they ever went out, they would leave me with an aunt or uncle who I was super close to, or my grandparents, mostly my grandfather. And so I was just always with a close family member. There was never any outsiders in my life.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina’s childhood wasn’t filled with play dates or parties with bounce houses. In fact, she didn’t really hang out with kids from her town that much. She was mostly with her parents and her two little sisters — and all the rest of their family that would visit — all the time. Because there was always something going on, some reason to gather.

Paulina Stevens: Since there’s so many people in the family, there was always an event. Every week there was a birthday. There was always a wedding. There was always something going on, some kind of celebration. There was just this constant, really just a constant event.

God, being a kid was fun. We wanted to stay up all night and we wanted to dance all day and eat all day.

Faith E. Pinho: It sounds so sweet and nostalgic. I remember when I was a little kid and how giddy I would get for big family parties around the holidays. I can only imagine what it was like to have family parties like that all the time. But mixed in with the nostalgia is an undeniable dose of bitterness. Because Paulina said all this family partying started to take on a different tone as she grew up.

Paulina Stevens: When I became old enough to help more efficiently at parties, it was just exhausting.

Faith E. Pinho: I mean, I never liked to help my parents out either. But my parents never threw parties like Paulina’s parents.

Paulina Stevens: As I got older and older, it got worse and worse. We had to wash these huge pots and we had to serve on everybody, like, “Grab me a beer,” or “Sing me a song.” We just had to do kind of everything that everybody was saying.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina had to take on more and more responsibilities at these parties, but her boy cousins did not.

Paulina Stevens: Basically, family members have more expectations for girls to meet. This includes cooking and cleaning and serving and entertaining. So I would have to, like, sing a song or — I remember family members would literally wake me up in the middle of the night.

I say the middle of the night, and I really mean like three in the morning, four in the morning. And they would be like, “You have to sing a song,” and it would be this just exhausting thing. I would pretend I was sick or I would do anything to get out of doing something stupid, you know, singing.

I would be like, “Why does this need to happen right now?” And these people are all drunk, too. So I was like, “You’re not even going to remember this in the morning.”

It’s weird, actually, how I went from loving it to absolutely hating it — and, now, missing it.

Faith E. Pinho: And one of the things Paulina found herself missing, a lot, was school.

From the time she was a baby, Paulina had spent almost all of her time exclusively with her family. So it was a very rough adjustment when Paulina was thrust into the outside world for her first day of kindergarten.

Paulina Stevens: The first day, I was just crying the whole entire day, I remember, until the very last moment that I got picked up from school.

Faith E. Pinho: To try to ease this transition, Paulina’s grandfather followed her to school and stood outside the window of her classroom all day just so she could have a little piece of home with her.

And all the while, on this first day in the outside world, Paulina had to keep in mind her parents’ very strict instructions.

Paulina Stevens: The only things before any school year was like, “Don’t tell anyone you’re a Gypsy.” I remember that.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina says it was thrown in with all the other first-day-of-school instructions. Like, “Don’t go home with strangers. Look both ways before you cross the street.”

Paulina Stevens: “And don’t tell anyone you’re a Gypsy.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina is laughing because, to her, hiding her identity wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it was pretty commonplace among her cousins and friends. And Paulina’s experience is not unique. Most Romani Americans have been taught to hide in plain sight, especially women.

Margareta Matache: Romani women would hide their identity more than Romani men.

Faith E. Pinho: Dr. Margareta Matache is an instructor at Harvard University.

Margareta Matache: And the director of the Roma Program at Harvard University.

Faith E. Pinho: In 2020, Dr. Matache led a study at Harvard called “Romani Realities in the United States.” She told me that the researchers spoke to 363 Romani people, which, it’s worth noting, only scratches at the overall Romani American population — an estimated 1 million people. And even that is almost certainly an undercount because, like Dr. Matache just said, a lot of Romani people won’t reveal their ethnicity. The study does acknowledge that, though, writing, “It is not generalizable to all Romani Americans.”

Anyway, with all that in mind, this study is pretty much the biggest, most comprehensive and most recent research about the Romani American experience out there. And its findings are remarkable. Nearly 70% of respondents said they actively hide their identity — now, in the 21st century, which is just so hard for me to wrap my head around.

Margareta Matache: It may feel hard for some to understand. I personally understand it because I was very close to giving up school because of feeling humiliated and feeling bullying in school. And I know what it means to prefer to be outside that environment that is not safe at all for you.

Faith E. Pinho: As a Romani schoolgirl in Romania, Magda was raised in the exact village where her ancestors were enslaved over 150 years ago.

Margareta Matache: So there are fears related to racism.

I was in school and this chemistry teacher asked me to stand up in front of the whole class, and she asked me, “Why are you so black?” And I just didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know what to say.

There are so many moments from high school, but also before, when I felt that I was ignored or overlooked or feared or overscrutinized, and I knew that it was because of who I was, but I didn’t know how to explain that.

Faith E. Pinho: How do you explain something like this? It’s so hard to wrap your head around these big ideas like identity and race, especially when you’re just a kid.

And Paulina was just a kid when she had to wrap her mind around this stuff too. Even as a kindergartner, Paulina felt like something bad might happen if people found out about her identity. She didn’t know why she had to tiptoe around it. But someone already knew: Paulina’s kindergarten teacher.

Paulina Stevens: Maybe it was the way we talked or looked. I don’t know how she could know, but she knew.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina had no idea how word got out. But I managed to track down Paulina’s kindergarten teacher. And she said, of course she knew.

Kindergarten teacher: When your mom has the fortunetelling store downtown in a small town, there’s not much to hide. And there are no secrets in a kindergarten, either.

Faith E. Pinho: You have to remember these are childhood memories.

Paulina Stevens: This is my memory as a 5-year-old, so some of this could be off. But she seemed nice when I first met her.

Faith E. Pinho: That is, until one day, at the end of class, when Paulina’s kindergarten teacher wanted a word with her dad.

Paulina Stevens: We were getting, I guess, picked up from school, and she has to wait with us outside the door or something like that. And he came to pick me up and she went up to him and she said, “I know that you guys are Gypsies.”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina’s kindergarten teacher said she didn’t recall this interaction. She didn’t think she’d say something like that.

Paulina Stevens: Maybe I just don’t remember. I was 5. But my dad was just like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He just played it off, and he was nice. And then he came home and he told my mom. He was like, “They know that we’re Gypsies, and should we leave? Is that bad?” He didn’t really know. And then after that, he was fine with it. He was like, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal, whatever.” He kind of got over it. But just that initial moment, I guess, sparked a little fear.

Faith E. Pinho: But from that point on, Paulina couldn’t help but feel like the teacher was singling her out.

Paulina Stevens: She would do little things, like, just wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom. That was weird. I’d have to ask to go to the bathroom, and she’d be like, “No, you have to wait.” And then I remember the other kids would ask and she’d be like, “Yeah, that’s fine.”

Faith E. Pinho: The teacher flat out denied that. But she did admit, from her perspective, she did feel like Paulina required more effort.

Kindergarten teacher: I tried very hard to make her feel successful. She wasn’t accustomed to any kind of school experience. She’d never been to preschool. So everything from following directions to lining up to cooperating with people — it was all completely starting from the ground up. Because she had just been at home her whole life. She was hard. She was a hard student because of that cultural difference.

Faith E. Pinho: And so Paulina was treated differently. Both Paulina and her kindergarten teacher agree on that. But what Paulina remembers as feeling called out, her teacher remembers as helping a student with a different background who needed more attention.

And this is exactly what many Romani parents fear — that their kids will be outed as different. It’s also partly why only 10% of Romani Americans in the Harvard study said they have a high school degree. Only 10%. Because many parents want to avoid racist experiences like Dr. Matache had.

Margareta Matache: You will see in our study, some of them would give up sending their children to school because some of them experienced bullying and discrimination. Some children would not want to go to school anymore.

Faith E. Pinho: The study said that 39% of Romani interviewees had been treated unfairly by a teacher, like being called slurs in class, being made to sit in the back, being singled out because they looked different.

But this is not the whole reason. The more I dug, the more I realized that while the lack of schooling is sometimes about bullying or racism, for many Romani girls here in the U.S., there’s another, entirely separate justification.

Nasta Lee: They told me, “Well, you can’t go to school no more. You’re a woman.”

Faith Pinho: That justification is puberty.

Nasta Lee: You know, basically because I got my menstrual cycle.

Faith E. Pinho: Nasta Lee is one of Paulina’s extended cousins. And at 55 years old, Nasta still feels the impact of what she said happened at 9 years old, when she got her period.

Nasta Lee: “Yeah, ‘cause you’re a woman now.” It’s like, oh, 9 years old. How am I a woman? I start crying. It’s like, “Hey, what’s going on here?” “Oh, no, you can’t go.” But they never would tell me why.

Faith E. Pinho: Nasta didn’t find out the reason until a few years later, when she learned there was a deeper explanation for why her parents were keeping her from school.

Nasta Lee: I think it was my dad’s side, where he was just worried that I was going to find a boyfriend on the other side or going to be dealing with a lot of kids that are not our culture. Things like that. And basically that brings down the father’s reputation if a daughter marries an American person or out of the culture, basically.

Faith E. Pinho: Nasta said her grandparents were the ones really pushing for her to be taken out of school because they didn’t want her looking at boys, and they definitely didn’t want boys looking at her.

Nasta Lee: I didn’t know nothing. But they kept on saying, “Oh, no, you’ve got to get her out of school because it’s not going to be good for her. You know, boys are going to start doing things to her.”

Faith E. Pinho: So Nasta stayed at home to start learning her womanly duties.

Nasta Lee: I had my chores, my duties, cleaning, cooking, so I was kind of like — at 12, 13 years old, I had to learn responsibilities, basically.

Faith E. Pinho: Which included helping her brothers continue going to school.

Nasta Lee: My younger brothers were going to school. I had to get them ready to take them to school. Fix their lunch, fix their breakfast.

Faith E. Pinho: Nasta was pretty much stuck at home. Her only friends were family.

Nasta Lee: I had my friends, yeah. But they had to be cousins. They couldn’t be nobody on the outside.

Faith E. Pinho: Because it turns out the reasons that Romani kids get taken out of school is not just about bullying. It’s not even just about dating, or womanly duties. There’s something much, much bigger at play here, something ancient that has been reinforced throughout the ages both from within and outside the culture.

Wherever there is a small group of insiders, they create another identity: the outsider. Like how Jewish people refer to goys and Gentiles. How the Romans believed everyone outside the empire sounded like they were saying “bar bar bar” and dubbed them barbarians. When I was growing up in my super-religious church, we called everyone outside the church “worldly,” which was definitely not a good thing.

In the Romani language, everyone on the outside — people like me, who are not Romani — are called “gadje.” But even more so than those other examples, “gadje” takes the idea of an outsider to the extreme. Because it’s like a permanent mark that can never ever be changed. An outsider can be someone familiar — a friend, even. But they’re still gadje, forever and always impure.

Ian Hancock: You risk becoming polluted by going into the non-Romani world.

Faith E. Pinho: I called professor Ian Hancock again for context. He explained to me that just associating with outsiders is taboo for a lot of Romani folks.

Ian Hancock: If you come from a very conservative family, then you risk becoming tainted.

Faith E. Pinho: Tainted. And in a conservative Romani family, they’re not even supposed to touch outsiders.

Ian Hancock: We cannot eat your food. We cannot touch you physically.

Faith E. Pinho: Because the uncleanliness, the impurity of the outsider, it can spread. It’s viral.

Ian Hancock: We think that not only are gadje unclean, but by socializing with them, we can become unclean too.

Faith E. Pinho: That spiritual uncleanliness, in the Romani language, is called “marimé.” And marimé doesn’t only come from outsiders. Many things in life can be unclean. And so marimé is this whole system of living.

Ian Hancock: This is what religions do: They turn common-sense behavior into ritual.

Faith E. Pinho: It’s a bit like keeping a kosher or halal diet: making decisions in the physical world that affect your standing in the spiritual world.

Ian Hancock: It rests on the idea that you can be physically unclean and you can also be spiritually unclean. You can take care of physical uncleanliness by washing yourself. But you could only take care of spiritual uncleanliness by living according to a certain way of life.

Faith E. Pinho: There are regulations around sexuality and menstruation. Or you can become marimé by using the same bar of soap to wash the upper body and the lower body, which, for obvious reasons, is considered more dirty. And if you drop some food on the floor, in a Romani household, there’s no five-second rule.

Ian Hancock: If you are in the kitchen and you’re cutting up carrots and potatoes and stuff and one of the bits falls on the floor and you’re by yourself in the kitchen, you pick it up, rinse it off and throw it back in the pot, thinking nobody saw.

But the mulé saw. The spirits saw. And they will remind you very soon that you transgressed the requirements of marimé. You did something wrong. And you will maybe cut your finger with the knife, and that’s not an accident. We don’t think things are accidents. There are reasons for what are called accidents.

Faith E. Pinho: To engage with uncleanliness is to tempt fate. You can’t be unclean and not expect repercussions. This is why even if a Romani family were to invite gadje friends over, they might give the gadje different utensils to eat with than the ones they’d use.

Ian Hancock: And you have to remember that the condition of being impure is contagious.

Faith E. Pinho: Ultimately, this is why so many Romani American parents decide to keep their kids home from school. Public schools are obviously full of gadje. Full of impurity.

Ian Hancock: You cannot even eat food cooked by gadje. So what’s the kid going to do at lunchtime in the cafeteria? You cannot sit next to the opposite sex in class. What are the kids going to do? And that is why they’re kept out of school.

Faith E. Pinho: The fear, professor Hancock says, is that Romani kids may start to imitate the gadje kids around them, picking up outsiders’ ideals of cleanliness, which, in a traditional Romani household, are completely marimé.

Ian Hancock: How can you read schoolbooks about kids and their house pets who sleep on their beds? This is all OK in modern mainstream Anglo American culture, but it’s anathema in Romani culture.

Faith E. Pinho: As you might have guessed, this is a pretty conservative mind-set. Quite literally, this is done in the name of conservation.

Throughout history, enslaved Romani families likely used the concept of marimé as a way to ritualize hygiene in slave quarters. These requirements were passed down over centuries until, eventually, the practice of marimé came to the U.S., where it’s become a way to keep the Romani world and the gadje world separate.

Paulina Stevens: My grandmother would make such a big deal about it.

Faith E. Pinho: When Paulina was a girl and everyone called her Nina, she said, her great-grandmother would come stay with her in Morro Bay and she was obsessed with avoiding gadje.

Paulina Stevens: My grandmother would answer the phone if my friends would call the house from school, she would say, “Nina moved. She’s not here anymore.” And then I’d be like, “Why aren’t my friends talking to me anymore?”

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina’s mom was a bit more lenient, though. She was New Age-y and fairly open-minded. And besides, she was a young mom in a small town. There weren’t a lot of other Romani people around Morro Bay, and they wanted to make friends.

Paulina Stevens: So basically that’s why. We just wanted to fit in, and so we assimilated. But, a lot of the times it was difficult because I knew that they were also struggling with where they fit in. Because it would be like, “Hey, we’re going to have some neighbors over,” which was a big no-no in the community.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said her parents even held barbecues with their gadje neighbors, but they would barely go over to other people’s houses. So, yes, they hung out with outsiders, but never too closely. And, of course, they didn’t tell the family outside Morro Bay.

Paulina Stevens: We did have friends there. And my grandmother was very against that.

Faith E. Pinho: But you can start to see the traditions relaxing, right? Paulina’s mom was looser than Paulina’s great-grandma. For an older generation, this leniency was the beginning of an end. Traditions getting let go. Rules being relaxed, generation by generation.

Faith E. Pinho: I think part of this story, too, is this fear that the culture is being diluted, and what do you do with that and how do you preserve it?

Ian Hancock: Well, you preserve it by being strict. And this is going to sound weird, maybe, but in our case, I believe in segregation. I know that’s a terrible word. But you learn nothing in school, in an American school, that will help you specifically as a Romani person. We think the gadje are not clean. We think — and this is the — When I say “we,” I’m saying “they,” because I married a non-Romani woman.

Faith E. Pinho: I was like, “Wait a second.” I knew professor Hancock had taught at an American university and lectured gadje. That already was super unusual and rare. I did not know about his spouse.

Faith E. Pinho: I didn’t know this until you just said, but you yourself also married someone who wasn’t Romani. So on one hand, I’m hearing you say the way to preserve a culture is by being strict, but also, you have done things that were not strict, right?

Ian Hancock: Absolutely.

Faith E. Pinho: So how do you reconcile those things?

Ian Hancock: Well, first of all, as I said before, I am not Vlax.

Faith E. Pinho: Professor Hancock’s rebuttal is that he gets a pass because he’s not a part of the subgroup where most of this applies anyway. “Vlax” is sort of an umbrella term that includes Paulina’s subgroup, the Machvaya. Descendants of enslaved families, like the Vlax, are known for being some of the strictest about the concept of marimé.

Ian Hancock: The Vlax people have a reputation for being the way they are. They are the ones who were the slaves. So you have to put their whole being into that historical context.

Faith E. Pinho: I was like, “Huh. OK.” Professor Hancock seemed to be acknowledging that even though there are rules — strict rules — not everyone follows them. Or at least he’s decided he doesn’t have to follow them.

Ian Hancock: Let me say one more thing in my own defense, regardless of my straying from the fold and becoming an academic: People are so proud of me for that very thing. So it again is ironic that this pride in my educational accomplishment, when it is generally seen as off limits. I think people are secretly want education, they just don’t want a certain kind of education. Yeah, that’s it.

Faith E. Pinho: Most Romani kids do start in school. Two-thirds of respondents in the Harvard study said they attended day care, nursery school or kindergarten, but it tapers off pretty quickly after that. The attitude overall, for so many Romani families, is that American schools aren’t worth it. Not worth the corrosion of a way of life. Not worth the bullying or the potential of intermarrying. And then there’s this cycle of Romani families being even more disconnected from American life and culture and traditions.

Nasta Lee: I grew up not being in, like, going to the prom or doing all that stuff. I feel like, “Oh my God, I didn’t have my chance to do all that.”

Faith E. Pinho: Nasta really missed going to school. Even today she sometimes dreams about what could have been.

Nasta Lee: I feel like that was a void. I wish I would have went through it, to feel that, to see what you can learn and what you can do and what do you find out. I was very curious back then. I was always into different things. I loved music. So I don’t know. Maybe I would have gotten into music. I don’t know what I have did. So I just think. You think about it.

Paulina Stevens: I remember I would ask my cousins, “If you were an outsider, what would you do? If you could really be anything in the world?”

Faith E. Pinho: Sometimes Paulina would daydream about what her life could be if she were born someone else.

Paulina Stevens: It was just this little fantasy in my mind.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina said she wrote a report for school about how she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, and take care of the sea animals that lived in the ocean nearby. Paulina said her mom outright told her that wasn’t going to happen. She couldn’t be a veterinarian because she wouldn’t finish school.

Paulina Stevens: I would go to school and I would think to myself, “None of this matters.”

Faith E. Pinho: Even as a little kid, Paulina knew she was just going through the motions of elementary school, knowing full well that she’d never actually graduate.

Paulina Stevens: “This is garbage because I’ll be out of school and married probably the next year or whatever.”

Faith E. Pinho: But perhaps it didn’t have to be that way. Maybe Paulina didn’t have to take fate as it was handed to her. And maybe there’s a chance to break this cycle, this tradition of taking girls out of school.

Alicia Cameli: Oh, there she is!

Faith E. Pinho: Even though being back in Morro Bay gives Paulina a knot in her stomach, she agreed to go back to her elementary school because she wanted to meet someone she hadn’t seen in about 15 years.

Alicia Cameli: Hello! So good to see you. You look exactly like you did as a little munchkin, just grown up a little bit.

Faith E. Pinho: Alicia Cameli radiates warmth with a big smile that feels like a hug. She’s exactly what you’d expect someone’s favorite first-grade teacher to be like.

Alicia Cameli: And I remember you being a really good student. When I say good student, I mean an outside the box thinker. Your writing wasn’t like, OK, first, you’re going to write about this and then you’ll add this. And then…. You know, it was just really creative. It was really different than the other students. So I remember that.

Faith E. Pinho: She clearly believed in Paulina and saw something special in her. Still does now, all these years later.

Alicia Cameli: I remember that little twinkle in your eye, and — oh, she still has that. Still lights up with enthusiasm, like right now.

Paulia Stevens: Oh my God! I feel so …

Faith E. Pinho: As a student, Paulina was enthusiastic, eager to learn. And in Ms. Cameli’s eyes, Paulina was like a little grownup. They stayed friendly even after Paulina graduated first grade.

Alicia Cameli: I just felt like, “Wow, she is so mature, beyond her years, almost like an adult.”

Faith E. Pinho: So much like an adult, Paulina was starting to be treated like one. She was partying with her cousins. By 12 years old, she had her own fortunetelling customers. She wasn’t just a carefree kid anymore. And that’s why, at the end of sixth grade, when the whole class was going to a waterpark, Paulina couldn’t go.

Paulina Stevens: Yes, I wasn’t allowed to go on field trips.

Alicia Cameli: So you came to my class.

Paulina Stevens: Yeah.

Alicia Cameli: And just for a whole day, for the whole time when they were at the waterslides, and you were such a good helper.

Faith E. Pinho: Helping out Ms. Cameli would become one of Paulina’s last memories from elementary school. Her sixth-grade class went on a tour of the middle school, where she was supposed to begin seventh grade. Her name was already enrolled and her locker picked out. But she knew she would never go.

Paulina Stevens: At 12, I remember telling my elementary friends, “I won’t be able to go with you guys and I hope you have a great life.” It was just sad.

Faith E. Pinho: According to Del Mar Elementary’s school records, Paulina officially stopped going to school in August 2007, when she was 12.

Paulina Stevens: That was a really big year for me. I left elementary school officially and I kind of accepted my fate. At 12.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina had always known this was coming. It was just harder in practice.

Paulina Stevens: I knew it. It was just repeated to me so many times, like, “Why is she still in school?” You just kind of grow up with it.

Faith E. Pinho: I tried again and again to talk to Paulina’s family members for this story. Her mom, especially. I was eager to hear her side of the story and learn more about her decision to pull Paulina out of school.

Paulina’s mom and I spoke once on the phone for about 45 minutes. She kept saying that she really didn’t want to talk to a reporter. I get it. I wish I could tell you her side of the story. But the fact is, Paulina hardly understands her mom’s attitude towards school.

Paulina Stevens: I barely remember my parents when I was a kid. Like, I don’t. I just remember — I mean, did they really — did they care? When I went to school, did they care about my grades or anything like that?

Alicia Cameli: Well, I’m sure they cared about you, but I don’t think school was their focus. You know?

Paulina Stevens: Yeah. I’m getting kind of —

Alicia Cameli: Aw. Well, what I remember is that you were such a good student. I really do remember that. So…

Faith E. Pinho: Standing there, in her first-grade classroom, Paulina wasn’t just reflecting on her own childhood. She was thinking of her two girls.

Alicia Cameli: So how old are your kids?

Paulina Stevens: So 5 and 6. And then my youngest, she’ll be starting kindergarten this year.

Alicia Cameli: She’s starting kindergarten, wow, oh, that’s such a magical age.

Paulina Stevens: Yeah, it is. I have a different relationship with them. I think my oldest is my pride. I can depend on her. I’m proud of her. And then my youngest is like my sugar. When she walks in the room, I just melt. They’re just different.

Faith E. Pinho: Paulina was envisioning a different childhood for her daughters than the one she had. One where education was encouraged — valued, even. She wanted to give them that. But Paulina also wanted to give her daughters some of the upbringing she had. Because there were definitely parts of her childhood she loved.

Paulina Stevens: While kids were going to middle school, I was exploring San Francisco and I was in Chinatown. And then I was in L.A. and I was going to Universal Studios and I was partying and I was living a different life.

Faith E. Pinho: Parts of it were really exciting. It’s part of what made Paulina so mature and responsible for her age. But she was growing up a bit fast at 12. As Paulina told me while we were walking around Morro Bay, she started hearing the adults talking to her parents.

Paulina Stevens: They were like, “The people need to come and look at your daughter.”

Faith E. Pinho: Everyone’s attention was turning to boys.

Paulina Stevens: They would come here and be like, “OK, we want your daughter. We’re ready to take her for marriage.”

Faith E. Pinho: Next week on “Foretold”:

Paulina Stevens: Any time I would want to do something, and I’m talking about even going on an elementary school field trip, we would get comments. I say “we,” as in the younger girls, would get comments from the older people, older women, older men, like, “Oh, do you want to go on the field trip because you want a man? Is that why?”

Everything, all of it, it’s always about getting married. They put so much shame on women and, at the same time, pressure them to get married.

Faith E. Pinho: Stay tuned next week to find what the future holds on “Foretold.”

‘Foretold’ podcast Episode 2: ‘A Certain Kind of Education’

Follow 'Foretold' wherever you get your podcasts:

More to Read