Blessing in the Betrayal

Every little girl grows up with the same picture in her head. A long white dress, glitter catching the light, a church aisle stretching out like a runway to forever. The wedding march we all know, and at the end of it stands a man who looks at you like you just turned his whole world on. He picked you. Out of everyone, he picked you. Then comes the house with the white fence, the babies, the happily ever after that Disney sold us before we were old enough to know better.

If that is how your story went, I mean it when I say I am happy for you. That is a rare and beautiful thing. But if you are reading this because your story went sideways, welcome. You are in good company, because mine did too. I did almost everything out of order. I was the girl doing karaoke at the local bar on a Friday night, the one who wanted to be a singer and settled for belting out Joan Jett in front of strangers instead. I was fun. I was loud. I was also, underneath all of it, pretty lost.

Church on Sunday, Chaos Every Other Day

Here is the part people do not always expect. I loved church. My mom took my sister and me most Sundays, and some of my best childhood memories are wrapped up in Vacation Bible School and summer Bible camp. I remember the excitement of getting ready for camp almost more than the camp itself. We would head to Kmart, and I would pick out little travel-sized bottles of shampoo and toothpaste and deodorant, the tiny versions that made me feel like a real grown woman packing for a trip. I know that dates me, but I would not trade that memory for anything. There was something about those small bottles that made the whole week feel like an adventure I had earned.

Bible camp had campfire worship, late-night talks with friends, lessons about Jesus that actually stuck with me, and a taste of independence away from my parents. It was peaceful. It was safe. And that peace mattered more than I understood at the time, because home did not look anything like it.

My dad served in Vietnam, and he came home with PTSD, though nobody called it that out loud back then. He drank to keep the flashbacks quiet, and sometimes drugs too. My mom did her best to shield my sister and me from the worst of it, but you cannot fully hide chaos from kids living inside the same walls. It leaves a residue of confusion even when nobody explains a thing. So I did what a lot of kids in that situation do. I left. Not physically, not yet, but I found every excuse to be outside the house, with friends, away from whatever storm was rolling through that day. It felt normal because it was the only normal I knew.

The friends I chose were not exactly a good influence, and I was a people pleaser who loved being wherever the fun was happening. As I got older, God quietly slipped further and further from my mind. I did not reject him. I just stopped making room for him.

The Wall

That wild streak eventually landed me in single motherhood at twenty-five, with no career plan and no life plan to speak of. Before that, at eighteen, I had gotten pregnant and chose to have an abortion. I will not sugarcoat it. It was one of the hardest and most horrible experiences of my life, and it was not a road I was willing to walk again. So when I found myself pregnant a second time, years later, I already knew what my answer would be. It was baby, or it was going to be jail or death, given the direction I was headed. I am so grateful it was baby.

My daughter, Hailey, slowed me down in a way nothing else could have. I moved into my parents' guest house with her, and for a long stretch of time, my entire world was raising that little girl. Dating was not on my radar. I had built a wall around my heart so thick that I genuinely believed no man was getting through it, and honestly, I preferred it that way. Trust in men had taken a beating, and I was not in a hurry to hand it back out.

After about a year of me showing zero interest in dating, my mom asked me something that stuck. She asked if I had ever thought about praying for the right man. We used to keep prayer journals together when I was younger, and something about her question cracked open a door I had shut.

The Prayer Journal

So I sat down one night with a notebook and started writing out a prayer, specific and unfiltered. I asked God for a man who was caring, responsible, and had a good sense of humor. I asked that he love children and love Hailey as if she were his own. I asked that he not have kids of his own already, because I was not interested in extra complications. I asked that he love us equally, as one family, not as an afterthought. And just for good measure, I added a little postscript. I asked God to make him Italian. I have always had a weakness for Italians, and I figured it never hurts to ask.

Six months later, my best friend Tina and I were at our usual karaoke bar when a group of guys at the bar caught our attention. One of them was loud and a little cocky, and I told Tina flat out that they seemed like jerks. A few weeks after that, she told me the cocky one had asked her out. She went. I told her they were welcome to sit with us at our table exactly never. Then, a couple weeks later, there they were again, and Tina gave me the look, and I caved. Fine. They could sit with us.

Tina's guy, Matt, and I bantered back and forth all night, and somewhere in there my guard cracked just enough to see he was actually funny. Matt would eventually become like a brother to me. But it was another one of the guys, the one they all called Gio, who kept asking me to dance. He had an accent I could not quite place yet, a quirky sense of humor, and something about him I could not shake. My wall was still standing tall, so he did not get an easy pass. But over time, he took that wall down piece by piece, the same way the walls of Jericho came down, fast and completely, once God decided it was time.

His full name was Giovanni Buccarelli. You cannot get more Italian than that. Born and raised. God had answered that prayer journal down to the postscript, and I did not even see it happening until it already had.

Building Our Family

Gio could not have biological children, which was hard for both of us at times, but I know now it was part of God's design. He loved Hailey from the very beginning, and his family embraced her the same way, without hesitation. I remember one of our first dates was a trip to Six Flags, where he bought her a little outfit at the gift shop. Later, when I finally brought her to meet him at his place, he had already bought a coloring book and crayons and gotten down on the floor with her.

One afternoon he picked us up from my parents' house, and Hailey had a dirty diaper. My mom reached for the diaper bag, and Gio told her not to worry about it, he had it handled. He changed that diaper without blinking. My mom looked at me afterward and said he was a keeper, that my own dad had never once done that. I already knew.

Gio supported me when I decided to go to beauty school, encouraging me every step of the way. He was steady where I was spontaneous, responsible where I was carefree, and somehow it worked. Two years later, we got married on a golf course in a non-denominational ceremony, glitter and all, a flower girl we proudly called our daughter standing beside us. It was beautiful. It felt like everything I had once stopped believing in.

But there was one piece missing that neither of us thought much about at the time. God was not part of that covenant. Gio had grown up in a Mormon household, and I had drifted in and out of church my whole life, and we both figured being good people was enough. We did not think we needed religion to make a marriage work. We were wrong, and it would take years, and a betrayal neither of us saw coming, to understand exactly how wrong we were.