easy way to track down a person, “It took him three
months to find us.”
Unfortunately, her mother’s successive choices in
men were not healthy ones. “Every man she was with
beat her,” Mantelli said. “So we grew up with a lot
of physical violence and a lot of stuff that kids really
shouldn’t have to see.”
“Naturally,” she said, “I had a lot of trust issues and
unhealthy feelings about men. It took a really good
guy to break down my walls.”
All of this dysfunction took a toll on Mantelli
during her teens and twenties. As a teen she engaged
in “a lot of numbing. A lot of drinking and drugs. You
don’t want to feel. All you want to do when you hang
out with friends that are like you is to numb out. I
didn’t care.”
She kept going to school but was inconsistent with
her schoolwork, and found out two weeks before
graduation that she hadn’t completed enough work to
officially walk in the graduation ceremony. “I left,” she
said. “I took a job at a hamburger joint.”
Dropping out of high school is one of her regrets
and it pushed her to encourage her own daughters to
take their schooling very seriously.
She got married in her twenties but the relation-
ship was dysfunctional. Their son passed away from
a congenital heart defect when he was just two weeks
old. It devastated her, but also provided some clar-
ity: “That was my turning point of saying ‘Why am I
in this unhappy relationship? Why did this happen
to me? I walked out of that marriage with nothing;
nowhere to live, no job.” She relied upon the kindness
of a friend for a place to stay and help finding a job.
While the stories of her trials are sad, Mantelli
sees them all as part of her path to learning, which
eventually would become deeply grounded in her
spiritual faith.
“I became a Christian at 35,” Mantelli said.
After she married her current husband, and became
pregnant with their second daughter, she said “I felt a
strong pull to bless this child in my growing tummy…
I felt a need to acknowledge how grateful I was to
have this beautiful family.”
A friend directed her to a new church. “As soon as
I walked in, I felt something special and knew I felt at
home in this place. I was completely changed by the
time I left the church service.”
Eventually, she began to speak about her
experiences in church. “When I would share my story
these girls would follow me to the coffee nook and say
‘Can you meet with me?’” She began to mentor these
girls to help them heal.
“In one instance, a mom came up to me to tell me
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
she and her daughter had mended their relationship
in a big way. That’s not me, that’s God. I taught this
girl to set boundaries and I said ‘Do not fall into the
same patterns with your daughter.’”
Mantelli had the opportunity to heal her relation-
ship with her own mother, too. Her mother came
back into her life after Mantelli was a mother, too, and
she cared for her for 16 years, until she passed away
from dementia.
“I learned that rather than striking back at her, I
would just take calm tones with her.”
She realized that her mother’s abuse was grounded
in a history of generational dysfunction that went back
to her mother’s own childhood.
“You cannot change generational dysfunction until
you change the dysfunction in you,” she said.
Though at times she had hoped to get her mother
to admit that she’d put her children into dangerous
situations, she realized that her mother’s denial around
those events was too thick, and that she had to see
her as incapable of any type of admission, due to
her mother’s own trauma. “I came to the conclusion
I wasn’t ever going to get an apology. I had to say to
myself ‘She’s not capable.’”
While “nothing was wrapped in a little bow” when
her mother died, Mantelli whispered in her mother’s
ear “I forgive it, you can go.”
She feels she has broken that chain of dysfunction
with her own girls and takes pride and joy in the
bonded family she has created with her husband.
The book interweaves her personal story with
lessons that she has learned. While it does contain
“snippets of how God worked in my life” she says it’s
not only for the religious. “I want to reach seekers, the
people who get stuck in their own heads.”
Her own healing wouldn’t have been possible
without her faith, she
said, but she has a
realistic view about it.
“I’m not in a prayer
closet twenty-four
seven. I like being
with people and I
want to be relatable
to all groups. At the
same time, I want
people to know
if you have some
sort of spiritual
connection, life
makes a little bit
more sense.”
december 2018-january 2019
gmhtoday.com
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