This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

As a little girl, you don't say,

oh my gosh, I can't wait to grow up and marry a guy who cheats on me

and makes me feel like the only way I can leave is if I'm going to be homeless and in a ditch.

I'm Andre Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the

deceptions that change everything.

Lorena is a Midwestern mom who's never met a stranger.

When she meets someone, she wants to really connect. If you want to sit there and talk about

the blue sky and the green grass, please go find somebody else because I don't have time for that.

You want to tell me who you are and what you want to be? I'm all over that.

She came to the interview with an extra large ice coffee in hand and the energy level to match.

Caffeine, caffeine, lots of caffeine. This is how I'll make it.

I have 11 children and I have four grandkids. I'm busy.

11 children. She was 18 when she had her first and 40 when she had her last. In that time, she didn't go two years without being pregnant. How did she get here with 11 kids? Well, she belonged to a conservative Baptist church. In her community, big families were the norm, and she loved motherhood. But today, she sees that she was a frog in boiling water.

She didn't realize the temperature was being turned up until it was too late.

Lorena was raised by a single mother, and their family moved nearly every year.

She always envied her friends who had the stability she didn't seem to have.

I really, really wanted the nuclear family. I really wanted, well, look, it's the mom and it's the dad,

and it's some kids. Her mom worked in a hospital and would bring Lorena along with her sometimes to sit in the waiting

room. While she was there, she fantasized about a career in medicine, working with premature babies.

I wanted to be a doctor. I actually wanted to be a neonatologist. But as she got older and became a teenager, she and her mom started budding heads.

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