Bon Jovi Thanks His Wife Appliance

I could feel the build-up to it long before D-day. FW began preemptively terrorizing me by not-so-subtly indicating he’d accuse me of “parental alienation” or cast me as a “dangerous, unfit mother” if I mumbled anything about his scary new drinking problem or about separating or asked if he was cheating or even told him to sleep in the guestroom.

It didn’t matter to him that I knew the grounds on which he was basing these arguments were complete bs. It seemed he was bellowing this stuff at me in order to demo how “credible” he would appear to others when he told lies about me. I also felt it in my bones at the time that he had already been saying these things to other people behind my back, rehearing the lies to the point that he was beginning to believe them himself which made the performance seem more believable. Something else that demonstrated his investment was the rage and sheer hatred on his face. I didn’t believe any of the lies but I certainly believed he meant business and could destroy my life.

Though I wasn’t aware of such a thing as reunification camps at the time, I knew from having worked as a DV survivors’ advocate that many abusers were successfully taking full child custody based on “alienation” charges against victims. And he knew I knew. It put the fear of God in me and I collapsed into an inert, catastrophically depressed puddle for almost a year. The thinner, weaker and sicklier I got and the more I socially withdrew, the more FW would weaponize these things as proof of my “unfitness.”

Thank God a lawyer friend knew just how to break the spellbinding. It took me almost a year to reach out to her and tell her what was going on. Genius that she is, she guessed immediately the FW was cheating and began coaching me on gathering evidence and turning the tables to protect myself and the kids. I followed her instructions like a robot– scrounged money in secret, hired a PI and retained an attorney.

Finding out about the affair was actually a relief because the evidence pretty much foiled all of FW’s threats and coercion. It’s very strange how, when you’re that terrified, you end up almost welcoming and crowing victoriously over every bit of evidence that would have previously broken your heart and torn you to pieces. The worse and more egregious the evidence, the more it worked in my favor. The fact that he didn’t want people in his profession to know about the affair put the power in my hands. FW dumped the AP like a human sacrifice, sending a brutal “cease and desist” notice. Her wailing protests must have been audible from space so it was pretty clear he wasn’t just taking the thing underground. He came clean on all the assets he’d spent and more that he’d been hiding under some vague notion that he might go to jail or lose visitation rights if he didn’t or was caught in any more lies.

Turns out that, despite stringing the AP along with hints that he might divorce and the credible-sounding threats he’d made to me, he actually didn’t know the first thing about divorce procedures or custody in our state so imagined all these dire outcomes for himself. He became weirdly compliant, even shooting himself in the foot further by writing out confessions about previous failed attempts to have affairs with other office barflies, about the drinking, pot smoking and drunk driving, how greedy and grasping and manipulative the AP was, all her sleazy secrets, his compulsive porn use, etc. And he also put it wring that there was no grounds to cast me as a bad mother and that I had never once “alienated” the kids nor threatened to keep the kids away from him.

It’s like he went into a trance and thought spilling the beans would gain him God’s amnesty or something. Fine with me. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, never interrupt the enemy when they’re in the midst of destroying themselves.