Snappy Answers to Chumpy Questions

What did schmoopie have that I didn’t have? Well, she was exactly like his mother, even down to a noticeable facial irregularity, culty religious bent and a personality that swung between squealing faux-twee (to men) to dead-eyed, spooky cyborg (to women). What ended up traumatizing me more than the idea of being betrayed were all the icky Oedipal ramifications. I’m not a horror fan. If I’d been reading a novel with a plot like what I lived through, I probably would have put it down. When I repeat the story, I feel like I should offer the listener brain-bleach.

The appearance overlap struck me immediately on D-Day when I was sent a heads up and cell phone pix as evidence by two people (a young couple) who had formerly worked with FW and the AP. I don’t know what I was expecting when I suspected an affair but it wasn’t a dead-ringer for the mother FW claimed to detest. The real shock was when one of the “Deep Throats” described the AP’s personality. I could literally finish her sentences or list a series of specific traits and the whistleblower would say, “OMG, YES!” One thing I couldn’t help asking was if the AP tended to turn weirdly stabby and hostile towards other women who reported or stood up against any kind of victimization by men. It turned out this was one of the reasons one whistleblower hated the AP and was motivated to drop the dime– because the AP had acted as a flying monkey in a workplace harassment situation that led to the female Deep Throat quitting. That was the biggest overlap. As it happened, my ex-MIL would always get triggery and spew cynical shade at any women in the news or whom she knew personally who reported rape, DV or harassment, etc. Ex-MIL would attack victims’ appearances, say the victims wanted attention, had mental issues, etc. It didn’t seem to be politically motivated like people who might only attack the alleged victims of figures on their own side of the political aisle and then defend the victims of figures from the other party. Ex-MIL hated all sexual victims who spoke out. If children– even boys– reported abuse, she’d suggest they were brainwashed into it. When the spiritual cult leader she’d followed for years was accused of serially raping children in all the headlines, ex-MIL sent FW some program literature from the sect which was all about “believing only what you see yourself, not rumor.”

I’ve always been the opposite of this. I’m a bit whistleblow-ery. Aside from looking nothing like my ex-MIL, I’d stood up against harassers since college, sometimes on behalf of other women. Both my parents been a spokespeople for the NOW organization on equality in education and I was raised with this kumbaya idea that men and women would work together to address injustice, discrimination, etc., not the idea that this was somehow a “man-hating” thing to do. Consequently I fell for FW’s initial “feminist ally” pose (backed up by complaints of his mother’s misogyny) because I didn’t think that was such a rare unicorn thing. But, covertly, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Furthermore, when the “apple” started trying to find a replacement tree, he did this radical 180 and started echoing his mother’s hatred for the fact that I’d once worked as an advocate for DV survivors. He never directly called me a “feminazi” but suddenly started characterizing me as demented, obsessed and anti-social for my “paranoid political crusades.” So, like, the apple wasn’t just trying to bonk the tree but started wearing a “tree suit” ala Silence of the Lambs and began channeling mommy??

It just kept getting weirder and weirder. After D-Day when FW temporarily threw himself into SLA and RIC, he admitted to trying but failing to launch affairs with three other completely identical women, all of whom had been married or engaged at the time like the AP. It was a pile-up of combo cheater/mate poachers with five chumps and about six children being potentially trampled in the process. He couldn’t seem to settle for one mommy replacement but was trying to collect a harem of them. This was happening in a heavily secular blue state so what are the odds FW managed to find four churchy Jesus cheaters in a row? Then I remembered a story of how FW’s mother had told him as a teen that she– while still married to FW’s father– was “always falling in love” with the married political power figures she worked under at her NGO job. Oh, she was the original combo cheater/mate poacher culty sex crime-apologist. Shudder, help, ugh.

If FW married me as radical departure from mum, it was a failed experiment since he ultimately snapped back to factory Oedipal setting. For my part, I don’t think it was equivalently twisted to fall for someone I thought reflected my family’s values but clearly my picker needs major tuning if I ended up with the “enemy’s sleeper mole.”

Perfect reply and response, LFTT! I dropped a few winners who had the temerity to ask similarly horrible things. “She matches his drinking, lack of morals, and proclivity for dishonesty and cruelty. She wins that talent competition.”

What my then 18 year old told me stopped me in my tracks and allowed me to stop making HoWorker/Wife central. He said in a very stern voice, like he became the parent in that moment: “This is what you do. You never acknowledge her. You never speak to her. You treat her like she’s dead. She’s beneath you.” That was in 2018.

It really saved my life. Because at that moment I understood that my children would never replace me. I was the Mom. HoWorker/Wife was just going to be some adult to be tolerated in my children’s lives, up to them to navigate that relationship. And if Asshat wants to “force” her on my children, the resentment will just flow to him. Kids get it.