Hey r/divorce,
I’m hoping some of you (especially anyone who’s dealt with child support enforcement in NJ or interstate cases) can give me some perspective. My arrears just got wiped out with zero explanation, and I’m torn about whether I should dig to find out how/why… or just let it be.
Background: Over five years in New Jersey (Hudson County), I was picked up in child support sweeps 13 different times. Each stay was anywhere from 5 to 45 days in jail. My court-ordered payments were $800 a week. I’d been a Wall Street consultant, but when the jobs dried up, I pivoted—drove a cab, got my insurance license, and landed at Aflac. I went back to the judge with what I thought was a solid plan: three days a week building my new Aflac career, four days driving the cab to keep income steady.
The judge looked at me and said (verbatim), “Mr. B, you got a job at Aflac? That’s commission work. I want you to quit it now—you can’t support your kids while you’re ‘learning’ a sales job. And that taxi? I’m sure it doesn’t make any money either. Quit that too.”
I completely lost it. I’d put together a real career move that would have helped everyone, and she shut it down. They sent me back to jail for 40 days that time. (Fun fact: the first time I got locked up I was beaten for snoring, so I started rapping in there… and believe it or not, that’s what kept me safe.)
After that, I ran to another state to avoid the next arrest because it was clear they were never going to stop and there was no way I could make those payments. Eventually I landed in Oregon, started paying again, and they reduced it to $400 a week while I was only making $55k a year.
During my 13th and final stint in jail, I hand-wrote a memoir about the whole experience—my childhood, the jails, the system, and what it did to my family. My ex had completely cut my kids off from my side of the family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, 40 cousins—they never got to know any of them). I brought it to court; her lawyer just said, “The kids are teenagers now and can make their own decisions.” We all know that wasn’t true—she was controlling them the same way she once controlled me.
For seven years I couldn’t even file taxes (cab driving, cash-heavy) because handing over income docs would’ve put me on the IRS radar and made everything worse. So modifications were impossible.
Fast-forward to this month: I got a letter saying I no longer owe anything—even though I still had $72,000 in arrears. My ex is alive, she never remarried, and arrears don’t just disappear. I have a strong hunch her son (now an associate at a big law firm in NYC) finally broke free from her control and quietly made something happen. But I don’t know for sure.
My question: Should I even try to find out how this was terminated? Or is it smarter to just thank the universe and move on?
(If you’re curious about my story, I turned the whole nightmare into a book called 13 Chains. It’s raw, real, and available at 13chains.com. Writing it literally saved me.)
Thanks for any insight, friends. This chapter has been heavy, and I’m finally trying to close it with grace.