Three's Allowed: Orszag and Co. Do Co-Parenting Proud

Like the rest of you UPpity women, I, too, was fascinated by our Budget Director Peter Orszag's story -- though not because I was mystified at how such a high king of nerdery gets so many ladies. (I'd take Food Network chem-whiz Alton Brown over George Clooney with a nice bottle of wine any day -- and not only because Alton would lay out the molecular rationale for letting it breathe first.)

In my case, the mystification was caused by the mainstream media, which seem to have come down with a bad case of the dreaded Regency Romance. Because, though all we know is that ex-girlfriend Claire Milonas gave birth to their daughter just a few weeks before Orszag announced his engagement to ABC correspondent Bianna Golodryga, again and again, outlets insisted on painting a rakish Orszag, Blackberry unholstered, cutting a merciless swath through D.C.'s ladies, leaving weeping babes of all kinds in his wake.

Rhetorical headlines practically threw their hands up at the hopelessness of it all. "Did Peter Orzag Listen to Obama's Speech on Fatherhood?" finger-wagged a columnist at The Washington Post. "If Peter Orszag Is So Smart, What Will He Do Now?" crowed The New York Times. Only The Daily News, it seemed, could give it to us straight: "White House budget director ditched pregnant girlfriend for ABC News gal." Pass the smelling salts.

Call me crazy, but I actually found the story heartwarming. Here were three adults handling an awkward situation with maturity and, dare I say, grace. What was The Washington Post talking about? There's no suggestion that Orszag is abandoning the child (he already shares custody of two children from a first marriage). Sorry, Times: he doesn't seem to be in a pickle (he and the new mom released a warm statement upon the baby's birth). And Daily News? We have no idea who orchestrated the breakup. (After confessing she'd be happy when the brief media burst blew over, through the Times' Mark Liebovich, Milonas even congratulated Orszag on his engagement.)

So why the uproar -- particularly when famously deadbeat dads are there for the flogging? Easy. In our country, where the primacy of the nuclear family is practically a national religion, it is almost impossible for us to conceive that two adults perfectly free to give it a shot might choose to go another way.

If you'll forgive me a brief detour into the land of the Vikings (any excuse to bring up Vikings!), I'll point out that this is not the case around the globe -- particularly in countries where women are financially and socially independent. In a pre-crash Iceland, a strong social net, liberal parental leave, and a lack of stigma have made non-traditional (to say the least) families the rule.

"Icelanders are the least hung-up people in the world," explains a citizen in this slightly incredulous Guardian article. "Thus the incentive, for example, 'to stay together for the sake of the kids' does not exist. The kids will be just fine, because the family will rally round them and, likely as not, the parents will continue to have a civilized relationship, based on the usually automatic understanding that custody for the children will be shared."

That's a pretty far cry from here, where we call out-of-wedlock offspring things like Baby It and Love Child, and where broken homes, both parents working, and any more or less than two parental figures is looming evidence of massive social breakdown. (Though -- ahem -- I can think of at least one product of a single mother, divorce, and erratic step-parentage who managed to cobble together a life.)

I hope Milonas will not feel damned with faint praise if I say, as a Harvard-educated venture capitalist with an ex willing to co-parent, she enjoys all the emotional, financial and social privileges of your average Icelandic 19-year-old. If the Daily News cannot envision a scenario in which this split was amicable, she can always head north to where they'll assume it was mutual, even on her side. (Women in every country can probably agree that there's nothing like realizing you are about to bear a man's child to make you subject your relationship to a little more scrutiny.)

I admit to some partisanship on this issue, since the out-of-wedlock birth in my own family is so moot I'd actually forgotten about it until this story, fast on the heels of the John and Elizabeth Edwards brouhaha, reminded me. In my family's identical scenario, both the wife and the other woman set aside their differences at great cost so that the siblings could grow up relatively unencumbered by their parents' choices. We've always just been family, as, I daresay, are thousands of other hard-categorize-families that have managed to figure out how to raise a child in a loving environment even if the parents don't share a loving environment.

Orszag, Milonas, and Golodryga, whatever their backstory, are already worlds ahead of Edwards and Co. on this score. (Starting with the fact that we, the public, don't know their back story.) In this scandal-ridden climate, it's probably hard for the media to recognize a triangle isn't a scandal when the three adults are acting, well, adult. MSM, look elsewhere for your juicy story. The only question you should be asking here is where they're all registered.