Saint or Monster, Elizabeth Edwards Isn't the Issue

With all due respect, I could not disagree more with the notion that Elizabeth Edwards has her priorities straight.

It's not that I'm not sympathetic to her situation. (If you're not up on the particulars, swing by Barnes & Noble -- she wrote a handy guide.) As the globe knows, the past few years have been particularly unkind to her: she got terminal cancer, learned of her husband's affair, and then got the shattering news that he'd fathered a child with the other woman.

But the idea that Edwards is trapped -- that she can't leave her husband lest her children's image of their father be tarnished -- is a reach at best. Because John's a public figure, it was always out of her control anyway. But as it happens, we're only aware of every ugly detail because Elizabeth has made it impossible not to be.

First of all, Elizabeth practically guaranteed that the affair would go down in the public record. With full knowledge of the rumors about Rielle, Elizabeth urged John to stay in the presidential race -- knowing that if he did well enough, the media would at that point have no choice but to go past speculation to examination. (This also put the Democratic party at risk of losing the White House for another four years to an elderly statesman and a VP whose greatest expertise was in moose-dressing, but let's set that aside.)

Then Elizabeth put the affair in the spotlight by writing a book in which she freely discusses it, embarking on a massive book tour that generated a series of video clips in which she publicly snarks at the origins of the child. (Welcome to the world, Baby It!) It's pretty hard to claim you're trying to dial down a scandal when you agree to devote an hour to it on Oprah -- then invite the host and millions of viewers into your house to give your husband the old fish-eye.

If there wasn't a child involved, I'd say she had a right to all of it. Get out the golf clubs; fire up Microsoft Word; call Larry King with one hand and scribble nasty things about the mistress on bathroom walls with the other. There's no rule book for how you deal with infidelity. (I'd leak humiliating details about personal hygiene, but that's me.)

But there is a child involved -- and that changes not only the rules but the book itself. Because -- sorry, Elizabeth -- this is no longer a story about a wronged wife trying to save her family from the clutches of an evil mistress. It's the story of a child who's been born into a family in tumultuous and very public circumstances -- one who deserves the adults around her to act grown-up enough to free her from its repercussions.

And say what you will about Rielle's behavior as a single woman, as a mother, her behavior has been impeccable. She's neither responded to Elizabeth nor publicly assailed John. All we know about her is from a leaked document, one that has subjected her to censure and ridicule, not sympathy. (Those who find her $17,500 a month request for child support from Edwards excessive, bear in mind: she is dealing with a father who's consistently denied paternity. She has no expectation that he will help parent, and may never be able to renegotiate child support during the next 18 years.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, has been shameless. Not only did she call the child "it" on TV. (Can you tell the "it" thing is where she really lost me?) She at least temporarily blocked her husband's efforts to move the child close by, stalled negotiations on child support, and has made herself, not the child's father, the arbiter of the infant's future position in the family. (Do I even have to mention John's behavior? Look up useless, pathetic and actionable in the dictionary, and there you are.)

In the old days, ever-so-slightly easing a mistress out of the way to absorb an out-of-wedlock child into the "legitimate" family was a convenient technique for a wife and errant husband to maintain the social order. (Well, not so handy for the child's mother. But doesn't she deserve what she gets?)

But unfortunately for Elizabeth, that maneuver is out of fashion. Not only have we acknowledged that all children are legitimate, we know they shouldn't suffer for their parents' misdeeds -- or be used as a vehicle for revenge. It must be an extraordinarily painful and terrible thing to acknowledge one's husband has started a family with another woman, and Elizabeth is free to dissolve her own marriage in response, if she chooses. But she can't dissolve or direct this new family and the parents of this child -- a child, she should remember, who is sibling to her three children.

I know I mentioned in an earlier post that, when the same thing happened in my family, the wife and other woman did their best to make sure the siblings were not separated. One generation later, the father himself was out of the picture. But the rest of the family was intact, and remains so.

I may be holding Elizabeth to a pretty high standard. (Yes, her book paints her as a bit of a martyr. My family wrote the book on martyrdom.) But I know from my own experience that families -- in addition to wronged wives -- are pretty resilient. The hardest thing for Elizabeth Edwards may not be getting over being betrayed. The hardest thing may be realizing that this particular book is not about her.