I fell ill in bed last week when the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke. I’ve been riveted by its every detail, and question why. I’m more interested in Spitzer’s wife, Silda, than I am in the arrogant sleazeball himself. Why stand by your man not once but twice as he announces to the world his regret for his behavior and, then, eventually, his resignation? Two articles have caught my eye over the past few days for their clarity of perception. The first appeared in “The Washington Post” in which the novelist Richard Russo writes about the characters of the Spitzer situation as if they were fit for a ready-made novel. In thinking about Silda as a character, he writes:

“What I know about marriage is that identities over time tend to merge. Eliot’s wife was once her own person, but down the years she’s lost some of that individuality, surrendered it willingly, never suspecting she might have further use for it. If she’s not this man’s wife, then who is she? Worse, can she abandon her husband without implying that her daughters should do the same to their father? And what was that promise that she made? For better or for worse? Did she mean that or just say it? How could it be that she was able to imagine the better so vividly, the worse not at all? Was that his fault for leaving so few clues, or hers for ignoring the few there were? The facts of her situation are simple and clear. Why aren’t her emotions? Why won’t they stand still so she can examine them?”

In an Op-Ed piece written by Ellen Goodman in today’s IHT, she writes:

“The very model of a political wife today is a strong woman. Silda Wall Spitzer is not unlike Elizabeth Edwards or Michelle Obama. They are all lawyers, all advisers, and all left their professional lives. That’s the way we like them. We want an independent thinker who rarely contradicts her husband. We want women who are powerful but not uppity, to shine but not outshine, and, above all, to be equals who happily choose to walk one step behind. We expect them to stand by their man in good times and are horrified when they do it in bad times.”

I can’t help but feel that Goodman’s words reflect how I often feel as a diplomat’s wife living overseas. And I see it in friends of mine living in Brussels who find themselves in similar predicaments. Of my close circle of friends, all of them have left their careers back home (or another country) to follow their husband’s career overseas. But not all of them have substituted their jobs with motherhood. Some are simply trying to maintain a sense of identity on their own in a foreign country while their husbands work all day. In the end, we, the wives, end up knowing the countries better than our husbands who work within them since we are pounding the pavement of the daily hardships of life. Yet we don’t always get credit for that on our curriculum vitae. How can women do it all? Something has to give. A part-time job has always seemed to me a full-time job with half the pay. I admire those women who appear to do it all. It seems to me the most important element of agreeing to stand by your man in his career is to maintain something related to a passion of yours, to not let go of that nugget of knowledge that was once manicured exclusively by you. So that when the kids grow up, and the husband has moved on to another job, at least you’ll always have that one talent, that one passion, that one interest that is exclusively yours to which you can return to always, regardless of what stage in life you might be entering.