Silda Spitzer's Message

This is also posted at Two Women Blogging

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Photo credit: Photo by MotherPie on Flickr

I was driving to pick one of my kids up from school for a dental appointment when I caught the words "prostitution ring" (just those two words) on the car radio and turned up the volume to find out who the latest outed addict was. That's the free association of my mind these days: prostitution ring to sex addiction.

As the week of media frenzy wound on, I followed the coverage of Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace in the most idle way. I would read or listen to things if I happened upon them, but I didn't seek them out. I would overhear talk shows on the car radio: ten or fifteen minute segments on the way to or from my daughter's preschool. Sometimes I'd catch a news headline pushed at me online or overhear conversations or get e-mail from folks (who know nothing of my husband's addiction or this blog) wanting to speculate or criticize. Often I'd stop reading or listening or turn off the radio because it was too painful or infuriating. I'd breathe and center myself.

I get so frustrated with myself that I am in a state of progress and not perfection when it comes to being sucked back into craziness on occasion. And on this occasion, the craziness, the pain and anger, didn't come from the Spitzers. I'd read or listen, looking for their voices between the lines. I'd listen for my own voice, the voice of someone who had been there and knew. Instead, what I heard, for the most part, were the ones and zeros of people talking in binary from inside the Matrix.

The voices that made me tremble most in rage, even misguided as I knew them to be, were the voices criticizing Silda Spitzer. Yet I was, with a different sex scandal, in a different place in my life, one of those voices. As a strong woman and a feminist, I was outraged, just absolutely disdainful of Hillary Clinton when the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. I wanted her to kick Bill in the crotch right in front of the press and send him to live on the streets while she got the White House. I was furious at Bill, furious at the image of men he represented, and I wanted that powerful woman, right there are the heart of things, to show him (and all men) that women would not stand by and quietly tolerate such behavior. And she did nothing, nothing except appear a little icier than usual. How I despised that woman. How could she betray women, betray me, that way? What kind of a message was that sending to men? To women? I certainly would never let my husband get away with that. (As if that were in my power.)

Some of my fury was born of fear, fear that men really are pigs and that the only way to control them is to let them know you're very serious about punishing them. It was born of not understanding my mother's life or choices. It was born of insecurity. It was born of not understanding what it really means to be strong or to be a feminist. The universe let me have my lesson a few years later when I found that my own husband is, like Bill Clinton (and Eliot Spitzer), a sex addict.

Needless to say, I don't see things quite the same way these days. I still feel rage (yes, yes, working on universal compassion, not there yet), but the target of that rage has changed. I see Silda Spitzer up on that stage, with the eyes of the world upon her, and I hear people say that they wish she weren't there or that she were visibly angry. I hear them say that she is sending the wrong message or that she's being used or that she should be thinking something different from whatever it is she's thinking. And I want to change myself into some avenging angel, covering Silda Spitzer gently with one great, silken wing while raining fire down on the press and fellow feminists and advice columnists and every possible incarnation of the old me. I want to shield and protect her, to heal her with whispers of the truth, and open the eyes of all the world with blazing pain.

Because here is how I see what happened to Silda Spitzer: There she was in the Governor's Mansion, maybe happy, maybe unhappy, who knows. What I do know is that she had a little pain or maybe just discomfort, a little twinge, let's say, in her arm. Some days it would hurt very much, some days she'd almost forget there was anything wrong. Maybe it never seemed serious enough to see a doctor about, or maybe she was afraid of doctors or what they might find.

Then one day someone walked up to her and shouted, "Good lord! Your arm is infected! It's rotting off your body!" And ripped her arm off her body and threw it to the floor. Now writhing in pain and shock, she's asked what she wants to do with the arm. A moment ago it was part of her body, part of herself, something essential to her life. The arm may have caused her problems and pain, it may be causing her pain now to see how infected the arm was, how close it was to killing her, how hideous and disfigured it had been without her ever noticing. Yet it was still her arm.

Now all the world looks at her and judges what she does next. (Bastards.)

What kind of message was Silda Spitzer sending? The message that she and Eliot Spitzer are human beings, in enormous pain, worthy of compassion, understanding and love.

What ought she to have done? Whatever, in that blinding pain and shock, she did was what she ought to have done.

If she had spit on and kicked that arm, or thrown that infected thing in the trash, I would have understood. And if she kicked Eliot Spitzer in the crotch at that press conference or walked off the stage or just not come at all, I would have said, "You go, girl. You do what you need to do right now." But if she cradled that arm for a moment and wondered if it could be reattached or healed or just buried properly, I would have understood that too. And when she did show up and walk away with Eliot Spitzer, hand in hand, I said (softly), "You go, girl. You do what you need to do right now."