Learning From A Not-So-Good Wife

 

Since becoming a bishop’s wife, I’ve been paying more attention to how other wives of other public figures – perhaps religious, perhaps not – conduct themselves, establish their identities, make their mark. Is there any perfect formula, I wonder, for mixing the need to be oneself, to find one’s own particular way to happiness, with the need to be a supportive spouse for a husband in the public eye?

I don’t have the thing down yet, completely, but I do think it will probably be a good idea to steer clear of the example set by Maureen McDonnell, wife of the former governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell.

You probably heard that both were indicted in federal court last week for accepting a whole lot of cash and other gifts from a businessman looking to sell more of his company’s dietary supplements. Word has it that she, this former cheerleader for the Redskins with a liking for finery, pushed her husband over to the bad side with her relentless desires and complaints about their penury. Somehow, she convinced herself that her husband’s salary of $175,000 (heaven forbid that she consider getting a job) was chicken feed and they needed to be bailed out of their hardscrabble misery.

I can’t imagine doing any of what she did, really, but I definitely can’t imagine the audacious move to get her husband an engraved Rolex watch: even Mr. Williams, the rich executive, tried to talk her out of that one, knowing that the thing would raise some eyebrows. After all, a governor is supposed to be a public servant, not a celebrity.  (Heaven only knows how much worse this would be in the case of a bishop.) How on earth, I wonder, did this grasping woman think that any good could come from such a gift— clearly not even from her –-to her man?  She would’ve been better off getting out the Scotch tape and making him a collage of high school pictures or taking him on a cheap road trip in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Considering all the damage she did, I think it’s pretty remarkable that she’s the one giving her husband a mad and steely look in the picture that the New York Times printed last week. Here’s the full article. I’ve been reading some of the history of that really successful TV show (haven’t watched it yet) called “The Good Wife” – the one about the woman who resumes her legal career after her famous husband goes to jail for a bunch of transgressions. Apparently, the creators of this show got the idea from watching a number of political spouses in the limelight—Hilary Clinton, Elizabeth Edwards and especially Silda Spitzer –as they stood by their husbands at various microphones after the various scandals broke. They wondered what these women would have been thinking during these terrible moments; for them it was likely some version of “Should I stay or should I go now?”  But the hardened Maureen McDonnell, she who wanted to make sure the Ferrari would be available at the summer house by the lake? Maybe she was blaming her husband for the fact that they got caught.

I don’t know how much of a reader Maureen ever was, but she might have avoided facing years in prison if she’d taken to heart a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm.

“The Fisherman and His Wife” tells you pretty much anything you need to know about the costs of overreaching.  I’m not sure why my mother liked this story so much, but it was somehow ingrained in my childhood. There’s a simple fisherman, a magic flounder, and a wife who is never satisfied.

At the beginning of the story they’re living in a hovel, a pigsty, a filthy shack, or even – in one version I saw – a “piss-pot.” Whatever the place is called, we might have a little sympathy for her wanting to make a few upgrades, even encouraging her husband to get more marketable skills. But her greedy nature does her in. Once she hears that the dutiful guy has met a talking fish, instead of just marveling at this, she immediately demands to know why he didn’t get something from the encounter. She keeps sending her husband back to ask for, in succession: a cottage, a palace, to be king, to be emperor, to be pope, and then – and if this isn’t overreaching I don’t know what it is — to be like God. At each request, a storm gathers force and the sea becomes darker and more tumultuous; the wife, furthermore, becomes more possessed and angrier at her husband, who starts out just wanting to please her and, pathetically, keeps doing her bidding even when he knows it’s all wrong.

They end up, of course, back where they started – in the filthy shack. Probably they don’t have too many nights of companionable Scrabble or lighthearted entertaining, but then again they’re not in prison, either.

As for me, I won’t be fishing for baubles or an elevation of status anytime soon. I will, however, try to get the lost diamond on my engagement ring replaced…eventually.

I will also continue slogging through a job search because it’s generally best, I’ve found, for a woman to maintain her own career. In the meantime, my husband’s not the only one in the family to wear purple; here I am with my doubles partner, Jessica, after a match. Pope envy? Not me.