How do we tell the children?

Among the many angles on the Eliot Spitzer the media are chewing on is how parents should talk to children about infidelity. Forget prostitution for the moment—I’m not ready to figure out how you explain to children the buying and selling of sex. What about infidelity?

Having grown up the child of a single mom, I always thought one of the grosser things about marriage as mythologized in our culture was how it muddled up the parents’ sexual relationship in their relationships with their children. Ick. My mother had boyfriends and partners over the years, but I always knew that had nothing to do with my relationship with her (and that ultimately I came first). And I think that’s a good thing.

Now, against all my expectations, I’m married. Which raises for me the question of how I make sure that my children know that my relationship with them is one thing and my relationship with their father is another. I’m pretty confident that infidelity and divorce—let alone prostitution—are not on the horizon for us, but I’m sure there will ups and downs in the marriage and I hope my children will understand that that’s about me and their father and not about them. My relationship with my children is unconditional.

But I lack models for how you convey this within the confines of heterosexual marriage. Perhaps one element is generally conveying that mama and daddy are separate (and imperfect) people and that our lives extend beyond our children, so there’s never any shattering of idols. My partner and I each spend time caring for our daughter alone, so I hope that we are cultivating equal and separate relationships with her. Still, we are a family unit—which is pretty wonderful, I think—and that is all she knows. I guess I just hope I never fetishize that unit. We’re still, also, individuals.

Any thoughts, gentle readers?