It’s been a little over a month since Eliot Spitzer resigned and while the topic seems to have died down in the press, I’m sure the effects are still lingering in the Spitzer household and especially in the hearts of his wife and teenage daughters. As a teenage daughter myself, I realized not a lot has been written about what effect this must be having on his girls and I thought maybe its time somebody brought up the subject.
Similar to Eliot Spitzer’s girls (who go to Horace Mann), I go to a small private school where all the students have a pretty good connection with their teachers. I can’t imagine what it would be like for me to come into school, day after day, and face my teachers with them knowing something like that about my father. Just thinking about it makes me feel weird. I think if I was in that situation, every time I interacted with my teachers whether it’s to talk about a history paper or my recent math test, I would be envisioning them envisioning the news about my father like headlines in the bubble of a cartoon character. I would be imagining them imagining the television news clips, the internet articles, and the front page pictures of my father and of Ashley Dupre on the covers of everything from the New York Times to the New York Post to New York Magazine. Suddenly New York would feel very small.
Moving on from school and teachers, let’s talk about something as basic as bringing friends home. What are the Spitzer girls doing? As a sixteen year old, I have to admit I like spending a lot of time with my friends both in and outside of school. I especially enjoy inviting my friends over to my house. If my dad was involved in this type of scandal, it could make a normal routine of inviting my friends over pretty awkward. Would my friends run away from my dad? Would their parents even be warning them that he might be looking at them the wrong way and that they should watch out? I mean how strange would that be?
The final blow I think would be the way the Spitzer girls might end up viewing guys because of this whole thing. I know my father impacts how I view boys my own age. As many people have stated, in a sense, a father is a daughter’s first love; an example of how your father treats your mom and even you is often how you come to expect guys to treat you later on. How do you deal with it when your father breaks your mother’s heart, and yours too, when you are so young? I wonder.
When I asked my father about the whole thing, his comment was typical for him. Compassionate but also optimistic. He said that while it hurts him to imagine what Eliot Spitzer’s girls are going through, he also thinks its encouraging to see how resilient young women from successful families can be. The person he pointed to as an example of this: Chelsea Clinton.
