Naomi Schaefer Riley:
Want to know why Wendy Davis will have trouble winning higher office in Texas or anywhere else in America? It’s not because she stretched the truth in her “from mobile-home-living single mom to Harvard Law grad” campaign biography, nor because her husband paid for her education, nor even because she placed a lot of value on her career.
Nope: It’s because Davis, the Lone Star State senator who became famous for her filibuster of an abortion-limiting bill in Texas, lost custody of her children to her ex-husband.
This revelation about Davis’ past, which came to light thanks to reporting by Wayne Slater at The Dallas Morning News, is nothing less than shocking to most women, regardless of their political affiliation.
According to Slater’s account, Davis decided to leave her children, then ages 8 and 2, with their father in Fort Worth while she went off to Harvard Law School. Who could resist the siren call of the Ivy League? Well, I suspect that most women and plenty of men would, if it meant moving across the country from their kids for three years.
But before we get to that, note two things. First of all, that 8-year-old was not her husband’s biological child. I don’t mean to cast any aspersions on Jeff Davis’ commitment to his daughters; in fact, he looks like the knight in shining armor of this story.
He not only took on raising his own daughter alone, but also another girl, who’d been abandoned first by her father and then her mother.
Second: After Jeff finished paying off the last of Wendy’s school loans, she filed for divorce and gave up custody of her children. According to Jeff, his wife just decided, “While I’ve been a good mother, it’s not a good time for me right now.”
That line sounds like it was lifted from MTV’s “16 and Pregnant,” but even the girls on that show are probably not self-absorbed or immature enough to utter it. I hope Jeff Davis made it up, but somehow I doubt it.
There are single mothers all over the country in dire straits who can’t afford to have such a thought. And even if someone offered them the chance to get away from it all and start over without a child, few of them would say yes.
Sure, there are women who pursue high-powered careers and need to spend time away from their children. Take Florida Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, who (according to a recent New York Times blog) manages to do plenty with her 9-year-old and 13-year-old twins over the course of a weekend at home. She played basketball with her son, read with her daughter, shuttled one to ballet, took another to the bookstore and out to lunch.
