When I read about Dr. Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, I rested the newspaper on my lap and started to sort out my emotions. She is impressive. Her educational credentials are second to none, with an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and a graduate degree in international relations from Oxford University. Dr. Rice is also a Rhodes Scholar. And how coincidental is it, I thought at the time, that she shares a surname and Stanford alum status with Condoleeza Rice, another admirable and influential black woman?

Anyway, it’s much more important — for the purposes of this blog — that Dr. Rice has intermarried. Her husband is Ian Cameron, a Canadian and executive producer of ABC News’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”.

How exhausting it was to read about her many accomplishments! Especially when I’m over here working full time, nursing an infant, trying to put my bad relationship with my mother on the back burner and trying to be a wife and big sister to a teenage girl sometimes leave me feeling exhausted. And let’s not factor in expectations from my family and friends to produce a novel. (Yeah, I’ll just work on that instead of sleeping!)

Where in the world did she and does she get the energy to be so accomplished?! And then I decided that it doesn’t matter. We all do whatever we can. So long as we are productive members of society and are good to our families, I think we can be satisfied with ourselves.

Let us skip all the debate about whether there are any conflicts of interest here, that a senior administration official is married to a high-level media executive for one of the most popular political news shows currently on the air. And don’t even read the nasty Internet comments about how hard it is to tell whether the ‘Northeastern elites’ are intermarried, because so few of them (including yours truly, although I’m not one of the elites) change their surnames after marriage. I hope this beautiful family (I think she has a son, not pictured here) gets all the health, affection and happiness that they can manage to hold in their arms.