Thoughts on Ayelet Waldman

I recognize that I am extremely slow to comment on this, but it has been churning around in my mind for a couple of weeks now, and I feel the need to comment.
If you have forgotten (and I wouldn't blame you) Ayelet Waldman is the woman who had the temerity to state on Oprah (and elsewhere) that she loved her husband more than her children. She went even further than this, and said that while she could imagine continuing on if one or more of her children were to die, she could not imagine being able to continue if her husband should die.
As can be imagined, this created a certain amount of outrage, with one woman in the audience of the Oprah show going so far as to indicate she would, in effect, like to rip Ms. Waldman limb from limb - perhaps what one might term an excessive response (at least I consider it excessive, but apparently this limb-rippin gwoman is far from alone in her viewpoint).
It seems to me that those who are attacking Ms. Waldman for not loving her children more than her husband have an essentially backward view of marriage. I will confess my own notion of marriage is skewed by three fairly major things. First, my parents marriage, which is 55 years old and going strong, has been remarkably hospitable to others (our home was a haven for all my cousings, and assorted others through the years), yet clearly founded on a strong love for each other (based, at least in part, on Sunday afternoon "rests" - don't ask!). My sister has recently celebrated her 29th anniversary, and I have been fortunate enough to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary this year too, and both of us do our best to model, with appropriate changes (or for those who like to use fancy latin phrases, mutatis mutandi - a great phrase to put in committee meeting minutes!) the marriage that we saw in our parents.
Trying to gather that experience into a few simple sentences is not easy, but I think the way I see and I hope I live my marriage is that my wife and I, by way of our love for each other, create a safe and supportive space within which our children can grow and mature. That model of marriage requires that our love for each other be stronger, and indeed of an entirely different nature, than that for our children. To imagine otherwise seems to me to present a rather impoverished view of matrimony, but others may beg to differ - your comments, as always, are welcome.