Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE Comme Il Faut

  CHAPTER TWO Playdate Pariah

  CHAPTER THREE Going Native: Mommy Wants a Birkin

  CHAPTER FOUR Manhattan Geisha

  CHAPTER FIVE A Girls’ Night In

  CHAPTER SIX A Xanax and a Bloody Mary: Manhattan Moms on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

  CHAPTER SEVEN A Rainy Day

  CHAPTER EIGHT Summary Fieldnotes

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  About Wednesday Martin

  Sources

  For Blossom and Daphne. And for all the mommies.

  INTRODUCTION

  ONE OF the first gifts I received after my older son was born was a baby book from an old friend, a mom of two who still lives in the small Michigan town where she and I grew up. The gift both welcomed my son and acknowledged that I was living in New York City now, a place very different from the one where she and I spent our childhoods. Urban Babies Wear Black is a whimsically illustrated board book that lists, with the succinctness of a five-minute sociology lecture, exactly how urban babies are different—starting with their outfits (black and stylish versus pink or blue and cutesy-pie), going on to what they eat and drink (sushi and lattes versus hot dogs and milk) and how they pass the time (going to operas and art galleries versus the playground). I’m pretty sure I loved this book more than my baby did. In our first weeks at home together, I read it to him over and over. Sometimes, I even found myself reading it while he napped.

  Eventually it dawned on me that the appeal of the book was that it also had things to say about the babies’ mothers. These creatures were visible only in small, alluring pieces—a high heel here, a fancy dog leash there—as they strolled and jogged and taxied and toted their tots across the pages of the book, making their babies chicly urban, being chicly urban themselves. I scrutinized the manicures and the fur baby carriers closely as I read aloud to my son. Who were they really, these glamorous, stylishly turned out women with sophisticated babies? What did they do? And how did they do it?

  I wanted to see more of these mommies of urban babies because I wanted to know more about my peers, other Manhattan mommies. Because I was a woman with kids in the industrialized West, I was mothering utterly unlike the people I had studied and written about for years in my work as a social researcher focusing on, among other things, the history and evolutionary prehistory of family life. Hunter-gatherers and foragers, living as our ancestors once did, raise their babies communally, in a rich social network of mothers, sisters, nieces, and other conspecifics who can be counted on to care for (and even nurse) the infants of others as if they were their own. My mother had a version of this support system when my brothers and I were growing up in Michigan: a dozen or so other women in the neighborhood who mothered full-time were fictive kin she could call on to watch us when she needed to run an errand or take a nap, or simply craved some adult company. Meanwhile, we got to hang out with other kids. Backyards connected homes, mothers, and children in a web of reciprocal altruism: You help me, I’ll help you. I’ll watch the kids from my back window today, you do it tomorrow. Thanks for the flour; I’ll bring you a slice or two of cake when it’s baked.

  In stark contrast, my New York City baby and I lived in an intensely privatized way, in spite of our proximity to so many others. I seldom even saw my hundreds of downtown Manhattan neighbors, who were busy with their own lives. Everything they did transpired in spaces—offices, apartments, schools—sequestered from public view. Having left my natal group, living far from my natal land, I had no nearby kin to call on. My closest adoptive relatives were elderly in-laws, enthused to see us but unable to lend a hand. And, as we live neolocally in the United States—leaving extended family to form our own separate households upon marriage—they were a half hour’s journey from us, anyway.

  Meanwhile my husband, like my own father and so many fathers in the West, and particularly the ones in Manhattan—an extraordinarily expensive town, where the pressure on wage earners with dependents is tremendous—went back to work after just a week home with the baby and me. For a time we had a baby nurse, a fixture of Manhattan babyhood who is hired through word of mouth to help with the type of baby basics our mothers and grandmothers used to teach us. She arrived cheerily every morning to lend a hand and remind me of what I had learned from the hospital maternity ward’s brief baby-care classes, and from babysitting so long before. Aside from her and the friends who visited, though, I was mostly alone with our neonate, and with my anxieties about getting mothering right, day after day.

  I was also something of a shut-in. We had a lovely little jewel of a backyard garden where I loved to sit with the baby. Other than that, I had very little desire to leave the house. The kamikaze cabdrivers, throngs of rushing people, jackhammers, and car horns made the town I had loved for over a decade feel newly inhospitable, even dangerous, to my son. A good friend, who had given birth just before I did, was so disenchanted with big-city motherhood that she fled to the suburbs. And I hadn’t made friends at the Mommy & Me yoga studio around the corner. Although none seemed to be working, the downward-dogging new moms scattered with polite nods each day after class, presumably to shut themselves up in their individual homes with their individual babies and do their individual things.

  Who, I frequently wondered, was going to teach me to be the urban mommy of an urban baby?

  A Midwesterner born, I had a slow and relatively traditional childhood. I walked to and from school with a pack of mixed-age neighborhood kids every morning, then played kick the can and mucked around our backyards and the nearby woods with them, unsupervised, into the early evening. Weekends, we all rode bikes and did Girl or Boy Scouts. When I was older, I babysat some evenings and weekends, too, a logical first job for a hands-on big sister and a popular pastime among the young pre-reproductives in our neighborhood.

  Probably the only notable thing about my background, the thing that could help me find my footing now, was my mother’s fascination with anthropology and the then-nascent field of sociobiology. Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was one of her favorite books. Mead’s suggestion that Western-style childhood and adolescence wasn’t the only or right way, and that Samoans arguably did it better, scandalized the country when the book came out in 1928, and all over again when it was reissued in 1972. Mead, my mother explained, was an anthropologist. She studied people in different cultures, learning about them by living among them and doing what they did alongside them. Then she wrote about it. Being an anthropologist struck me as an impossibly exotic and glamorous and appealing job, growing up as I did surrounded by mothers who were mostly housewives and fathers who were mostly doctors and lawyers.

  This was also the era of Jane Goodall, a beguiling, ponytailed blonde in khakis and a pith helmet who became the public face of primatology. Goodall—who observed and protected her brood of Gombe chimps in Tanzania, introducing them to the world via National Geographic—was my idea of a rock star. Over dinners at our house, we talked about my father’s day, my mother’s day, what my brothers and I had done at school—and Mary Leakey, a cigar-chomping mom of three whose fossil discoveries in Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli, Tanzania, were forcing everyone to rethink human prehistory.

  When my younger
brothers bickered at dinner, my mother invoked Robert Trivers’s theories of parental investment and sibling rivalry. When they were nice, she talked about kin selection and altruism. Wasn’t it odd, she mused one day when I was around ten years old, E. O. Wilson obviously on her mind as she folded the laundry, that if I were about to get hit by a car and she pulled me out of the way, she would be doing it to protect not just me but also her own genes?

  This unsentimental (if oversimplified, circa 1975) take on the sociobiology of motherhood, this entirely novel theory of relationships between parents and children, got my attention. Along with my mother’s book collection—Mead sat alongside Colin Turnbull’s books about the Ik of Uganda and the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, Betty Friedan, The Hite Report, Silent Spring, and towering piles of Natural History Magazine—it also likely set me on a course to study biological and cultural anthropology, with a focus on the lives of women. Nothing fascinated me more than grooming, friendship, and struggles for dominance among savanna baboons. Or the strangeness of worlds within worlds like my college campus’s Greek system of sororities and fraternities, with their choreographed pledge-week rituals and passionate loyalties and rivalries. I studied Old World and New World monkeys and Homo habilis and Homo ergaster brain sizes, and wrote about how sorority girls weren’t so different from great apes.

  In my twenties, seeking excitement, I moved to New York City to pursue a doctorate in cultural studies and comparative literature. Manhattan changed everything about me—my goals (I finished my doctorate but decided I didn’t want to be an academic after all), my fashion sense (clothing, always an interest, became a near fixation in a town of beautiful and beautifully turned out women), even who I was on a cellular level (the sheer excitement of being in a big city altered my cortisol levels and metabolism, transforming me into a stereotypically skinny Manhattanite with insomnia). Energized, I wrote and edited for magazines and taught a few courses in my discipline to pay the rent.

  In my midthirties, having delayed marriage and childbearing as highly educated women living in affluent metropoles tend to do, I married a wry native with deep professional and emotional roots in his town. He was born and raised here, a reality as exotic and appealing to me as, say, being from Tahiti. Or Samoa. He had a pleasingly nerdy microknowledge of the city’s history and seemed to have a personal anecdote about nearly every street corner, building, and neighborhood. If I had any hesitation about making a life for myself in New York City, he swept it away with his passion for the place. It was appealing that his parents and brother and sister-in-law were here, with his teenage daughters from his previous marriage living with him on weekends. His was a cozy, ready-made family for me, with my own family so far away.

  New York City had the added benefit of being one of the few places a writer like me could thrive, in ecological niches as diverse as advertising, publishing, and teaching. Teeming and vital, the city reminded me of a rain forest, the only other habitat that could support such extreme and robust variation among life-forms. At one point I had lived in an Indian neighborhood abutting a Peruvian one, then moved near an enclave called Little Sweden. My husband wasn’t budging, and I was fine with that. We settled downtown, and six months after marrying, I was pregnant. We never thought about leaving New York City. My husband had been raised here, after all, and I had gone to the significant trouble of moving to Manhattan from halfway across the country. Why wouldn’t it be good enough for our offspring, too? And so our moment of discovery—We’re having a baby!—was not just personally joyful. It was also the beginning of something much bigger than me or my marriage or my background or my feelings about being a mother. It marked a transition, I realized only later: my initiation into another world—the world of Manhattan motherhood.

  This book is the stranger-than-fiction story of what I discovered when I made an academic experiment of studying Manhattan motherhood as I lived it. It is the story of a world within a world, a description I do not use lightly. We moved to the Upper East Side just after 9/11, craving both physical distance from the tragedy and closer proximity to my husband’s family. This felt especially important now that we had a child. We longed, at a moment when the world seemed so dangerous and our town seemed so vulnerable, to give ourselves and him the comfort of a tight band of loving relatives. That would be the easy part. There were also the other mommies to learn about and live among.

  We eventually settled on Park Avenue in the Seventies. From my base camp, I went to Mommy & Me groups, applied to exclusive music classes, wrangled with nannies, coffee’d with other mothers, and “auditioned” at preschools, for my firstborn son and then his little brother.

  In the process I learned that motherhood was another island upon the island of Manhattan, and that Upper East Side mothers were, in fact, a tribe apart. Theirs was a secret society of sorts, governed by rules, rituals, uniforms, and migration patterns that were entirely new to me, and subtended by beliefs, ambitions, and cultural practices I had never dreamed existed.

  Becoming an Upper East Side mom, one day and interaction and trip to the playground at a time, was an experience I undertook with some trepidation. The überwealthy and status-conscious neighborhood where we landed, and the frequently smug-seeming mommies dressed to the nines around me, felt foreign and intimidating. But, like a higher-order primate and like humans everywhere, I longed to fit in, for my own good and, even more, for my son’s, and eventually my other son’s, too.

  I knew well from my studies of literature and anthropology alike that, without a sense of belonging, and actually belonging, we great apes are lost. Outcasts in literature and the real world may be interesting antiheroes we can root for, but they are usually miserable. From Odysseus to Daisy Miller, from Huck Finn to Hester Prynne, from Isabel Archer to Lily Bart, social outsiders and pariahs, particularly female ones, do not fare well. Unprotected, unsupported by a network, they die figuratively and sometimes literally, not only on the pages of books but also in society and the wild, as field biologists have amply documented. And there is no one more at risk than a female primate transferring to a new troop with a neonate. Primatologists tell us, for example, that mother chimps who attempt to join a group of strangers are frequently subjected to harassment and harrowing physical violence by established females; sometimes they and their infants are even killed by the very peers from whom they seek community.

  Of course, nobody was out for my blood as I sought to find my place on the Upper East Side, at least not literally. But finding a way in and gaining acceptance felt important, even urgent. Who wants to be on the outside? Who doesn’t want friends to have coffee with after morning drop-off? Who doesn’t want her child to have playmates and playdates? My in-laws and my husband helped me along, telling me where to shop for groceries and explaining the byzantine rules of the galas, over-the-top bar and bat mitzvahs, social clubs, co-op boards, and other strange-to-me rites and practices specific to our new home. But Upper East Side mommy culture was a thing in itself, my own puzzle to solve, since I was a mommy who wanted—needed—to play ball. Yes, I had made plenty of forays to the Upper East Side over the course of my time in New York. I knew it was glossy and moneyed and privileged. I knew understatement was not an Upper East Side thing. I knew the uniform and philosophy and ethos were different from downtown’s. But there was no getting a purchase on the secret world-within-a-world of Upper East Side motherhood until I entered into it. Without children, I might never have noticed it, this parallel universe of privileged parenting and privileged childhood. With children, though, I was more than compelled by it—I felt obliged to understand it, infiltrate it, crack its cultural code. Getting to know the mommies all around me and learning to do it their way, becoming an Upper East Side mother, was a journey so strange and so unexpected that nothing I had studied or experienced—not the cow-jumping and blood-drinking rites of the Masai, or the ax fights of the Yanomami in the Amazon, or the ritualized bacchanalian rites of sorority rush at a Big Ten school—could rival it, or pre
pare me for it.

  Childhood on the Upper East Side is unusual by just about anyone’s standards. There are drivers and nannies and helicopter rides to the Hamptons. There are the “right” music classes for two-year-olds, tutors for three-year-olds to prep them for kindergarten entrance exams and interviews, and playdate consultants for four-year-olds who don’t know how to play because they don’t have time to play because they have so many “enrichment classes”—French, Mandarin, Little Learners, and cooking classes, as well as golf, tennis, and voice lessons—after preschool. There are wardrobe consultants to help moms buy the right clothes for themselves for school drop-off and pickup. There are teetering high heels and breathtaking J. Mendel and Tom Ford furs at playgrounds and at birthday parties that cost $5,000 and up in apartments so big and with ceilings so high that they can and do have full-size bouncy castles inside.

  If childhood is unusual here, motherhood is beyond bizarre. I learned firsthand about the “gets” that define life for the privileged and perfect women with children I lived among. Their identities, I discovered, are forged through cruel, Upper East Side–specific rites of passage: the co-op board interview and school “exmissions”; the cults of Physique 57 and SoulCycle, where the highly educated, frequently underemployed, and wealthy women I have come to think of as Manhattan Geishas pour their vaunted career ambitions into perfecting themselves physically. There are obsessional quests for nearly-impossible-to-procure luxury items (like my own, once I had “gone native,” for a Birkin bag) and “insider trading” of information, such as how to hire a black-market Disney guide with a disability pass in order to circumvent all the lines. An Upper East Side mommy’s identity also emerges from the fraught, complicated relationships between herself and the women she hires to help her raise her children and run her home (or homes). Learning about Upper East Side motherhood west of Lex, living among and learning from Upper East Side mommies, opened up a world that titillated, fascinated, educated, and occasionally appalled me.