The truth is that, while mommies have most of the money, nannies do have power—the power to make our lives easier, or to upend our schedules and lives unintentionally or intentionally, and the tremendous power of caring for the most vulnerable members of our families. There are plenty of wonderful, loving nannies out there. One friend’s nanny attended child-care seminars at the local JCC—not because she was asked to but because she wanted to. My friend discovered she had taken this initiative only when she found the nanny’s notes, transcribed in broken, phonetic English and then painstakingly translated into Spanish, folded on the counter near her purse. Unbidden and uncompensated, this woman had gone to hours of trouble out of devotion not just to her charge and her bosses but also to the idea of making herself a better nanny. Another nanny risked her life when the scaffolding outside a grocery store on the Upper West Side collapsed to find her charge, a baby. Breaking away from first responders who told her it was too dangerous, she dove into the wreckage and found and recovered the baby (who was unharmed, but might not have remained so if not for her caretaker’s bravery and devotion).
There are also nannies who are resentful, or have no background or interest in child care and are doing it “until I figure out what I really want to do” (the twentysomething, college-educated variety) or because they are unqualified to do anything else. Some are undermining. Some act out. Some have bad judgment and terrible attitudes. On a day that became so windy so suddenly that police urged people to stay off the street, a friend called her nanny to tell her to come home with the children. Her seven-year-old later reported that the nanny had hung up the phone and said to him, “Your mother is so freaking ridiculous.” The truth is there are nannies who passive-aggressively call in sick when mothers have important events on the family calendar. Or leave the house in disarray to make a point. Nannies and mothers get into power struggles. They have arguments. Often they simmer under the same roof, needing and resenting one another. They confront and negotiate the intricacies of socioeconomic and cultural difference (in the case of nannies from other countries) or developmental gulfs (in the case of twentysomethings) and of envy (“My kid sees her more than she sees me!” a mother may fume; “Why should she have so much and I have less?” a nanny may seethe), all within the walls of a home. It can be helpful or maddening to have a nanny, or to be a nanny and have a mother as your boss. But I have never heard anyone describe it as easy.
The chemistry with a nanny, with whom a relationship can be every bit as complex as a marriage, is a wild card, and one of if not the most important determining factor in an Upper East Side mommy’s anxiety levels and quality of life. At one point I might have scoffed, “But you have the power to fire them!” Having lived it, I now wonder, And then what? In a culture where, as Anne-Marie Slaughter has observed, we have no infrastructure of care, no government standards, oversight, or monitoring of caregivers, mothers and nannies are too interdependent and options are too few for it to be quite so simple. Another drop of wine.
And then there is the Gordian knot, the triple-threat plague on my people: the interplay of calorie restriction, plummeting estrogen, and insomnia that dogs just about every one of the women with young children I spoke to. There is no overestimating, I realized at a certain point in my career as a mother on the Upper East Side, how anxious and miserable it can make a person to be sleep deprived, hormonal, and hungry. Women who delay marriage and childbearing may have a sense of perspective and more thoroughly myelinated brains than twentysomethings, and more social and financial stability. But we are less energetic than our younger mommy counterparts. And it’s harder for us to recharge by getting the rest we so badly need. As estrogen levels ebb and in some cases plunge from the midthirties onward, sleep becomes elusive. Lower levels of estrogen do more than keep you awake. Researchers are now realizing that women’s vulnerability to anxiety and mood disorders may be explained in large part by declining estrogen levels. Estrogen calms the fear response in healthy women and female rats: the higher the estrogen was in the blood of women who were trained on a fear-extinction task by researchers, the less likely they were to startle. In short, when estrogen is on the wane, so is your sense of calm.
Now add to this mix the plague of one of the most bizarre imperatives of the UES: to be as fit, fat-free, and sylphlike as possible. On a business trip to Abuja, Nigeria, my husband visited a market in search of a gift for me. A plump woman in vibrant traditional dress, helping him sort through the brightly colored clothing in her stall, asked, “Is your wife fat?” When he answered, in confusion, “What? No, she’s skinny!” the woman looked down in embarrassment. She had meant, “Is your wife healthy and beautiful? And are you a rich man?” She did not make eye contact, he reported, even as he paid and thanked her for her help. His wife was thin, and he had admitted it. He might as well have been covered in boils. But here on the Upper East Side, nothing sells faster than a size 00. Women are thin, thinner, thinnest. It is our very own marker of beauty and wealth, and the standard is exacting. “Aside from Hollywood and the modeling world, I don’t know of any place where there is more pressure to be thin,” Manhattan psychoanalyst Stephanie Newman observed in her private practice on the Upper East Side, where she has treated many patients for eating disorders. And the skinnier you are, endocrinologists tell us, the less estrogen you have. Fat is not necessarily healthy, but fat cells are estrogenic, and estrogen helps blunt anxiety. Nervous and thin go together, it turns out, like Dolce&Gabbana.
Being skinny and being hungry and substituting kale juice for a proper meal, all ways of life in the tribe I studied, affect more than estrogen levels. The conditions of a famous starvation study of thirty-six male WWII conscientious objectors nearly replicate the daily practices of many women on the UES and the standard US recommendations for weight loss today: a five hundred to six hundred calorie deficit daily for a goal of losing one to two pounds per week (the men in the starvation study had sixteen hundred calories a day, and walked twenty-two miles per week, with a weight loss goal of two and a half pounds per week). In that study, the men quickly began to experience lethargy, irritability, and significant anxiety, as well as dizziness, cold intolerance, hair loss, ringing in the ears, inability to concentrate, and loss of sex drive. They became obsessed with food and developed elaborate rituals when they sat down to eat, much as anorexics develop rituals around food preparation and food consumption.
In short, the whole experiment was a lot like a weekday lunch at Sant Ambroeus. And it’s worth noting that such dietary restrictions sent a full 6 percent of the motivated and healthy participants in the WWII study to a psychiatric hospital: one man became suicidal; another chopped off three of his fingers. No wonder the women around me, women for whom “juicing” and fasting and “detoxing” and rigorous exercise for hours are a way of life, were so on edge. It was a miracle, apparently, that they were merely giving one another pointed, envious once-overs in school elevators rather than taking meat cleavers to themselves and others.
Indeed, the drops in estrogen seen in skinny women in midlife, a description that fits my tribe to a tee, make them more aggressive. In one study, researchers administered a point-subtraction aggression paradigm game to women who met the criteria for high anxiety and women who didn’t. They noted a higher ratio of attack by highly anxious women, and observed, with some surprise, that the attack option of the game had no instrumental advantage in terms of gaining points, and “so constitutes a pure case of spiteful, reactive aggression.” Aha, I thought as I read it, flashing back to the sidewalk charges that were a daily affair where I had set up base camp.
And for every plague, a drop of wine. Or a glass. Or a few.
Wealthy husbands on the Upper East Side collect red wine. The wine cellars in their Hamptons homes are a form of cultural capital, suggesting that they aren’t just rich consumers; they are refined and erudite connoisseurs. They open a bottle of red for enjoyment, for sharing, but also for power. Like the right contemporary art, the
right ’94 Pomerol telegraphs not just what you have but also that you know. It is the husband, sometimes in consultation with the other husband at the table, who orders the bottles with the three-digit price tags when couples go out to a restaurant in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, their wives drink, usually white (red, they say, keeps them awake) to get by. To be an Upper East Side woman with young children is to drink wine. Nationwide, women are the growth engine for wine sales—and everyone in zip codes 10021 and 10075 and 10028 knows it. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that Upper East Siders are healthier than all other New Yorkers on nearly every measure. But they bombed one: they are 35 percent more likely to binge drink than anyone else in our town. One in five adults in the tribe I studied, in other words, has engaged in binge drinking in the past month. How many of those binge drinkers are women? There are no stats, but based on my fieldwork, and a fair amount of participating versus just participant-observation, my quasi-scientific answer is: a lot. It is nothing, nothing at all, for revelers at a moms’ night out to quaff four glasses of wine each. At arts-and-crafts studios where mommies take their kids for birthday parties and rainy days, wine is served as early as 11:00 a.m. The mommies I knew drank—white wine, vodka, tequila, and, for those bent on male approval or setting themselves apart, scotch or some other “guy” whiskey—every night. Except Monday. That was a day for penance—a juice fast to make up for the weekend of drinking and eating. Tuesday through Friday, drinking was on.
“And all bets are off on the weekend,” a friend explained when I asked her the rules. Meaning, start in the morning if you want, and have wine for lunch and a cocktail before dinner and more wine with dinner. For many of the women with kids I knew in Manhattan—women who wore sunglasses in the school hallways on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday mornings—drinking was a way to self-soothe and self-medicate, a solution of sorts, something to bring on sleep, a reward for surviving the cab ride, the crosstown schlep, the argument with the nanny. Seeing someone underfed but overserved at a gala or dinner out, seeing someone who needs to be poured into her car by her driver, was nothing unusual. People might whisper about it the next day if you went really crazy, but there’s a basic understanding and unspoken agreement, and it is this: “We drink. No big deal.” There’s a spectrum, of course, from teetotaling to being an alcoholic. But what struck me as I drank with the women around me was that, be it psychological, social, or emotional, the drinking was mainly, to my eye, tribal. It is virtually comme il faut because it is part of the culture and it is part of the culture in large part because it works on the worry. “They need a bar in the pediatric ER!” Candace told me emphatically after her trip there with her son.
And it’s not just alcohol. On the Upper East Side, benzodiazepines are a girl’s best friend. Plenty of the Manhattan mommies I knew relied on prescription drugs, daily. Ativan. Xanax. Valium. Klonopin. Ambien. They had them all, and weren’t afraid to take them. Frequently, they mixed them with wine, as was the regular practice of a glam fashion designer and mommy of two whose head was frequently in her plate at an Upper East Side restaurant of the moment—at lunch. The women I knew took antianxiety meds to fall asleep. They took them in the middle of the night, when they woke up with their hearts pounding, panicking about schools or money or whether their husbands were faithful. They took them to calm their nerves before drop-off or a luncheon where they expected to encounter more frenemies than friends (the mere idea of seeing the Queen of Queen Bees at an event, with her sneering and snideness, made me want to reach for a flask). And they took them again when they wore off. I wasn’t judging, really. I used benzos myself to medicate for my phobia of flying, and one day in the school elevator, overhearing another mother, a perfect stranger, tell her friend that she hated flying and Xanax didn’t help, I turned to her and suggested, with great authority and no self-consciousness, “That’s because you have to take it with a Bloody Mary!” We had never seen each other before, let alone spoken.
Some women will give up their wine and their benzos as their kids get older. For them, these are a way to smother the stress of being in charge of their children and the people in charge of their children and everything around them, all the time. When the kids are older and in school all day and the hand-to-hand-combat phase of mothering begins to fade, so does their using. But for a portion of these mothers, drinking and drugs are more than a phase. For them, motherhood doesn’t just incite the urge to drink and mix; it also masks it, providing a convenient pretext and deep cover. Everybody else is doing it. So no one notices. Some of the privileged mommies will develop “a problem.” At an Upper East Side AA outpost located in a church between the Prada and Ralph Lauren storefronts on Madison Avenue, exquisite, lean mommies decked out in Chanel and Céline and Valentino, all just a few blocks south, avail themselves of the program’s child-care option so they can slip into a meeting. They are a secretive tribe within a tribe and they will never, ever tell. At parties, they will arrive early and carefully request something that looks like wine in a wineglass. At a moms’ dinner at Serafina, they will pass off tonic with lime as a vodka tonic. They will say they’re not drinking because of antibiotics, or a headache, or an early appointment the next day. They will keep up appearances and save face, because that is the rule and the way. At their AA meetings, they will settle halfway into their chairs without ever really relaxing, rustling in place like slender, nervous racehorses, their faces tense with effort and worry. Really, it could be lunch at Le Bilboquet, the unmarked restaurant and gathering place of the tribe around the corner. All that is missing are the glasses of wine.
But wine cannot blunt the biggest anxieties. One of these, I realized after the evening at Rebecca’s, was dependency. The more I watched and listened and lunched and drank with the UES mothers around me, the more I saw that for many of them, their lives, happiness, and very identities hinged on things and people entirely outside their control.
Economic dependency on their husbands, I came to believe, kept many of the women I knew awake at night, whether they realized it or not. The knowledge that their husbands could leave them for other women, the simple realization that they could not support themselves without them, seemed to gnaw at some of the women I knew as badly as their hunger pain. Some told me, in hushed tones, that like their mothers and grandmothers, they had secret bank accounts where they stashed their allowances and other money they had access to “just in case.” Several women clued me in about “year-end bonuses” husbands gave their wives—as if they were employees rather than partners. “My mother told me to get as much jewelry as possible from my husband. As insurance,” a woman told me wryly as we chatted on a playground bench about a mutual acquaintance’s spectacularly acrimonious and very public divorce. My interlocutress had graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy. She also had an MBA. But she had never worked.
“The very type of woman who is drawn to a master of the universe type,” Manhattan clinical psychologist and author Stephanie Newman told me when I asked her about anxiety and economic dependency in her Upper East Side practice, “may well end up feeling marginalized in her own home, fearful that she cannot fend for herself and support her children.” And if things do go wrong in her marriage, “divorce may be no solution, in practical and emotional terms” observes lawyer and psychoanalyst Rachel Blakeman, “for a woman whose self-concept is entirely wrapped up in having a perfect marriage.” For many such women, there is no way out of this conundrum—being married to rich and powerful men—that had at first felt like The Answer.
“She shouldn’t flirt with other women’s husbands!” women told me pointedly about a beautiful French mother and investment banker, a mom at another school whose kids were older than mine, when I asked why so many of the mommies at our school seemed ambivalent about her. She was a transfer to the troop, having married a wealthy New York native, and she apparently found the tribe’s sex-segregation practices as bewildering as I did. Like me, she could often be
seen talking to men at the kids’ birthday parties and concerts. Probably drumming up business, I figured, and trying to have a little fun. I found her glamorous and smart, and always searched her out. I made a point of putting my husband in her path, too. Wasn’t any woman who flirted with him doing me a favor? If he was in a good mood, my life was easier. And safe fun and titillation didn’t seem like much to ask in exchange for a lifetime of commitment. But for women who felt their marriages and motherhood were their entire identities, and their husbands their only lifelines, I came to realize, flirtation was anxiety inducing, even terrifying. It suggested the possibility and stood as a reminder that it could all be taken away.
Some of these women were economically dependent not only on their husbands but also on their husbands’ parents. Much of the spectacular wealth on the Upper East Side is intergenerational, which can lead to strangely infantilized relationships between young adults (and not-so-young adults) and their parents or in-laws. More than one woman described to me the strange pressure of needing to please one’s in-laws because they held the financial purse strings. “My husband basically stands to inherit a lot, and that gives his parents very real power over our lives,” one woman explained simply as we walked behind the group on a school field trip. Chatting about school tuition, which she said her in-laws paid, had led us here. She showed me her iPhone calendar, reading off a series of appointments and luncheons to which she would ferry and accompany her mother-in-law in the next week. “It’s not that I don’t want to help out. It’s that there’s this unspoken script that I owe it, because they bought our apartment as a wedding gift, and my husband works for his father’s business.” Another woman described a typical Upper East Side situation: she and her husband wanted a place of their own out at the beach for themselves and their two young children. Her husband’s parents nixed the idea, saying their own place was much bigger, they had room for them there, and so their plan didn’t make “sense.” Her in-laws were being generous, financially and emotionally, but it cost the younger generation something, because they were also being controlling. “It would be nice to feel like we were the grown-ups,” she told me flatly. “It would be nice to have our own place and some independence.” Her situation is more common than not in the tribe I studied. Many very wealthy people in my town are, on some level, waiting for their even wealthier elders to die, with mixed feelings about it.
Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir Page 17
