Hrdy and anthropologist Kristen Hawkes and more recently Katie Hinde have shown that, in de Waal’s words, “the human team spirit started with collective care for [our] young, not just mothers but adults all around.” These adults included men but were mostly, Hawkes and Hinde showed us, other women—kin and the kindly disposed who simply helped out when it was necessary, and who were helped out in turn when they needed it. Science suggests that being a cooperative breeder isn’t just doing good—it also feels good. For de Waal, rhesus monkeys eloquently make the case that maternal care and communal care feel good for those who do it. Every spring, when the rhesus monkeys have babies, juvenile females go nuts trying to lend a hand—and get their hands on them. They stay close by, attentively and tirelessly grooming the mothers of the beguiling infants until a mom agrees that the sitter can have a moment with her baby. These sitters snatch the babies with all-consuming zeal, de Waal reports, “turning them upside down to inspect the genitals, licking their faces, grooming them from all sides, and eventually dozing off with the babies firmly clutched in their arms.” This nodding off with the babies happens like clockwork and without exception, “giving the impression that the babysitters are in a trance, or perhaps ecstatic.” Clutching the babies close releases oxytocin in the sitters’ brains and blood, lulling them into a delicious sleep. They invariably rouse after a few minutes in order to return the babies to their mothers.
Such observations of our nonhuman primate relatives, as well as extensive neuroimaging experiments, have led anthropologist James Rilling to conclude that “we have emotional biases toward cooperation that can only be overcome with effortful cognitive control.” In other words, caring is our first impulse; only our minds stand in the way of doing so every time.
Our two sons were eventually accepted at schools on the Upper West Side, and with my work and my husband’s, going back and forth from the East Side every day during rush hour seemed like too much to contemplate. We moved across town. Mommies on the Upper West Side are thought to be more casual and friendly and relaxed than Upper East Side mommies, and I have generally found that to be the case. Nobody makes too big a deal about playdates; the kids just sort of tumble over to a nearby playground when school is over. I am rarely charged here; I never feel underdressed. And I live closer to Candace and Lily now.
Sometimes, though, I miss the immaculateness of the Upper East Side, the sense of safety, its burnished, formal sedateness. When I want to see my Upper East Side girlfriends, or have an Upper East Side experience—lunch at Sant Ambroeus or a browse at Charlotte Olympia or window-shopping along Madison—it’s relatively quick and easy to pop across the park. Many of my East Side girlfriends have children who attend school on the Upper West Side now, so sometimes we meet on my side of the world, too. Like so many other uptown dwellers, I cross over. But those two places—Upper East and Upper West—do feel very distinct to me still, as they do to most other New Yorkers. I can love and appreciate and embrace the difference, now that I’m no longer in the trenches on the East Side, trying to decode it all and fit in somehow.
I had to retire my Birkin. In Paris for a vacation, I consulted a doctor in the Sixth about a persistent numbness in my arm. The neurologists I consulted in New York ruled out the serious things but had no solution to offer, no root cause to suggest. I was unable to type, which was inconvenient, to say the very least, for a writer. I spent several days of our trip massaging my right forearm and fretting. The chic Parisian doctor sat behind her desk and like a chic Parisian, she took in not just my story of a writer being unable to write but also my outfit, my bag, every part of my outward appearance. Then she spoke in an emphatically French way. She blamed my heavy bag, pronouncing, “It’s zee Birkahn, or zee writing. You shoooze.”
Lily had twin daughters two years ago, and she named me their godmother. I see the girls almost every Thursday and have taken it as my mission to dote upon and indulge them. They are energetic and curious and beautiful, Lily’s girls, and they are endlessly entertaining. Lily is more a mommy than anyone else I know, better at it and calmer about it than I ever was with only one baby at a time. Sometimes we talk about Flora, and she tells me that it does not get easier, or better, but that often she is happy, and I tell her that I think I understand.
My sons are big boys now. They can do all the things we in the West so want our children to do—read and write and do math, mostly. I urge them to make their beds, to get off their iPads, to write thank-you notes, to look grown-ups in the eye and speak politely. And then I get lazy about it and let them be. In the summer, we go out to the beach and I watch them swim in the pool and go on the tire swing. I see them come together with other groups of kids, kids they know and don’t know, on the beach and in the neighborhood, as I make chitchat with the mothers and fathers I know and the ones I don’t, taking in the fact that, even in a place as precious and curated and privileged as the Upper East Side and its satellite, the East End, childhood can be rambunctious and unplanned and easy, and motherhood can be relatively simple. It can feel good.
A few times a year my husband and I travel without our boys—to Europe, mostly, and other places his business takes him—and while we are there, I pine for my children. I marvel at how different childhood and motherhood are from continent to continent, town to town, place to place. And how strange and interesting and touching the practices of a tiny tribe on a tiny corner of a tiny island I once studied seem from a distance. I think of the words of Charles Darwin, not the Darwin whose work has been oversimplified and deployed to justify ruthless self-interest and to rationalize the notion of “the selfish gene,” but Darwin the father, the one who lost three children and mourned them so deeply that he was nearly incapacitated, and who joyfully helped his wife raise seven more to adulthood, and who balanced the work he loved with parenthood, and who taught us so much: “The social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.”
Yes, I was feeling upbeat and compassionate and generous and sympathetic, not to mention good about myself as a mother and a writer, when we found ourselves at a family-friendly party on the immense, immaculate lawn of someone’s immense, immaculate home in the Hamptons not long ago. I had sold a book and delivered the manuscript. There was interest in Hollywood. In the small and gossipy circles I still spent time in, this was news, and people wanted to talk. Much of the talk was goodwilled and supportive, the parents of kids my sons knew, people I had come to know through motherhood, expressing the hope that things would work out, that the book would be a success, along with a lot of joking inquiries about whether I would be naming names. As we chatted about that and other things, too, such as where our kids were going to school now and how they liked it, my older son came over. He looked flushed and told me under his breath, “Mom, I don’t feel so good.” I turned to touch his forehead—he had a raging fever. “Take this water bottle and go sit under that shady tree where nobody else is sitting, and I’ll be right there to take us home, sweetie,” I told him, scanning the party for my husband and our younger son.
That’s when she materialized before me—the Queen of the Queen Bees, the meanest of the Mean Girl Moms. I had done well at dodging her for many months, ducking into the stairwell whenever I saw her in the hallway at school, turning to real friends when I saw her at an event, and generally just praying she would pass. Now I made a little gasping noise in spite of myself, hoping she was on her way somewhere else. She didn’t usually bother with me—why bother with someone you don’t notice? Even viewed through the gauzy lens of cooperative breeding and caring, even when I made excuses for her in my mind—she had an eating disorder; her husband apparently cheated on her; it didn’t feel good to be her, even in all her this-season Chanel—she was, to me, beyond hard to take. The recent stories of her nastiness were legion. She told women, in front of their friends, that they were ugly, that they were stupid, that there was somet
hing wrong with their children. I thought her a crass bully, and even worse, an empress with no clothes, the Chanel notwithstanding. Because she was so rich and powerful, the people who rolled their eyes behind her back were too petrified to actually confront her about her nasty antics. School administrators looked the other way because she made big contributions. Everyone else took her put-downs meekly and sat at her table at events, hoping for a scrap of I didn’t know what. Business? Money? A ruffle or ribbon of her haute couture?
“Hi,” she said, sort of looking through me. My mind hopped and skipped. My head bobbled.
“Oh, sorry, my son is—” I began, rattled, looking wildly from side to side for an escape route. She couldn’t have cared less that I was talking and broke in as if I had no right to respond to her salutation.
“I heard about your story or book or . . . whatever. What’s it called?” She scanned the lawn for better prospects. I felt my older son touch my elbow.
I told her the name of the book and turned toward him to reassure him that yes, we were going, right now.
“That’s a good title,” she said flatly, her gaze alighting indifferently on my son for an instant.
“Oh, thanks; we have to . . .”
“I guess your publisher gave it to you.” It wasn’t a question. It was an assertion. You can’t possibly have a good title in you, let alone a good book, etc. I straightened up and turned to face her. She smirked.
“No, it’s my title,” I said, no doubt stiffly, staring her in the face now. My son coughed. She said, with a sarcastic smile, “Sure it is.” For one second I imagined doing what I had heard a woman who lived downtown had done when the Queen of the Queen Bees insulted her little son. She had, the story goes, put her hand on the Queen’s shoulders and intoned solemnly, “Nobody. Likes. You.” And then just walked away. She was like Paul Bunyan, this Woman Who Dared, whose legend lived on in song and gossip.
Now, before I could decide what to say or do, my reverie was broken by my son. As if in slow motion, obediently, after years of training, he was extending his hand toward the Queen, not knowing any better. I imagined myself, again in slow-mo, like an action hero in a movie, jumping across the distance between them, dramatically intercepting his hand and shouting “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” To save another mother from a dreaded beginning-of-school-year cold or fever. To look after her, as those who had shown compassion toward me had done, because she obviously needed it. I saw myself lying on the ground, my dress smeared with dirt and grass stains from my kind and heroic act. The Queen of the Queen Bees looked at me with surprise and gratitude.
And then it was a normal day on a bright lawn, and I did nothing as she took my son’s hand—limply, with no interest in him. I pulled him away without saying good-bye to her, and gave our hasty thanks to our hosts as I departed, having found my husband and younger son. And I noted with a satisfied smile, as I turned around for one last look at the party, that the Queen, who was also leaving, was wiping her eyes and her nose with the very hand she had used to accept my feverishly sick son’s greeting.
My son would be fine with some ibuprofen and a little rest, I knew. The sun was sinking lower in the bright blue sky, and I felt a strong, slow swell of happiness come over me as our family drove home with the windows rolled down, taking in the beautiful afternoon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the women with young children who taught me to be an Upper East Side mother. Initially, I was as wary of them as they were of me, but they proved what all primatologists know: we are remarkably prosocial and affiliative beings whose long, intensive, and highly cooperative parenting trajectories have in large part made us who we are. The group of Upper East Side mothers who embraced me and my project were masterful and generous native guides, showing me the Way while unlocking the belief system behind it with intelligence, humor, and a great sense of fun. They shared hilarious anecdotes, and heartbreaking ones, on all the big issues for primates—power, parenting, sex, anxiety, and loss, to name a few. They took me behind the scenes, opening up their homes, sharing their insights, thoughts, feelings, and—so important to us great apes—their food. Thanks to them, I went from being an outsider to knowing the warmth of sitting at the campfire in the company of others. I am equally indebted to the friends who listened and advised and put things in context. Thank you, then, to Regan Healy-Asnes, Lindsay Blanco, Jackie Cantor, Vivien Chen, Amy Fusselman, Elizabeth Gordon, Lauren Geller, Barrie Glabman, Judith Gurewich, Marjorie Harris, Eva Heyman, Suri Kasirer, Jennifer Kingson, Kelly Klein, Ellen Kwon, Nancy Lascher, Simone Levinson, Wellington Love, Eve MacSweeney, David Margolick, Jennifer Maxwell, Jackie Mitchell, Liz Morgan Welch, Arianna Neumann, Solana Nolfo, Jeff Nunokana, Debbie Paul, Rebecca Rafael, Barbara Reich, Tina Lobel-Reichberg, Jessica Reif-Cohen, Atoosa Rubenstein, Jackie Sackler, Erica Samuels, Jen Schiamberg, Caroline Schmidt, Adam Schwartz, Carole Staab, Dana Stern, Rachel Talbot, Amy Tarr, and Amy Wilson.
Trish Todd’s editing was insightful, incisive, and patient, undertaken with the sensitivity of a mother who knows exactly how protective other mothers are of their babies. She was and is a book shaman par excellence. Thank you to Richard Pine, who went beyond the call of duty, and to Sandi Mendelson, who never rests. Bethany Saltman helped immeasurably with research. I am grateful to professors Katherine MacKinnon, Richard Prum, Katie Hinde, and Dan Wharton for taking the time to enlighten an outsider whose basic misapprehensions of their worldview did nothing to deter their generosity or forbearance. Any imperfections in the book’s science are entirely my own responsibility. Thanks also to experts Heidi Waldorf, MD, Dennis Gross, MD, Stephanie Newman, PhD, and Rachel Blakeman, JD/LCSW, whose insights on beauty and anxiety informed my thinking on these topics.
Without the dedication of several alloparents tending to my children, I could not have written this book. Thank you to Carlos Fragoso, Elizabeth Dahl, and Sarah Swatez. My children have also formed very real and meaningful attachments to their caring cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and half sisters, to whom I am indebted. Thanks to my own mother, who somehow found the time to teach me to love anthropology, biology, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Goodall and her Gombe chimps, even as she raised three children far from her own kin, with no nannies in sight. Special thanks to my friend Lucy Barnes, who with characteristic generosity and kindness asked me almost every day, “How’s the book?” and made me the godmother of her daughters, Sylvie and Willa.
My children, Eliot and Lyle, taught me to take the risk of maternal love. I love you, monkeys. Finally, my best reader, and the best choice I ever made, is my husband, Joel Moser. Thanks to him I became a mother, and learned that the pair bond, in spite of being an anomaly and a blip on the screen in evolutionary terms, can feel like home. For that I am eternally grateful.
Reading Group Guide
Primates of Park Avenue
by Wednesday Martin
Introduction
Wednesday Martin’s new memoir, Primates of Park Avenue, is an inside look at the unexpectedly stressful and anxious lives of Manhattan’s most elite set: Upper East Side mommies.
The book follows Wednesday on her journey to join the “it” crew in Manhattan, and no detail—no matter how trivial or painful—is left out. We read about the feelings of exclusion and unhappiness Wednesday experiences as she learns to navigate the sometimes-cruel streets and female “friendships” west of Lexington Avenue. We hear about her epic quest to own an Hermès Birkin bag and about the cutthroat nature of preschool applications on the Upper East Side. Through it all, Wednesday straddles the line between subjective insider desperate to find a place for herself and her son and academically detached outsider using her background in anthropology and primatology to help make sense of her world, one she realizes might seem silly and unsympathetic from the outside. Wednesday is both participant in and observer of the rituals of motherhood in Manhattan’s richest neighborhood.
Discussion Questions
1. In her introduction, author Wednesd
ay Martin asks herself “who were they really, these glamorous, stylishly turned out women with sophisticated babies?”. Answer Wednesday’s question with your group. Who are the women of the Upper East Side really? Is there an Upper East Side in your town? Did your conception of these women change after reading Primates of Park Avenue? Why or why not?
2. On page 8, Wednesday discusses her strong desire to fit in with the mommies of her new neighborhood, and for her son to fit in by extension. She writes that from her studies in literature and anthropology, she knows that “without a sense of belonging, and actually belonging, we great apes are lost. . . . Particularly female ones . . . do not fare well.” Do you think that all people feel this way to some extent? What about all mothers? Is wanting to fit in and feel a sense of community particularly important for new mothers?
3. Why do you think Wednesday Martin chooses to frame the beginning of her memoir as an academic study? Does the format add humor? Does it give greater credibility to the author? Both? Think about how you would describe your own world anthropologically. Are you part of a tribe? If so, which tribe?
4. Discuss the way gender figures into life on the Upper East Side, according to Primates of Park Avenue. Wednesday writes on page 24 that “in Manhattan, the woman is in charge of finding a place for the family to live.” What else do the women seem “in charge” of in Manhattan? Of what are they decidedly not in charge?
5. “Women on the Upper East Side, particularly women in their thirties and women on the downhill slope of middle age, are utterly attuned to and obsessed with power”. Consider this power obsession in connection with Wednesday Martin’s obsession with acquiring a Birkin bag. What is the implicit connection between expensive handbags and power? Does owning a Birkin on the Upper East Side make one more powerful? What is your tribe’s “it” bag? Is it a “fetish object”?
Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir Page 22
