Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  I marveled, day after day, at the abundance all around me. It wasn’t just that the neighborhood and the neighbors were rich. Through the lens of anthropology, I saw that they lived in a state of what one could only term extreme ecological release. Every living thing is tethered to its surroundings. Environmental conditions—climate, flora and fauna, predation—all help determine the daily course and overall life cycle and evolution of every population of every species. In much of the world, humans still struggle to ward off predators and disease, and work hard to provision themselves and their families in unstintingly difficult environments—the savanna or the rain forest or a shantytown in Brazil. It is nothing new to say that things are different for the well-off in the industrialized West, where our dinners come prepackaged from stores, we get vaccines, and, in the words of primatologist Sarah Hrdy, there are no jaguars lurking outside our nurseries. In short, many of us live unconstrained by our environment in unprecedented ways. But nowhere, I considered as I walked from here to there every day, foraging for crisp Frette sheets and shiny All-Clad pots and pans and the perfect sconces, are we as radically and comprehensively released as on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was the land of gigantic, lusciously red strawberries at Dean & Deluca and snug, tidy Barbour jackets and precious, pristine pastries in exquisite little pastry shops on spotless, sedate side streets. Everything was so honeyed and moneyed and immaculate that it made me dizzy sometimes.

  What really caught my eye, though, was the profusion of indescribably lovely children’s stores. There were nearly a dozen of these within a few blocks of our new home, and they specialized in the kind of classic, beautifully crafted clothing for tots you never saw downtown—little wool shorts and kneesocks, navy blue shoes with beige leather soles, white blouses with Peter Pan collars and red rickrack trim, and fuddy-duddy argyle cardigans for mini-me boys. It was all made in Italy or France. Except the pajamas, which were always made in Portugal. My favorite of these upscale children’s boutiques was called Prince & Princess. “No, we’re not having any sales, we never do. But we can give you a perfect size,” a saleswoman told me when I asked whether there was a markdown in the future of a tiny powder-blue cashmere sweater I coveted for my tyke. Living in a state of ecological release, I surmised, must have an impact on parenting. But other than paying retail for fancy kids’ duds, what precisely did it mean to be a child, and a mommy, living on the floridly, exotically plentiful and bounteous Upper East Side? What did it do to mothers and children to live in this world—and what, I wondered with a pulse of anxiety, would it do to my child? And to me?

  Things weren’t equally Edenic for everyone, even here; this I knew. For Eden was segmented into the Haves and the Have-Mores and the Have-Mosts. You could tell the difference pretty easily—the Have-Most women looked the most carefully put together and the most beautifully turned out, and generally had the most children. The first time I witnessed a perfectly coiffed, perfectly dressed petite brunette and her two nannies hauling her brood of half a dozen into an upscale kiddie-clothing boutique, it was so unlike anything I’d seen before that I could hardly process it. Was she a stepmother to a few of them? I wondered, staring as the kids wiggled and protested in and out of precious outfits whose price tags presumably ran into the thousands of dollars. She must be. Right? Oh no, she wasn’t, the saleswoman later told me. She was a stay-at-home mother whose husband owned a whole lot of businesses and buildings and concerns. And she wasn’t a rarity in my new niche, not by a long shot.

  I quickly became desensitized to massive families—they were everywhere. Three was the new two, something you just did in this habitat. Four was the new three—previously conversation-stopping, but now nothing unusual. Five was no longer crazy or religious—it just meant you were rich. And six was apparently the new town house—or Gulfstream. The culture war in our building between the older residents and families with children—the retirees who owned yippy little dogs and believed that babies in strollers belonged on service elevators versus the couples with young kids pressing for a playroom off the lobby—mirrored a larger trend in the city. People with children were staying, rather than fleeing for the suburbs as the previous generation so often had. The superheated economy meant that the rich—whether they were newer, hedge-fund wealthy or inherited-wealth wealthy—were snapping up town houses, or two or more apartments at a time, connecting them and creating three- and four- and six-bedroom spreads with space you could previously find only in Westchester or Wyoming.

  The change was creating pressure in two places: the real estate market—where, as I had just learned, there was not enough inventory to keep up with demand—and Manhattan private schools. I knew there had been a time when, if you could pay private-school tuition—the price tag had now climbed to something like $25,000 per year for nursery school and $35,000 or more for “ongoing”—your kids could go. Getting into Brearley was just a matter of affording it. But now, I kept reading in the newspapers and hearing moms around me whisper over coffee on the park benches, with so many families deciding to make a life here, and so many of them able to afford private school, everything was different.

  So many kids. So much money. And only so many school spots. In this land of plenty, it seemed, some things were very, very hard to get. The specter of failing to land one’s child in an elite school—in the altered ecology of the Upper East Side, this was the terrifying predator to be outwitted and bested. It was our jaguar.

  “You forgot?” the woman demanded, the second word a register higher and a measure harsher than the first.

  Her voice conveyed disbelief, disapproval, and more than a hint of the haughtiness of someone who has something she knows someone else wants very badly. Our son would be attending public school eventually, we were sure. So we didn’t need to find him a spot in a preschool that was a “feeder” for a prestigious private school. But getting into any nursery school up here at all—“top tier” or not—was a cutthroat endeavor. What with all the parents committing to raising all those kids they were having in the city, spots at nursery schools previously considered “safety schools” were now coveted and nearly impossible to come by. Manhattan was bursting at the seams with children and their anxious, ambitious-on-their-behalf parents. But the nursery schools themselves had not yet caught up with demand. They hadn’t expanded their class sizes in any real way, most of them. And there were not any “new” nursery schools.

  Meanwhile, not sending your kid to nursery school just wasn’t done. The vast and overwhelming consensus was that children did better with some formalized preparation and socialization before kindergarten. And so the woman on the phone had me where I lived—at the intersection of ambition and anxiety about my little son’s well-being. I wondered briefly about my blood pressure—it felt as if my heart were trying to pound its way out of my eyes—and took a deep breath before pleading my case. Again. It was my third call of the morning. Yes, I knew it sounded strange, but we had recently moved from downtown, where things were different and deadlines were later, and if she could just possibly tell me whether it was worth my while at all, I would be really, really grateful. And if it was, and she would deign to let me, I would dash right over to pick up the Envelope from her—the large manila mailer with an application, parent-essay form, and, in some cases, forms for letters of recommendation inside. I so appreciated her time, I really did, and I apologized for the trouble.

  But what I really wanted to say to her, to all of them, was, “Why are you so unfriendly?!” We were talking about nursery school, after all. Sure, there were too many kids and too few slots. I got that. But c’mon, this was about graham crackers and finger painting and circle time. Warm, fuzzy, hands-on fun. Making friends and reading stories. Wasn’t it her job, as the school’s liaison to the outside world, to be helpful and polite, no matter how clueless the caller and how naïve her questions? Up here on the Upper East Side, though, child’s play was apparently a deadly serious business. And a lot of work. There was a right way t
o do it—applications, playdates, all of it. When it came to school, I had things to learn.

  A few music-class moms and my sister-in-law, an Upper East Side mother of four teens, were in charge of my education and filled me in about the school drill. Certain nursery-school directors, they explained, have relationships with certain “ongoing” (that is, K–8 or K–12) school directors who do, in fact, based on their relationships, have better and worse track records getting kids into “good colleges”—which in a superheated, übercompetitive environment no longer means Ivy League schools but basically any US college with decent teaching and research facilities. Moreover, many nursery schools and “ongoing” schools have agreeable “sibling policies”—once you have a child in that school, the next one’s admission is pretty much a given. Between the nursery school playing a role in where your kid winds up for college and the likelihood that if you play your cards right, you have to apply to K–12 only once, preschool mattered a lot more than you might think. And preschool directors were very, very powerful people. Yes, we were sure the neighborhood public school would be good for our son, and our family. But what if, down the line, we wanted the option to send our son to private school? What if the class size in public school was too large for him to learn effectively? What if the public school went down in quality while he was there (it was not unheard of, when a school got a new principal) or before he even arrived? What if the trend of “teaching to the test,” a practice that seemed to be burning out and stressing public-school teachers, kids, and parents alike, continued, and created problems for my son as it did for so many kids in public school? What if, for whatever reason, we wanted him to be in private school at some point? That meant we needed a great preschool director now, so she could pull strings for us later. Lesson learned.

  I sighed as I held the line. I was a supplicant again, and this time around, I gathered, I was at an even more distinct disadvantage than I had been in my housing quest, because, unlike all the other mothers on the Upper East Side, I hadn’t received the Memo. The one that apparently read: “Always plan way, way, way ahead.” One of the tribal ways, I was learning from my chats with other moms on playgrounds and at the park, was to always be doing what you were supposed to be doing long before you thought you should be doing it. For example, before nursery school, your toddler was supposed to take classes at Diller-Quaile School of Music. Before Diller-Quaile, you were supposed to do a certain baby group. Everything, it seemed, fed into everything else, and having this knowledge, exchanging it, and acting on it in a timely fashion was something like insider trading. It affirmed that you were part of the tribe of Upper East Side mommies.

  It was also an anxiety-provoking way of living, parenting, and being, because it meant you could never let your guard down and relax about anything at all. When these moms shook their heads upon hearing that my kid “took music” at the pedestrian Gymboree, I could not help but think of Jane Goodall’s matriarchal chimp Flo, the entrepreneurial dynast whose canny advocacy, sheer ambition, and skillful coalition building on behalf of her offspring Fifi, Figan, and Faben catapulted them to the top of the dominance hierarchy of their troop in Gombe, Tanzania, making the family’s reign something previously unheard of: an intergenerational affair. Just getting by up here, it seemed, required Flo-like perseverance, cleverness, forethought, and strategy.

  Other times, as these women imparted information to me, they seemed to sprout the darkened feathers and sharp beaks and compassionless, glinty eyes of birds—David Lack’s bird mothers, to be specific. Lack, a British ornithologist, blew apart our cherished assumptions about motherhood and maternal love in his post-WWII study of brooding behavior among birds in the English countryside. He noticed that some bird moms were better than others, fledging more chicks who then went on to fledge chicks themselves, and wanted to get to the bottom of it. Why did some bird moms succeed where others failed? Lack wondered. The birdbrained mothers, he eventually discovered, were the ones who went all out every time, laying and tending to as many eggs as they could, going gung ho for each and every hatchling, in every breeding season, depleting themselves in the process. Tired and worn down by their efforts, with bigger broods to defend and provision, they were more likely to die—and so were their chicks. These “selfless” avian moms didn’t have nearly as much success as did the cooler, more calculating bird dames who ran the numbers before they threw themselves into hatching and provisioning their young. “Looks like it’s going to be a crappy, cold, late spring, probably very few worms. Should I hatch these eggs, or let them go, and lay more next time around, when ecological conditions might be better? Or just hatch a couple?” Once the chicks were hatched, the game of playing the odds, Lack discovered, went on. A not-so-wise mother bird would feed her whole brood. A smarter one might do the same. But depending on circumstances, she might just as easily let the biggest chick push the littler ones out. Or peck its younger sibs to death. Or she might fly the coop entirely, calculating that she could do better next time around, in another breeding season with more potential mates and more abundant berries. Such “retrenchments in maternal care,” Lack discovered, were as important to being a successful mother as the willingness to nurture and sacrifice. Smart bird moms played the odds and made informed “maternal trade-offs” every day. It didn’t take long for evolutionary thinkers and primatologists like Sarah Hrdy to figure out that primates—both the human and nonhuman variety—do exactly the same thing.

  Sure, with the advent of birth control, and in this environment of affluence and extreme ecological release, these moms on the Upper East Side were utterly unlike bird mothers in that they could afford each and every child and could lavish them all with food, attention, and clothing from Bonpoint. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t strategy in their game. One example: the matter of conception. Do you like the idea of having your baby in warm, lazy summer, when Dad can more easily take a paternity leave? Does a yearly outdoor kiddy birthday party with cake at the picnic table sound nice? Not up here, sister! Summer birthdays, it turned out, were just no good. Especially if you had a boy. Boys, the thinking went, were more rambunctious, less compliant, and slower to develop fine motor skills—hence they needed to be “older” once they started school. In the South, such “redshirting” had begun so that boys would be bigger for sports teams. But in New York, it was for brains and development and that killer cognitive edge. Schools wanted boys to start each grade having had their birthdays not later than August, they said. In which case my son, born in July, barely made the cutoff. But they actually meant May, my sister-in-law explained. And they would prefer, say, an October birthday. Moms who became pregnant in January, February, or March won the Flo prize—and, if all else went well, the coveted school spots. The rest of us had kids who went through life and the Manhattan private-school system with the black mark of a June, July, or August birthday. A friend joked that Upper East Side IVF clinics should post warnings in September, October, and November: Skip this cycle.

  So, it dawned on me, not only was I slow on the preschool application uptake but I had also conceived a child of the wrong gender at the wrong time. “Oh no, you didn’t even apply yet and he also has a bad birthday?” the moms I was getting to know exclaimed without fail when I appealed for advice. One said it in front of my son at the playground and he began to sob. “What’s bad about my birthday, Mommy?” “Nothing, honey,” I comforted him. But I was lying. I had moved us to a place where birthdays could, in fact, be “bad.” The gist of it was that I had to get on the phone right now. So here I was.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman told me now. She had picked up the line again with an alarming clatter and didn’t sound sorry at all. “There are no more applications.” She hung up without a goodbye, before I could thank her. Presumably, she was in a hurry.

  We could just buck all this nonsense, I thought, putting the phone down as calmly as I could. It was stressful and silly. Who cared where our son went to nursery school, or if he even went at all?
Weren’t kids all over the world doing just fine without nursery school? I hadn’t gone, I reasoned, and I was okay. But the Upper East Side was not West Africa or the Amazon basin or Grand Rapids. No, I couldn’t check out of this game if my child’s future was even potentially at stake. What kind of mother would that make me?

  Thus began my disorienting slide from bystander to total buy-in: with fear. I had been seized by the culturally specific and culturally universal anxiety of not being a good enough mommy, of being a mommy who does less than enough for her children.

  Prolonged childhood sets us primates apart. While other mammals go from newborn to weaned juvenile to sexually mature adult with startling (to us) speed, we humans and our closest relatives take our time. Primatologist and Saint Louis University associate professor of anthropology Katherine C. MacKinnon observes that “most primate species spend 25–35 percent of their life span in a period of juvenility.” She cites the example of orangutans, who are classified as “infants” for the first five years of their lives, and juveniles for ten to twelve or so years. “A prolonged juvenility, relative to overall life span and body size, is true for all apes and most monkeys,” she says.

  It’s a gradient, she points out. But of all primates, we are born the most dependent, and stay that way the longest. It begins when we enter the world essentially as fetuses, half-baked, neurologically unfinished, uniquely needful and dependent. Unlike nonhuman primates, we can’t even cling at birth; others have to hold us. That’s just for starters: “altricial” or highly dependent offspring, and neoteny, the retention of youthful traits for a prolonged period, affect parents and kids in many and profound ways, for many years. As anthropologist Meredith Small observes, “Human childhood makes human parenthood longer and more complicated.” We are physically and psychologically entwined with our offspring, and they with us, often for a lifetime. We clothe, feed, and pay to educate our kids into adulthood. At that point we may underwrite the cost of their housing and eventually contribute emotionally and financially to their kids’ well-being. How can we, as a species, justify this costly, never-ending investment in our children?