Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  As it turns out, for many millennia, we couldn’t. Our early ancestors, it seems, did not likely tarry between infancy and independence as we do now, but rather got right down to the business of becoming sexually mature. And then, as science writer Chip Walter puts it, “around a million years ago, the forces of evolution inserted an extra six years between infancy and preadolescence—a childhood—into the life of our species.” Why? For decades experts believed that this change came about because young, early hominins needed an additional period to learn skills such as language and tool use. Childhood, in this view, got stretched like taffy in order for us to impart all the necessary lessons of humanity. Being so special, we needed something special—a childhood.

  There were flaws in the theory, though. Natural selection would not likely favor the emergence of an idyll period that was burdensome for parents and risky for parents, dependent offspring, and entire groups alike, just so some kids could learn to start fires and talk pretty. In order to figure out the real reason for childhood, thinkers had to stop presuming that childhood had always been the way it is now. Maybe it wasn’t originally a time of playing and learning at all. Maybe childhood evolved not for children but for adults, and was beneficial for them. Indeed, the only scenario that makes sense, anthropologists such as Barry Bogin, Kristen Hawkes, and Anne Zeller say, is that childhood came about to shift the burdens of reproduction off reproducing adults, so they could reproduce again. They suggest that kids were helpers, babysitters who allowed their mothers to rest and get nourished, which in turn allowed them to provision the kids they had, and have more. It was kids, not male partners, who turned us into “cooperative breeders,” helping us thrive where other Homos bit the dust. Childhood was about work, not play.

  The proof is in the contemporary human pudding. In most cultures, children are net contributors to their households by age seven. They tend livestock, clean the kitchen, and fetch firewood; they cook, do laundry, and sell stuff in markets. But mostly, they are babysitters for their younger sibs and, sometimes, their cousins. In fact, in a survey of 186 societies worldwide, UCLA anthropologist Thomas Weisner found that, in most places, mothers are not the principal caretakers or companions of younger children. Older children are. Kids, those who study them tell us, are wired to help out, to spend their days in multiage groups of other kids, caring for one another, absorbing and passing along the skills they have learned from observing and working alongside adults.

  This order of things seems to work well for everybody, especially in contexts of low-skill work where children’s contributions are meaningful. In traditional Mayan villages in Mexico, for example, kids essentially run households and market stalls. These children, anthropologist Karen Kramer found, have high levels of self-confidence: they know exactly what they’re supposed to do, master it, and feel important. And their parents do not report stress, depression, or fatigue as so many parents in the industrialized West do. In West African countries where children begin helping out as early as age three, people often say, “A man with children can never be poor.” Children are assets, loved and valued as such. Kids, in these contexts, bring real joy because they really contribute. They make their parents rich.

  But in the industrialized West, we have turned childhood on its head. Our children are expected to do next to nothing until late in the game. They are taken care of and tended to. Rather than hanging out in language- and skill-rich multi-age groups with lots of older and younger sibs and cousins, where they learn to talk and contribute to the home economy, they go to school, sometimes as early as age two. There, they are sequestered from the rest of society with kids their own age (the most efficient way to create groups of kids when birthrates are low) and unrelated adult strangers called teachers, who may or may not have their best interests at heart. Deprived of a group of older relatives who can teach them practical skills and impart language simply by speaking all around them all day long, they have to learn it in a labor-intensive dyad (“Da da da da” we say, and “cat cat cat,” over and over). This is just one example of how, in our world, kids are work, and our lives are arranged around their needs, rather than the reverse. You can feel it every time you make your child’s bed or tidy up the kitchen after making her a special, kid-friendly meal. Or pay someone else to.

  Meredith Small famously observed that children of the Anthropocene, our current geological era, are “priceless but useless.” We value them in our own way, practicing what we might think of as “descendant worship,” the same ways other cultures practice ancestor worship. But we also complain that kids are terribly costly and tiring—which they are, because they do very little to earn their keep. This reversal of the evolutionary order of things creates unique ecological, economic, and social circumstances for mothers. If the idea that childhood is a carefree idyll is a modern Western invention that comes from affluence, so, too, is the notion that mothers should be their children’s principle caregivers and companions, mainly, if not solely, responsible for not just their survival through infancy but also their well-being over the course of their entire childhood, even their success over a lifetime. In changing childhood, we have changed motherhood as well, until it is virtually unrecognizable compared with what it used to be, and what it is elsewhere.

  Nowhere is this change in childhood and motherhood more the case, more in evidence, or more intensified than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In a niche of extreme ecological release, in a highly competitive culture, “successful” offspring are status objects—and mirrors. Promoting them, working assiduously on their behalf, is a vocation. Being a mommy here is a cutthroat, high-stakes career, stressful and anxiety-producing precisely because it is ours alone to succeed or fail at, leading to the success or failure of our offspring. And ourselves. The circuit is seamless—and, I was learning, nearly inescapable.

  This explained why Upper East Side mothers all wore tiny medallions engraved with their children’s initials around their necks. And stacking rings, one for each child, on their fingers. And entered the names of other mothers in their contacts under the names of their children, so that, on so many of my new friends’ phone and email lists, I came up not as “Wednesday Martin” but as “Eliot M/ mother, Wednesday M.” We were our children, utterly merged together. The message came home every time I saw a woman wearing her child’s school badge on a lanyard around her neck: “So and So, Parent, Such and Such School.” In emails we introduced ourselves, or signed off, as “Pierce’s mom” or “Avery’s mom.” In conversation we said, “Did you ask Schuyler’s mom?” These women had become their offspring, and vice versa. As my friend author Amy Fusselman wrote, “It was as if I had no life or identity before them, as if my children had given birth to me.”

  Anyway, were these other kids, the ones whose mothers had already applied, somehow better than mine? I fretted as I considered the ever-contracting range of options we faced on the nursery school front as every day slipped by without our submitting an application, and the spots filled up in a game of musical chairs I was on some level increasingly anxious not to lose. Were they any smarter or cuter than my kid? Were their parents any nicer than my husband and I were? I doubted it. I was going to get those applications if it killed me. I was going to call my sister-in-law. And my native guide, Inga. I was going to ask for a favor. They didn’t have kids the same age as mine. Neither did their friends. So they could afford to be generous. I was getting the hang of it. Or losing my perspective entirely. It depended on how you looked at it.

  Inga was game, and wired. She knew literally dozens of people with kids at fancy nursery schools, having sold many of them their apartments over the years. My sister-in-law was happy to help, too. But there was a catch: the First Choice Dilemma. In Manhattan, after going through the school application process and calculating the odds and calibrating your desires, you send a letter to or have a conversation with a school that is your “first choice.” In this document or chat, you use the language of monogamy and commitment, prom
ising, essentially, that if they accept your child, he or she will go there. If your child should get into a school on a friend’s recommendation but then go elsewhere, your friend will look bad. And you can consider the bridge to that school burned in perpetuity, and a friendship lost. When my sister-in-law’s four kids attended their nursery school, it was just the friendly neighborhood preschool around the corner. But by the time we were applying, with all the new money in town and the director’s strong record of getting kids into highly desirable ongoing schools, it was the most prestigious pre-K in Manhattan. Indeed, it had recently weathered a scandal in which a master-of-the-universe type tried to pave the way for a client’s child’s admission with a million-dollar donation. The child was not admitted.

  Before we got our son in anywhere at all, there were applications and parent interviews and child “playdates” at the schools. The applications were easily procured, in spite of our tardiness, once Inga and my sister-in-law called their friends who could get the schools to hand them over. I scampered across the Upper East Side picking up manila envelopes for days, then got down to work writing essays about what made my toddler special, what his strengths and weaknesses were, what kind of learner he was. Sorely tempted to write, “I really don’t know yet, since he’s two,” I instead banged my head against the wall until I came up with what I hoped were some good-sport responses. Next came the playdates, which I grumblingly referred to as “auditions” because it felt more honest. They were generally scheduled during nap time, unfathomable until you consider that the schools were basically trying to exclude as many “nonsibling” kids as they could. Overtired kid had a meltdown in the play kitchen? Or smacked someone at the craft table? Or just wasn’t paying attention during story time? Better luck at another audition at another school. I will never forget the “playdate” where there was a single desirable toy—a brightly colored play oven with knobs and lights and buttons—surrounded by a few other, lesser toys. It was the center of a game of musical chairs rigged by admissions people who wanted to see how a bunch of tired toddlers would respond to the stress of confronting exactly what they were incapable of handling at that point in their development—the need to take turns and delay gratification and manage their own frustration under unusual circumstances. With no reward.

  After waiting and waiting, my son grew visibly upset. Other kids were shoving one another, and him. The “playdate” was devolving into chaos. I was disgusted and angry, and as my son burst into tears, I got up from my spot on the floor to comfort him (they never told you where to sit or how to be at these idiotic “playdates,” because watching you wonder and try to figure it out was part of their “assessment”). And I hoped then, as I still hope today, that the director of that school would end up in a special circle of hell, one reserved for people who stress out two-year-olds and their hopeful, tense, and vulnerable mothers for no good reason.

  All around me at every one of these misery sessions, mothers were beautifully dressed and groomed, tightly wound, ready to melt down if their children did. We were all being tested. And we knew it. Often you got the sense that some of the administrators enjoyed watching us squirm, enjoyed making relatively rich, privileged women feel small by wielding their own cultural capital, their power to pick and choose families, to include or exclude little children. It was not unusual to see a mommy crying on the street as she bundled up her child and headed off. I cried myself when my son “flubbed” an audition by eating a handful of sand from the sand table and yelling “GIVE IT BACK!” when a little kid grabbed a book from him. At another nursery school, this one in a church, he walked in and announced, “Damn it all!” and I knew, from the narrowed eyes of the administrators, that they were not amused. The cruel ritual was played out over and over, for weeks. To me it seemed like institutionalized sadism, and I heartily resented it.

  But what could I, or any of the other mothers, do? The nursery schools had all the power, and many of them, you could tell, believed that the fact we were all there begging to be admitted attested to their excellence. Really though, none of them was so excellent; it was a numbers thing. There just weren’t enough schools. And given the hordes applying to the school my husband’s nieces and nephews had attended, many of them with their own strings to pull and connections to play, we had to try everywhere. So I kept going, kept dragging my son to auditions. One day, holding my hand as we were about to enter yet another “playroom” full of kids he didn’t know, he looked up at me and said, “Mommy, I can’t do this,” and I wanted to weep.

  We thought it best to let my husband, a calm and collected fellow, take our son to the audition at the fancy preschool his nieces and nephews had gone to. He pointed out that this particular director was probably one of the most powerful people in the city, and hence, the world. We had a good chuckle about that, but he wasn’t entirely kidding. I tapped my fingernails on my desktop waiting to hear from him after the audition. When the phone rang, I nearly fell off my chair. “I’m going to jump out of a window,” my husband whispered. My heart did a dive down to my feet. “Why?” I asked, struggling not to sound as hysterical as I felt.

  It turned out that the school’s director was in the room for my son’s audition. As she talked and rolled Play-Doh and pasted and drew with my son and the other kids, he wanted her attention. He called her name several times and when she failed to respond in the noisy classroom, he punched her (albeit lightly) in the arm and said, “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

  I have no idea why my son was admitted to the school. I never asked. We chalked it up to my sister-in-law’s influence and the fact that the school, so desirable, was also deeply tribal. If you were family of someone who had gone, perhaps especially someone who had sent four kids there and donated a fair amount of money and was pleasant to deal with, you were at a distinct advantage. You were, in their view, vetted, and a relatively safe bet. Even, apparently, if your son punched the boss lady in the arm. And here we were, with a child at the “best” nursery school in the city. I was learning how to reap the benefits of tribal membership. Now I would learn that there were disadvantages as well.

  We were euphoric when our son landed at a “good” nursery school. It felt like a slam dunk, a real accomplishment, and while I knew better than to talk about it much, for fear I would seem to be gloating, I was not above relishing the envious looks of other mothers when they asked where he would go to nursery school and I told them. Like a town house, a big diamond, or waterfront in the Hamptons, a spot at this nursery school, reflecting as it supposedly did one’s social connectedness and influence, and increasing the likelihood that your child would go on to a “top tier” grammar school, was a coveted Manhattan “get.” Mostly, though, it made me feel like a “good” mother. Like Flo.

  But, once again, our sense that we had crossed the finish line and were “done” was an illusion. Because aside from a shrinking water hole in the Serengeti during the dry season, there is no place more desperate, aggressive, dangerous, and inhospitable than the halls of an exclusive Manhattan private school at morning drop-off and afternoon pickup. Those corridors make the conference rooms at Goldman Sachs (where, an investment banker acquaintance once observed, “They don’t bother to stab you in the back, they just stab you in the front and step right over your body”) seem like nice, friendly places to stroll with Aunt Bea from Duluth. I had landed at the fanciest school in the snobbiest zip code in the wealthiest town in America, where everyone was advocating for and living through their offspring. So maybe I should have seen it coming. But I didn’t.

  My son started nursery school at the height of the boom. There was adrenaline in our blood and hope in the air. People were closing deals. People were buying second and third and fourth homes. Everyone in Manhattan seemed manic with happiness. And every day after dropping my son off at school, I cried. Not because it was touching and sweet to watch him cross the threshold of the classroom. Not because letting him go was some metaphor for watching him grow up. Not because b
eing a mother is poignant and painful sometimes.

  No, I cried because the other moms were so mean. I called them the Mean Girl Moms when describing them to my husband and my friends from downtown.

  They gathered in the hallways in clusters and cliques, heads bowed, murmuring, laughing, whispering. They all seemed to know one another somehow, “from before.” Their uniform telegraphed that they were one tribe united—their identical Burberry raincoats on rainy days and their chic puffers on cold days. Their crinkly Lanvin flats, or the high heels that screamed, “I have a driver.” They might have lifted their heads from their huddle to return my hello as I walked by—but that almost never happened. I arrived early at school every day to avoid the feeling—that sensation of falling through space—I got when they looked right through me. Standing awkwardly on the edge of the group, alone, I would usher my son into his room the second the door opened, say good-bye, and scurry away. Outside on the sidewalk my arms felt empty and on the worst days my stomach churned. Because it was unsettling to feel invisible. And because, for the life of me, I couldn’t get any of these women to agree to make a playdate for our children.

  This I knew: our children request that we arrange for them to play with someone after school, and we arrange it. We arrange it by text or email or phone. I knew the drill from other moms and other schools. But my texts, emails, and phone calls to the mothers of my son’s classmates went unnervingly unanswered. Even worse, when I followed up in person with the moms in the hallways, they frequently put me off or changed the subject. Sometimes, when I asked, they shot alarmed or sly looks at their friends, as if to telegraph, “Oh my God, is she actually doing this? Can you believe how awkward?!” My son and I, I realized as the other moms continued to look through me every day, were playdate pariahs. I was uncharacteristically distraught.