Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  Stanford biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, my partner in crime in the Bergdorf daydream, has mapped out how stress, once an indispensable adaptation, got twisted around, creating the uniquely contemporary conundrum of chronic stress and its affective handmaiden, chronic anxiety. “For the average mammal,” he explains, “stress is three minutes of terror on the savanna, after which the stress is over—or you are.” Stress evolved as a useful, extremely short-term, lifesaving physiological state: your heart races to pump oxygen; your lungs work harder; and your body turns off anything nonessential in the interest of immediate survival (being chased by a lion is no time to ovulate, grow, or put energy into tissue repair—that’s for later). With these brief bursts of terror come surges in stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. Once the lion has been outwitted or escaped, the blood levels of these stress hormones go down.

  Today, though, “we turn on our stress response for purely psychological states, and that’s not what it evolved for,” Sapolsky observes. Our blood pressure surges to 180/120 not in order to save our lives, but as we sit in traffic or worry about terrorism. And we can’t find the Off button. So, momentarily, adaptive stress becomes chronic stress and perpetual anxiety. These days, “the hormones that we used to secrete to save our lives are being secreted . . . continually, when we worry about the ozone layer or have to speak in public.” One of Sapolsky’s most important discoveries was that among hierarchical mammals, like baboons or humans on the Upper East Side, social rank can cause massive stress, changing one’s blood, mind, and body, especially where rankings are unstable and individuals are jockeying for position. Now we were getting somewhere.

  There is so much we could learn from a drop of blood, which looks like a drop of wine, I thought as we sat at the table in the Upper East Side home of my brother-in-law and his wife on Passover. My older son loved this holiday, with all its ritualized food and hand washing and prayers. My little one adored the doting attentions of his older cousins and the songs, if not the sitting still. I had come to this tradition, and to Judaism, as I had to Upper East Side motherhood: through marriage. So, while my nieces and nephews and in-laws and husband went through the motions, it was all newish and fascinating to me, as it was to my children. At the point in the Haggadah when we list the ten plagues of Egypt, the punishments God rained down upon Pharaoh for refusing to release the Israelites from slavery, we dipped our fingers into our glasses, leaving drops of wine on the edges of our plates, one for each plague. Blood. Frogs. Lice. Flies. Diseased livestock. Boils. Hail. Locusts. Darkness. Death of firstborn. As I listened, I listed in my mind another version of the plagues, the afflictions of the tribe of women I now knew so well. Head lice. School applications. Capital campaigns. Traveling husbands. Intrasexual competition. SEC investigations. Divorce. I knew there were more. Lots more.

  Thank God for a drop of wine.

  As I got closer to many of the Upper East Side mommies around me, and others continued to keep their distance, I became more and more preoccupied with what “belonging” might mean—to me, and to the women who were now my friends, and to the ones who were not. Part of me wanted to fit in and be embraced by everyone in my adopted troop. Primates are, after all, deeply affiliative and highly prosocial, characteristics that set us apart from other species: as with chimps and baboons and macaques, connections with others mean more to us than just about anything else, even if we are slightly cynical moms from downtown. I was still shaken by having been, all those months before, a playdate pariah. I knew that such “hazing” was not uncommon among primates of the human and nonhuman variety, and I doubted that the exclusions and performative back-turnings had ever been precisely personal. But I still harbored, in the most primitive parts of my brain, the fear that I might be excluded again. All women want to fit in—whether they are hippies in Berkeley, PTA moms in Omaha, or TriBeCa transfers, those who depart the Upper East Side to move downtown. Part of me was now hell-bent on toeing the line: dressing to fit in, helping with school committees, going to luncheons. Meanwhile, my front brain puzzled over what would happen if I didn’t, or couldn’t. How did you fall out, and what happened then?

  Divorce and diminution of income—the DD plagues, as I came to think of them—seemed to be two events that could precipitate getting drummed out of the group. Once a woman is divorced, she likely won’t have the money to play at the same level—to buy the tickets for the events, join the flyaway parties to St. Barths and Paris and Miami. There will be fewer invites for this reason—and another one, too. Women who are divorced often ignite fear among peers that “it can happen to me, too.” And that “she’s on the make and may try to steal someone’s husband.” As one divorced member of the tribe told me, “It’s bye-bye for me. Third wheels are scary.” A divorced tribe member may keep a friend or two, but find she has a significantly circumscribed social life.

  It was no doubt frightening to think that your life as you knew it could fall away because your marriage fell apart. But the story I really couldn’t shake was about a woman I’ll call Lena. After the crash in 2008, the story goes, she and her husband lost almost everything. The oceanfront Hamptons home. The classic eight–classic seven combination on Park. They pulled their kids out of prestigious private schools, where they had once been big donors and board members with a measure of influence over whose kids could get in, which in turn gave them massive cultural capital. Gone. They moved to 110th street. Without telling anyone, Lena took a job at an upscale department store in an upscale mall in an upscale Manhattan suburb. Seen one way, this was an act of simple necessity. But seen another, it was brave, because it was a step down. Several women she knew showed up at the store one day, and were shocked to discover that Lena was “on the other side” now, bringing them shoes to try on. Other friends might have rallied around Lena and organized a shopping excursion en masse to the tony store where she worked, to give her a day of great commissions. They might have reached out and buoyed her up. I like to think that I would have. Instead, Lena’s no-longer-peers simply avoided her. This didn’t surprise me, somehow. But it angered me. It served to remind me of the foreignness of some of the women around me, the divide between what they felt and how they acted, and how I did. It was as if they lived in a caste system, and Lena was now forever tainted, ritually impure. She and her plight were terrifying—and she became a taboo object. Perhaps these women believed that Lena would find it humiliating to be around them, but I doubted it. And was that any reason to abandon a friend?

  “It’s almost like the attitude in this world, when your girlfriend is down, is ‘Sink or swim,’ ” a woman who was newly divorced from her wealthy and powerful husband explained to me over coffee. The Queen of the Queen Bees would no longer speak to her, she explained, and I suggested she might be better off for it. But I knew how her ostracism, the being dropped, must feel, and I felt sorry for her, as I did for Lena.

  Eventually, the story goes, Lena and her husband left town. I was interested and relieved to hear that she had become a Buddhist, and was happy. But to a certain set of women, she no longer existed. “I think she moved to some hippie place? And joined a cult or something?” is how a woman I asked about Lena’s story described it. She was dead.

  The Upper East Side culture they lived in was itself a major plague on my tribe of mommies, it seemed to me. The pressure to conform, the drive for perfection, and the emphasis on appearances and keeping up appearances on the Upper East Side are extraordinary and unrelenting. My realization, early on in my life there, that I had to get dressed up to run to the corner for milk, was just the tip of the iceberg. You would have to be socially tone-deaf not to sense the pressure to be perfectly turned out, perfectly groomed, perfectly coiffed, and always at the right event with the right person at the right time. But there is something deeper going on, too. Lena’s story taught me that like the social worlds of the Bedouin and the Roma, the world of the Upper East Side is an honor/shame culture. Shame and the fear of not fi
tting in or of falling out or of being ostracized, rather than the fear of going to hell or prison, are the main means of social control. And on the Upper East Side, as in China or among certain tribes of Native Americans, one can lose one’s honor or one’s “face”—not the physical thing that you talk and eat with and put makeup on, but your prestige, reputation, indeed your very self. Marcel Mauss wrote of the Pacific Northwest Indians that

  Kwakiutl . . . noblemen have the same notion of “face” as the Chinese. . . . It is said of one of the great mythical chiefs who gave no feast that he had a “rotten face” . . . To lose one’s face is to lose one’s spirit, which is truly the “face,” the dancing mask, the right to incarnate a spirit and wear an emblem or totem. It is the veritable persona which is at stake, and it can be lost in the potlatch just as it can be lost in the game of gift-giving, in war, or through some error in ritual.

  Or, Mauss might add today of the women I studied, it can be lost by losing your money. Or having bedbugs.

  While bedbugs and head lice are an inconvenient and stressful fact of life for people all over New York City, for a privileged Upper East Side mom like my friend Gina, they are something else. Gina sobbed for days—not just because getting rid of them is so expensive and time-consuming and exhausting. And not only because she was covered in itchy bites and could find no relaxation, only stress, in her bed at night. And not just or even primarily because the family might not be able to sell the apartment for several years after, owing to new laws requiring sellers to disclose that their largest assets have had pest problems. No. Gina was mostly very, very afraid that her friends would find out. Her identity hinged on hosting playdates and having a perfect home, among other things. Bedbugs suggested the frightening possibility of being ostracized from the group. “Nobody will come here anymore!” she told me. If her kids didn’t have a social life, neither did she. And we know what happens to the socially unaffiliated in an affiliative, hierarchical world: social death (and even physical death, if you’re a baboon).

  Many of the mothers I knew shared Gina’s heightened sense of social shame and humiliation—about not only catastrophic life events such as divorce or going broke but also that extra five pounds or having a kid who needs occupational therapy or being unable to afford two weeks in Aspen. In an honor/shame culture, a world where you are expected to have not one dimple of cellulite or one stray hair, a world where your entire being hinges on what you give away at a potlatch, or how you keep your home, or having kids without problems, losing face is easy. There is no sin, and probably no god—the tribe was monotheistic by tradition but largely postreligious—but there is shame. As foreign as you might find it, once you enter into the cultural logic of losing face, it’s clear how the very possibility of such public humiliation could stress you in real ways. Their exhausted, gaunt faces. Another drop of wine.

  Candace was almost always right about the tribe, and, following her lead, I did indeed discover that there was an anxiety gender gap of sorts. Women in developed countries (but not those in undeveloped ones) are, remarkably, twice as likely to suffer from anxiety disorders as are men. But I had thought my tribe would be an exception. After all, I knew from firsthand experience that being a relatively privileged Manhattan mommy conferred a crucial advantage: the ability to buffer oneself not only from catastrophes such as being sick with no insurance or not having the money to feed your children but also from the assaults of everyday big-city life, by means of a massage or a weekend in the country. I figured with their exponentially greater wealth and private planes, their three-week Caribbean/Aspen (or Turks and Caicos/Vail) vacations and weeklong girls’ getaways to Canyon Ranch, the places on Further Lane to get them farther from the madding city crowds, the über-wealthy mommies from my sons’ school and playgroups should be exponentially calmer. Wouldn’t having your children in the very best school, or having the best possible nanny—one procured through an agency that charged a very hefty fee to partner parents with the crème de la crème of caregivers—give you a degree of calm and confidence about their well-being? I presumed all this should be enough to quell anyone’s worries. And that any other stress and anxiety was something the women I knew created themselves, by fretting about the wrong things and failing to be in the moment and enjoy all they had.

  I was wrong.

  As it turns out, the old adage is true—once you control for factors such as poverty, illness, and hunger, money does not buy you happiness. And it certainly does not buy you a reprieve from anxiety. Precisely the opposite seems to be the case, with a whole host of specific-to-their-ecological-niche factors above and beyond the everyday stressors of city life making rich Upper East Side mommies the ultimate nerve-racked nellies. Mothering in a state of ecological release and an honor/shame culture, I was learning, was in many ways a perfect storm for anxiety. Their perfect lives were in fundamental ways the worst thing for these mommies’ minds.

  The cult of “intensive mothering,” peculiar to the West and specific to the wealthy, was certainly a plague upon the mommies I studied. Sociologist Sharon Hays, who coined the term, defines intensive mothering as “a gendered model that [compels] mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children.” Constant emotional availability, constantly monitoring your kids’ psychological states, endlessly providing activities, and “fostering” your children’s “intellectual development” are all expected of women of means, Hays observes, and failing to nurture them comprehensively, or just letting them be, borders on neglect. My tribe of mommies, unlike my mom, were forever on duty, doing baking projects to teach their kids fractions and making educational museum visits and being “involved” at school. In this paradigm, motherhood is an anxious, 24/7, depleting, high-stakes duty. There is virtually no sense, on the Upper East Side, that letting a child fail and feel frustrated could build her resilience and make her a happier, stronger person. No, if your child failed—to score 99.9 percent on her ERB, to do a great drawing in art class, to do well on an obstacle course or race—it was less a teachable moment, it seemed, and more evidence of your own failure as a parent.

  But if you mother intensively, go all out, you also run the risk of being called a “helicopter mom” and chided for ruining your kids. No wonder a study of 181 mothers with young kids found that those who embraced intensive motherhood had high levels of anxiety and depression. Meanwhile, opting out and reading Star magazine while the kids watch TV makes you a Bad Mom. It’s hard to imagine anything further off the evolutionary script of mothering—kids hanging out in multiage groups all day, the younger ones learning skills from the older ones so they can lend a hand at home, while moms spend time with their sisters and cousins, parenting together—than the plague of intensive motherhood. Another drop of wine on the side of the plate.

  It eventually dawned on me that having choices and the money to make them was another plague upon my mommy tribe. This surprised me at first: we often say that rich people have options that poor ones do not, and having choices is a privilege. We’re right. The option of sending your child to a private school with small classes rather than a public school with crowding issues is a distinct advantage. So is the option of choosing between the two safest cars, because you can afford either, rather than having to purchase the cheapest car with a horrible accident rating. In these and other instances, choice and the economic privilege which enables it (which Volvo, cancer specialist, or Norland nanny?) not only improve one’s life quality but also protect one’s life. But from observing and mothering with the mommies around me, I learned what the research shows: having too many choices is stressful. Facing more than three or four options increases negative effects such as regret, heightened expectations, and disappointment. As the choice set grows larger, those negative effects escalate, leading to anxiety. Only one factor mitigates this effect: if participants are not held accountable for their choices. Privileged, intensive motherhood presents just the opposite situation. You are utterly responsi
ble for the potentially life-altering choice of the best and safest car seat, stroller, and organic carrots. “I have no idea whom to pick,” a mom exclaimed to me in the nursery school’s café one day, a pile of nanny résumés in front of her. She was about to return to work full-time. “And it’s not like it doesn’t matter who I choose. These are my kids.”

  Call it a “first-world problem,” but only if you understand that it is literally that: in much of the world, child care is not an issue, because “it takes a village” is a way of life, not just a bumper sticker. This allows women to work, feel fulfilled, and have lives apart from mothering without guilt. Or anxiety. Another drop of wine.

  Nannies and housekeepers and mannies and cleaners and house managers are a privileged mommy’s most important allies. And frequently, as I learned firsthand and from other mothers, they can be her greatest adversaries. And a major source of anxiety. Before I had children and moved uptown, I always figured it was simple to have good relationships with the people who work for you in your home. If I was “nice” and respectful, our nanny would be “happy” and do a good job. End of story. Women who had problems with their nannies and housekeepers, I figured, were wielding their power against disempowered people unfairly, and paying the price. But to actually live this relationship, I quickly discovered, is to learn just how much more interesting, complex, and anxiety inducing it is than The Nanny Diaries suggests. First, there is the matter of money. Many of the nannies I knew made $100,000 per year or more and traveled the world by private jet. They had paid vacation, half or all of their health-care coverage paid for, and generous holiday bonuses. So we’re not talking about the salt mine here. This is why it always struck me as shocking when such nannies and their female bosses—yes, female, for it is very, very rare for a father of the tribe I study to take an active role in household administration—got into power struggles. “She thought I needed her more than she needed me,” one woman told me glumly about what I realized was a fairly typical downward spiral in the nanny/housekeeper/boss relationship. “Once she realized how essential she was, she kept demanding more. It got to the point where we felt really exploited.”