Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  Other rich women I knew on the Upper East Side had money of their “own”—but often this meant being financially dependent on and emotionally beholden to their fathers. “I’m not complaining,” one woman told me about her parents’ significant wealth, wealth she and her sister stood to inherit, wealth she benefited from every day in the form of her bankrolled apartment and trips to Aspen and children’s educations. “But it’s weird for my husband.” Often, a husband works for his powerful father-in-law, or trades on his father-in-law’s cultural capital to forge his own business, professional relationships, and deals. Rarely is this state of affairs uncomplicated, because economic dependency is almost never free. Rachel Blakeman told me, “No matter how good the deal feels financially, being beholden to someone else for your well-being and that of your kids is often emotionally costly. It can create resentment, insecurity, and all kinds of issues for a person and in a marriage.”

  Our female ancestors, women who gathered (and some who hunted, as Agta women still do today), had autonomy and a voice in their communities and power in their partnerships because the food they brought in, the calories they supplied, made them indispensable. Not much has changed. And so, often, the women I studied and knew and had coffee with seemed something even beyond economically dependent. In many instances their very identities seemed contingent and relational, hinging on their relationships—to their friends and in-laws and parents, but most of all to their husbands and children. If you are not in a perfect marriage—and who is?—then how can you be a powerful man’s perfect wife? If you do not have perfect children—and who does?—then how can you be a perfect mother, or even a good one? And how can you save face? Divorce is not an option, and neither is trading in the imperfect children you love for perfect ones. Many of the women I knew suffered from the strange, culturally specific anxiety of being extensions and reflections of others. In this sense, even their identities, their very selves, were not precisely or entirely their own.

  “Thank God that’s over,” Candace exclaimed over lunch once her husband had transitioned to his new job. I thought she meant it was stressful to be unsure where he would land, or to contemplate a period of time without income. But Candace shook her head. “No, I mean I can relax now. I had to look really good every second while he was out there because that’s how it is here, especially if you’re asking people for something. Pass me the bread.” There it was—that unique stress. In this honor/shame culture, having a high-status husband made you a high-status wife. But having a great-looking wife—beautiful, with an enviable body and wardrobe and social connections to wives of other powerful men—could also reinforce and even boost a husband’s own social rank and professional status. Candace’s husband did, in part, owe his career to how good Candace looked in her Azzedine Alaïa dresses, to her social dexterity, her ability to charm just about everyone. Wives were their husbands’ expensive baubles and bottles of wine, proof of their awesomeness, and husbands were their wives’ meal tickets. Talk about anxiety. Another plague. Another drop of wine. Another glass. And another.

  And then there is the final plague, the one that broke the Pharaoh’s will, and broke his heart. After the lice and the boils upon his people, after the plagues of blood, frogs, flies, diseases, hail, locusts, and darkness, still the Pharaoh would not relent. And so God said, Now I will take every firstborn son, passing over and sparing the Israelites.

  When Candace called me one day on the phone, fighting back tears, she taught me another lesson about anxious mommies, one that was, in retrospect, stunningly obvious but had entirely eluded me. She was hiding in the bathroom, she told me, so that no one could hear her. Her son had recovered nicely from the concussion that took them to the emergency room, or so it seemed. After a week of “brain rest” in a dim room, with no reading or screen time, and another week without any physical exertion, he was back up and running, as funny and smart and energetic as ever, just like his mother. But there was something else now, fourteen days after the accident. I felt my heart speed up as Candace told me this. I took a deep breath, as silently as I could, so that no matter what it was, I could be calm for her. Then she said, desperately: “His tooth.” His tooth? I wondered. Just his tooth? I felt a wave of relief, but she went on urgently. “It’s gray. It looks horrible.” She began to sob. I murmured that it would be all right, and asked what the dentist had said, and played for time, listening. All in a rush now the words tumbled out: It was just an accident. A dustup. He and the other boy had collided. There had been some blood. That was all. He was fine. But now the tooth had gone gray. Killed by the impact. “It’s dead in the mouth,” Candace said, sounding faraway and sad.

  I could hear my toddler son playing with pots and pans on the floor of the kitchen. I had set him up there so I would have time to talk. But in my mind I was seeing all the pictures on all the living-room walls in all the apartments I had viewed with Inga, all those months ago. None of those children in those portraits had a gray tooth. I considered how a single imperfection could feel catastrophic, like a massive, overpowering wave that took your entire identity as a good mother, as a person who feels safe, away from you, pulling you under. Candace cried and cried and as I cradled the phone to my ear and told her that it would be all right, everything would be fine, I instinctively reached down and cradled my belly, too. Because there was more to it, still.

  It was a perfect tooth that had been killed. It was the Pharaoh’s child and every child, taken by God. It was just a tooth. It was just a story. But it meant that something was wrong, and was a sign that things could go more wrong still. It meant that we could lose them. It was the ghost at the heart of so many Manhattan mother behaviors that seemed to me, until just then, incomprehensibly crazy. The need to be perfect and have a perfect life, the jousting on the sidewalk and the stressing over strollers and nontoxic mattresses and the fights to get him into the right school, the hiring of someone to teach her how to ride a bike—these are the baroque, bizarre flora and fauna that spring from a terrain of damp, fertile panic. Please, I thought, another drop of wine.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Rainy Day

  AT A moment I couldn’t precisely pinpoint, I had flipped. A couple of years into life with children on the Upper East Side, I found myself less a participant-observer than a participant, less an insider/outsider and more a person for whom there really was no “outside” anymore. My connections downtown had all but faded—I saw those friends, many of whom were unmarried artists and academics, at Thanksgiving and maybe Christmas. Then they read to my children and showered them with goodies and gifts, and poked loving fun at me about my transformation, which they considered comprehensive, bizarre, and somehow endearing. They were right that I was changed. We were no billionaires, to be sure. Our home on Park Avenue was far from huge (though I did have an entire closet just for my handbags). I insisted that my children do chores. I didn’t throw them huge yearly birthday parties, and when they were invited to something I considered over-the-top—a Yankees game in seats in the first row right behind home plate, a party at someone’s Hamptons home complete with pony rides and tightrope walkers—I made sure they understood how lucky they were. I did not want my children to think that all of life was one fantastic first-class experience after another. I did not want to set their expectations high, or deprive them of the ability to find pleasure in simple places and in simple things.

  But I was an Upper East Side mommy now, because I had come to care about the things my Upper East Side mommy conspecifics cared about: Where my kids went to school. Whether I was doing enough for them. Whether my children’s teachers knew what they were doing. Whether my friendships were not only gratifying and healthy for me but also useful—to me, to my children, and to my husband’s career. I wanted a comfortable, curated life. I wanted a killer body, and beautiful clothing and shoes by Dolce&Gabbana and Prada, even if I got them on sale, and the kind of great hair color that required the expense of tending to it every other month. I wanted
a house at the beach. Unlike many of my Upper East Side girlfriends, I also wanted to work—to write things I was proud of. But, like them, I wanted to be a good wife and like them, I wanted most of all to be a good mother. Not a good-enough mother, but one who did everything I was supposed to do, everything I possibly could, for my children.

  Like an Upper East Sider, like the person living in the industrialized West that I was, I thought of motherhood in a certain way. I subscribed to the script of intensive mothering, even as I knew that it was peculiar to my privileged niche, and possibly self-destructive. Motherhood, in the world I first observed, then adopted, and finally embraced, meant giving life, and then exhausting yourself, sacrificing parts of yourself, sometimes joyfully and at other times with irritation and aggravation and anxiety, protecting it. I fretted and worried alongside the other privileged mommies I knew, sure. Sometimes, I was a nervous wreck about my children. Like Candace, I might find myself, for a few hours or a day, shattered by a gray tooth and all it suggested. But, like everyone around me, I was conditioned by years of plenty and pediatricians and preschools, desensitized to the immediacy of danger by living as I did, cosseted in a high-rise and riding around in a cushiony SUV. Because of this safety halo, aided and abetted by living in a state of ecological release and abundance and vaccines, I, like all Westerners, took risks with my offspring that our ancestors and contemporary hunter-gatherers, who live as we did for nearly our entire evolutionary prehistory, would never have dreamed of.

  Valuing “independence”—theirs and ours—we place our newborns in bouncy seats on the floor while we shower, and hire nannies we don’t know, or know only through word of mouth or a service, to try to get a little something done, rather than carrying our babies continuously and handing them off to close relatives for a few minutes or hours at a time. We put them on sleep schedules and feeding schedules, rather than following their lead about when they’d like to eat and nap. And, astonishingly to mothers and fathers in other cultures, we actually leave our infants alone in wooden crates far away from us, all night long. There, they sleep on their own . . . and cry. Many are the anthropologists who report describing this practice to traditional people—hunter-gatherers and foraging agriculturalists who let their babies sit and crawl next to fires and allow their toddlers to play with axes and machetes—who are appalled by what they see as our unfathomable and cruel negligence toward our infants. When they are informed that we frequently let our little ones “cry it out,” they are initially disbelieving, then horrified. How, they demand, can we be so callous toward the most precious and dependent of things, a baby?

  It’s not just what we do but what we believe that sets us relatively privileged Western parents apart from the rest. Here we take for granted that our families of two, three, four, five, and even six children will not only survive but also thrive. They will brush off colds and flus and chicken pox, if they get them, bypassing the more awful things—the disfigurers and paralyzers and killers such as measles and whooping cough and polio—thanks to immunizations. They will go to school and then to college, our children. And medical school or business school or law school. They will marry, in time, and have children of their own. They will make us proud. They will bury us. This is our script.

  And so, as I mothered day to day as one did on the Upper East Side, I didn’t contemplate, in any sustained or careful or serious way, just how closely the territories of mothering and loss overlap. It’s a secret, until it happens to you.

  How could I possibly be pregnant? Like some protagonist in a sitcom—or Lifetime Television for Women tragedy—I stared at the two purple lines on the pee-soaked stick and then back at the instructions on the cardboard box.

  No way. It was impossible. We had used birth control that failed, those couple of months ago, yes. But we knew it had failed, and so I immediately used emergency contraception prescribed by my doctor, following the instructions to the letter. Then I had my period. Scant, but a period. Twice. And so there was just no way I, the forty-three-year-old mother of a toddler and a seven-year-old, could be pregnant. What were the chances of emergency contraception failing after contraception failing? And what were the odds of getting accidentally knocked up at forty-three? “How’d you manage that?” I could imagine my friends who had gone through round after round of IVF asking. Gripping the marble bathroom counter, I now vaguely recalled family lore about Cherokee and Scottish ancestors having babies at improbably late ages. “Change-of-life babies,” my grandmother called them, the bizarre-sounding euphemism suggesting, in retrospect, that it happened often enough for there to be a term for it. It was possible, then. Barely. Maybe the test was wrong. I grabbed the second one, hopeful, hands shaking, and peed on it.

  Then again, I considered as I flushed the toilet and waited, these double purple lines might explain a few things. I had been pretty sure I was going through an early and very sudden menopause in the weeks preceding this moment in the bathroom. Or losing my mind. Or dying. My head felt stuffed with cotton. I couldn’t think. I snapped at my kids and my husband. Everything—Where is my phone? Why aren’t the teachers helping him more? When will the renovation overhead end?—irritated me more than usual. And I was so tired that I fell asleep at my desk, and standing on line at the grocery store (“Excuse me, miss? Um?”), and at Pilates, right on the reformer, midstretch. I called my doctor and told him something just wasn’t right. We made an appointment—for what, I didn’t know; to talk about how it felt to become suddenly insane and sick with an ineffable but undeniable whatever it was?—and I waited. Coffee didn’t help my foggy, tired, weak-feeling malaise; the smell of it made me sick.

  Oh my God. I was nauseated. By coffee. And now, I realized, by other things, too. A lot. Duh. I glanced down. Yes, of course: another set of double purple lines. Do not pass.

  Naturally, unnaturally, against all the odds, I was pregnant.

  I sucked on a ginger candy in my OB’s waiting room, waiting. I was here to tell him what we were going to do, he and I. I considered, as I glanced at all the magazine covers of happy, smiling pregnant women all around me, how peculiar yet entirely predictable was the situation in which I now found myself—in primatologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Hrdy’s formulation, as a bipedal, hairless, semicontinuously sexually receptive higher-order primate living in the shadow of agriculture.

  Throughout our evolutionary prehistory, as remains the case among many foragers and hunter-gatherers today, women had babies spaced by three- or four- or five-year intervals. After all, a life of foraging and gathering and just-right caloric consumption of mostly plants and nuts and just a bit of meat kept you trim. Women with low body fat ovulate and menstruate less frequently—maybe four times per year. This, plus the burdens of lactation, nursing, and child rearing while foraging kept our ancestors in a very low fertility state long after their babies were born. By the time the next baby rolled around, they had a four-year-old to help out a bit with the newborn. But put women on farms, a drastically more sedentary state of affairs than gathering, and make calories more plentiful, and you quickly ratchet up body-fat levels—and fertility. This lifestyle, with its hallmark monthly menses, stuck with us when we moved out of the fields and farmhouses and into the malls and McMansions and apartment buildings, of course. And so babies spaced a couple of years apart became the norm. This is why, in every town in America, you see a mom pushing her tiny baby in a stroller while the two-year-old rides on the stroller board. Over time, the original, pre-agricultural state of affairs has come to seem strange to us. We humans are forever changing up our own game.

  And so here I was. I had a young toddler and a second-grader (I just shrugged and said, “It’s a Pleistocene parenting gap,” whenever people asked about the age difference between the boys), and I was ten weeks pregnant, I figured. Once my doctor invited me in and closed the door, I lost all semblance of composure. I tearfully explained what my husband and I discussed after the day of double double lines—at my age, with a young
toddler, and my medical history, and so on, we simply couldn’t. My OB nodded and said the right things. He gave me some forms he had signed, and I left and went to the hospital and filled out more forms for the procedure. I felt numb around the edges as I wrote down the information and handed the chart to the quietly compassionate administrator who told me, with a small, sympathetic smile, to come back the next morning.

  Instead of going home or to my office, I walked to Central Park and sat near the lake, in a little wooden pagoda under the trees. It was a weekday morning, sunny and cool but not cold, and there was hardly anyone else around. As I watched a few turtles swimming around in the murky, algae-covered water, I thought about motherhood. I thought about being, all at once, a loving, generous, giving, doting mommy and a flexible, dry-eyed strategic thinker, dispassionately playing the odds like David Lack’s mother birds. I thought about reproductive trade-offs and retrenchments in maternal care—those moments, all those moments throughout history and evolutionary prehistory when breeding females of every species had to make hard choices. Feed both twins, or just this one? Sometimes, there is only so much, and so much of oneself, to give. Send this babe to a foundling house, where he might well die, in order to continue to work and provision the children who had made it out of the danger zone of infancy already? Or keep him at home to invest in his well-being, thus possibly damaging the chances of the others? Eject the joey while running from the predator so I have a better chance of surviving? Only if I’m a young-enough kangaroo to breed again, and willing to place a bet on just-right ecological conditions—plentiful food, good weather, few predators—the next time around. And so on.