Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

  This book is the stranger-than-fiction story of what I discovered when I made an academic experiment of studying Manhattan motherhood as I lived it. It is the story of a world within a world, a description I do not use lightly. We moved to the Upper East Side just after 9/11, craving both physical distance from the tragedy and closer proximity to my husband’s family. This felt especially important now that we had a child. We longed, at a moment the world seemed so dangerous and our town seemed so vulnerable, to give ourselves and him the comfort of a tight band of loving relatives. That would be the easy part. There were also the other mommies to learn about and live among.

  We eventually settled on Park Avenue in the Seventies. From my base camp, I went to Mommy & Me groups, applied to exclusive music classes, wrangled with nannies, coffee’d with other mothers, and “auditioned” at preschools, for my firstborn son and then his little brother.

  In the process I learned that motherhood was another island upon the island of Manhattan, and Upper East Side mothers were, in fact, a tribe apart. Theirs was a secret society of sorts, governed by rules, rituals, uniforms, and migration patterns that were entirely new to me, and subtended by beliefs, ambitions, and cultural practices I had never dreamed existed.

  Becoming an Upper East Side mom, one day and interaction and trip to the playground at a time, was an experience I undertook with some trepidation. The über wealthy and status-conscious neighborhood where we landed, and the frequently smug-seeming mommies dressed to the nines around me, all felt foreign and intimidating. But, like a higher-order primate and like humans everywhere, I longed to fit in, for my own good and, even more, for my son’s, and eventually my other son’s, too.

  I knew well from my studies of literature and anthropology alike that, without a sense of belonging, and actually belonging, we great apes are lost. Outcasts in literature and the real world may be interesting, antiheroes we can root for, but they are usually miserable. From Odysseus to Daisy Miller, from Huck Finn to Hester Prynne, from Isabelle Archer to Lily Bart, social outsiders and pariahs, particularly female ones, do not fare well. Unprotected, unsupported by a network, they die figuratively and sometimes literally, not only on the pages of books but in society and the wild, as field biologists have amply documented. And there is no one more at risk than a female primate transferring to a new troop with a neonate. Primatologists tell us, for example, that mother chimps who attempt to join a group of strangers are frequently subjected to harassment and harrowing physical violence by established females; sometimes they and their infants are even killed by the very peers from whom they seek community.

  Of course, nobody was out for my blood as I sought to find my place on the Upper East Side, at least not literally. But finding a way in and gaining acceptance felt important, even urgent. Who wants to be on the outside? Who doesn’t want friends to have coffee with after morning drop-off? Who doesn’t want her child to have playmates and playdates? My in-laws and my husband helped me along, telling me where to shop for groceries and explaining the byzantine rules of the galas, over-the-top bar and bat mitzvahs, social clubs, co-op boards, and other strange-to-me rites and practices specific to our new home. But Upper East Side mommy culture was a thing in itself, my own puzzle to solve, since I was a mommy who wanted—needed—to play ball. Yes, I had made plenty of forays to the Upper East Side over the course of my time in New York. I knew it was glossy and moneyed and privileged. I knew understatement was not an Upper East Side thing. I knew the uniform and philosophy and ethos were different from downtown. But there was no getting a purchase on the secret world-within-a-world of Upper East Side motherhood until I entered into it. Without children, I might never have noticed it, this parallel universe of privileged parenting and privileged childhood. With children, though, I was more than compelled by it—I felt obliged to understand it, infiltrate it, crack its cultural code. Getting to know the mommies all around me and learning to do it their way, becoming an Upper East Side mother, was a journey so strange and so unexpected that nothing I had studied or experienced—not the cow-jumping and blood-drinking rites of the Masai, or the ax fights of the Yanomami in the Amazon, or the ritualized bacchanalian rites of sorority rush at a Big Ten school—could rival it, or prepare me for it.

  Childhood on the Upper East Side is unusual by just about anyone’s standards. There are drivers and nannies and helicopter rides to the Hamptons. There are “the right music classes” for two-year-olds, and tutors for three-year-olds to prep them for kindergarten entrance exams and interviews, and playdate consultants for four-year-olds who don’t know how to play because they don’t have time to play because they have so many “enrichment classes”—French, Mandarin, Little Learners cooking classes, and golf, tennis, and voice lessons—after preschool. There are wardrobe consultants to help moms buy the right clothes for themselves for school drop-off and pickup. There are teetering high heels and breathtaking J. Mendel and Tom Ford furs at playgrounds and at birthday parties that cost $5,000 and up, and apartments so big and with ceilings so high, they can and do have full-size bouncy castles inside.

  If childhood is unusual here, motherhood is beyond bizarre. I learned firsthand about the “gets” that define life for the privileged and perfect women with children I lived among. Their identities, I discovered, were forged through cruel, Upper East Side–specific rites of passage: the co-op board interview and school “exmissions”; the cults of Physique 57 and Soul Cycle, where the highly educated, frequently underemployed. and wealthy women I have come to think of as Manhattan Geishas pour their vaunted career ambitions into perfecting themselves physically. There were obsessional quests for nearly-impossible-to-procure luxury items (like my own, once I had “gone native,” for a Birkin bag); and “insider trading” of information, such as how to hire a black-market Disney guide with a disability pass in order to circumvent all the lines. An Upper East Side mommy’s identity also emerges from the fraught, complicated relationships between herself and the women she hires to help her raise her children and run her home (or homes). Learning about Upper East Side motherhood west of Lex, living among and learning from Upper East Side mommies, opened up a world that titillated, fascinated, educated, and occasionally appalled me.

  The women who taught me how to be an Upper East Side mother could be ruthless in their advocacy for their offspring—and themselves. Sure, they are loving mommies, but they are also entrepreneurial dynasts dead set on being successful and, therefore, having “successful” kids. None of them admitted to having prepped their three-year-olds for a standardized kindergarten exam called the ERB, for example, even to their best friends. But they all did it—finding the tutors through word of mouth, like insider trading, and sometimes shelling out thousands of dollars for the lessons—out of equal parts love, fear, and dry-eyed ambition. Just as many scheduled their children’s playdates with the “alpha offspring” of the rich and influential, in a bid to move up the invisible but pervasive and powerful hierarchy that organizes life here, strategically avoiding the kids of “lower-tier” parents as they would a used Band-Aid. It struck me that, for some of the women I lived near and chatted with in the school halls, children were another way to “live high”—more like baubles than babies. Someone for whom to buy the right things, lavish with the right kind of attention from the best experts, feed the best and healthiest foods, and help get into the most prestigious schools. I’ll admit it: sometimes my adventure made me cynical.

  The flip side of these women’s ambition and aggression, I found, is extraordinary anxiety. The pressure to get it right, to be a perfect mother and a perfectly fit, perfectly dressed, perfectly sexy woman as well, and the time and energy devoted to it, seems to stress many to the breaking point. To remedy this they turn to alcohol; prescription drugs; “flyaway parties” with girlfriends to Vegas, St. Barth’s, and Paris on their private planes; compulsive exercise and self-care (Flywheel and raw, organic, cold-pressed juice fasts are big); jaw-dropping
clothing and accessory purchases (among the women I know, “presale” is a verb, and dropping 10K at Bergdorf Goodman or Barneys in a day is not necessarily a huge deal); and lunch and a blowout or spa days with their oftentimes equally anxious girlfriends, and sometimes envious “frenemies.”

  My goal, initially, was to assimilate while keeping a distance from the stress and madness and competitiveness of Upper East Side mommy culture. My background in social research and anthropology, I figured, would help me stay sane and grounded as I made a place for my children and myself in a world that sometimes felt inhospitable. But, like anthropologists the world over, I eventually found myself “going native.” This is the term for what happens when the field scientist slips from objectivity into identification with the people she is studying, crossing the line from understanding to essentially “becoming” them. My connections to my friends downtown fraying as I applied myself to work and motherhood and cultivating mommy friendships uptown, I slowly but surely, without even realizing it, began to dress and act and think more like the women around me. And to care about what they cared about. Their world was equal parts alien, alluring, and alienating to me, but the imperative I felt to find a place among them was surprisingly strong.

  Eventually, thankfully, I made friends among the tribe of rarefied Upper East Side women with children I met. Deep, nurturing friendship is no easy thing in a rigidly hierarchical social environment where jockeying, competition, and pervasive insecurity and stress are the rule. Their rituals, the rules and practices of their tribe, were mostly strange to me, and frequently off-putting. So was the attitude of superiority and indifference I encountered initially. These things set them apart. But they had, I learned, much in common with women with children all over the city, and all over the world. In times of hardship they frequently bond with and look out for others in ways that are unexpected and extraordinary. The worldwide, eons-old evolutionary imperative of our species and of so many primates to cooperate and care runs through and informs and defines female friendship and motherhood everywhere. Even on the glossy, well-toned, hypercompetitive, and megamoneyed Upper East Side.

  What I noticed, what I still notice as most unusual among these particular friends, is their generosity and eagerness to translate for me the world they understood better than I did, their enthusiasm for sharing insights about their universe, their irony about the lives they themselves and others around them lead. And their sense of humor. “Anybody who doesn’t get how ridiculous and over-the-top our lives are, and how funny and nuts it is, isn’t anybody I want to be friends with anyway,” one mother told me when I only half-jokingly expressed concern, once word of my project got out, that she might get in trouble for being seen with me. I was afraid to write this book. But she and others put me at ease by showing me that, even in the strangest, most off-putting contexts and oddest-seeming worlds, there is a fair amount of normalcy to be found, and reminding me that even in apparently inhospitable, unfriendly climates, there is real warmth and kindness to be celebrated.

  In my years of studying and living among them, as a social researcher and mommy, I learned that women with children on the Upper East Side want what mothers everywhere want for their children—for them to be healthy and happy, to feel loved, to thrive, and, one day, to make something of themselves. But the similarities end there. Unless you were raised in Manhattan, and perhaps even if you were, nothing about Upper East Side childhood seems natural. And, by extension, unless you were raised by an Upper East Side mommy yourself, nothing about motherhood here feels logical or straightforward or commonsensical. Upper East Side mothers are not born when their babies are, I learned the hard way. They are made. This is the story of how I was made, and remade, and how it often felt like my undoing. It is a consideration of one narrow sliver of motherhood on one tiny island, and a meditation on what it might mean for everyone else.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Comme Il Faut

  Fieldnotes

  Environment and ecology

  The island is a geographically, culturally, and politically isolated landmass roughly seven times longer than it is wide. The climate is temperate, with relatively harsh winters and extremely hot and humid summers that, in recent years, approximate tropical conditions due in part to two centuries of intensive land clearing and industrial practices. The island’s longitude is 40°43’42” N, and latitude 73°59’39” W.

  Island dwellers live in a state of ecological release—resources such as food and water are abundant and easily procured; disease is minimal; there is no predation. Living in a niche characterized by literally unprecedented abundance, untethered from hardship, the wealthiest islanders are able to invest heavily in each and every offspring, and to invent elaborate and complex social codes and rites, the observance of which are time-, labor-, and resource-intensive.

  In spite of the extraordinary abundance of food, water, and other resources island-wide, there is persistent and marked poverty in some areas. The isolation, extreme population density, and vast discrepancies in wealth, as well as traditionally gender-scripted roles and behaviors around child rearing and work, may inform and in part account for many of the strange-seeming behaviors of the wealthiest island dwellers, discussed in the following pages.

  Island dwellings

  The island’s inhabitants are primarily vertical dwellers, making their homes directly on top of one another in structures of finely ground stone. Living in these “vertical villages” allows inhabitants to maximize physical space, a precious commodity in short supply on their tiny and remarkably densely populated island. In some locations, particularly where the wealthiest islanders reside, these vertical villages are notably restricted, with a secretive “council of elders” presiding over who will and will not be allowed to live there. Scouting out a dwelling is one of the most labor-intensive practices of the female members of the tribe I studied—most often the task is undertaken by primaparas. Almost without exception, “dwelling shamans” guide these women in their quest for a home—which is also a quest for identity. The shamans offer specialized knowledge, counsel, and emotional support throughout this costly, protracted, and painstaking initiation process.

  Geographical origins of islanders

  Island dwellers have heterogeneous geographical origins. Many dispersed at sexual maturity from their natal groups in distant, smaller, and even rural villages, immigrating to the island for enhanced professional, sexual, and marital prospects. Other island dwellers are indigenous; their status is higher than that of the non-autochthonous residents, particularly if they were raised in certain corners of the island or attended particular “learning huts” while growing up there.

  Beliefs of and about Islanders

  Whether they are autochthonous or émigrés, island dwellers are believed by outsiders, many visitors, and their countrymen to harbor haughty attitudes about themselves and their island. They are known throughout the land for their brusqueness; intellectual gifts; dazzling adornment practices; and acumen in barter, trade, and negotiation. Increasingly, their trade is in invisible ideas and abstractions, enhancing the sense that they have privileged knowledge and even “magical” powers. The journeys and tribulations of those who move to the island and struggle to succeed there are the stuff of legend, literally—there exists a long oral and written tradition about the supposedly indomitable and unique spirit of people who are able “make it there.” Once they have established themselves on the island, it is said, they can “make it anywhere.”

  Resource acquisition and distribution

  On the whole the island dwellers are the richest in the entire nation, living untethered from the environmental constraints that have such a profound impact on life history courses in other habitats worldwide. Obtaining adequate calories for themselves and their children, the main ecological challenge to parents worldwide and throughout our evolutionary prehistory, is a simple given for wealthy island dwellers. However, as i
n many industrial and postindustrial societies, fathers of the very traditionally gender-scripted tribe I studied tend to focus on the job of provisioning their wives and families with less-tangible resources, including financial, social, and cultural capital. While many island-dwelling females work outside the home, during the childbearing and child rearing years, many wealthy islanders believe it is their “role” to remain home with their children, where they are often assisted by alloparents—individuals other than parents who take on a parental role. They call these “housekeepers,” “nannies,” and “caregivers.”

  Island organization

  The island is organized, in the minds of island dwellers, into four quadrants: Up, Down, Right, and Left. The “Up” and “Down” areas are believed to be markedly distinct—with Up being preferable for raising children and Down being considered primarily a place for pre-reproductives, cultural “outsiders,” feasting, and ecstatic nighttime rites. Islanders further divide their island into left and right hemispheres. “Left” and “Right,” like “Up” and “Down” are believed to have different—even polar opposite—characteristics. Left is believed to be more casual and progressive, in contrast to Right’s perceived formality and conservatism.

  For islanders, Up/Down and Right/Left are more than mere directions or coordinates; they are powerful and deeply felt oppositions that organize an island dweller’s identity and everyday experience. Fittingly, islander subtribes are defined by their quadrant—e.g., Right Siders, Left Siders, Updwellers, Downdwellers. Island dwellers are largely indifferent to residents of adjacent areas of the archipelago, rarely going there or even speaking of them. “Crossing over” to outlying parts of their own landmass and to other islands in the archipelago requires complex transportation, insider knowledge of routes, and a tariff, further reinforcing not only islanders’ intense xenophobia but also their literal geographical separateness.