Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

  Other times, as they imparted information to me, these women 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 mums didn’t have nearly as much success as 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 tradeoffs” every day. It didn’t take long for evolutionary thinkers and primatologists like Sarah Hrdy to figure out that primates—both the human and non-human 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 “red-shirting” 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; I had 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 adults with startling (to us) speed, we humans and our closest relatives take our time. Primatologist and St. Louis University associate professor of anthropology Katherine C. MacKinnon observes that “most primate species spend 25–35% of their lifespan 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 lifespan 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 for the longest. It begins when we enter the world essentially as fetuses, half-baked, neurologically unfinished, uniquely needy 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, impact 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 for the education of 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?

  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 pre-adolescence—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 like 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 adult
s, 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 day in multi-age groups of other kids, caring for each other, 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 simply impart language 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 has 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 “descendent 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 to 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. 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 has written, “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 kids? Were their parents any nicer than me and my husband? 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 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, promising, essentially, that if they accept your child, he or she will go there. If your child should get into a school on the 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 had 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 him 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 l
earner 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 had come 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 are basically trying to exclude as many “nonsibling” kids as they can. 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 each other, 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 ended up in a special circle of hell, one reserved for people who stress 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 her child up 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.