My son would be fine with some ibuprofen and a little rest, I knew. The sun was sinking lower in the bright blue sky and I felt a strong, slow swell of happiness come over me as our family drove home with the windows rolled down, taking in the beautiful afternoon.
SOURCES
Beck, Taylor. “Estrogen and Female Anxiety: Study Suggests Lower Levels Can Lead to More Mood Disorders.” Harvard Gazette, August 9, 2012.
Bell, Adrian, Katie Hinde, and Lesley Newson. “Who Was Helping?: The Scope of Female Cooperative Breeding in Early Homo.” PlosOne, December 2013 (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0083667).
Bennetts, Leslie. The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? Voice, 2007.
Campbell and Haussman. “Effects of Oxytocin on Women’s Aggression Depend on State Anxiety.” Aggressive Behavior 39, no. 4: 316–22.
Carmon, Irin. “Strong Proof: ‘Drink’ and ‘Her Best-Kept Secret.’ ” Sunday Book Review, New York Times November 13, 2013. Retrieved online April 14, 2014.
Cronk, L., N. Chagnon, and W. Irons, eds. Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000.
de Waal, Frans. The Bonobo and the Athiest: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.
Deans, Emily, MD. “Dieting Can Make You Lose Your Mind,” online edition, Psychology Today, retrieved March 24, 2011, at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201103/dieting-can-make-you-lose-your-mind.
Donner, Nina, and Christopher Lowry. “Sex Differences in Anxiety and Emotional Behavior.” European Journal of Physiology 465 (2013): 601–26.
“Generalized Anxiety Disorder: An In-Depth Report.” New York Times, retrieved online http://www.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/generalized-anxiety-disorder/print.html.
Gesquiere, L., et al. “Life at the Top: Rank and Stress in Wild Male Baboons.” Science 333: 357–60.
Glaser, Gabrielle. “Why She Drinks: Women and Alcohol Abuse,” Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2013. Accessed online April 12, 2014.
———. Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—and How They Can Regain Control. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
Grant, Adam M., and Barry Schwartz. “Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6 (2011): 61.
Hayes, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
———. “The Ideology of Intensive Mothering,” in From Sociology to Cultural Studies: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Long. New York: Blackwell, 1997.
Hewlett, Barry, and Michael Lamb, eds. Hunter Gatherer Childhoods: Developmental and Cultural Perspective.s Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2005.
Hoffman, Stephan, and Anu Asnani. “Cultural Aspects in Social Anxiety and Social Anxiety Disorder.” Depression and Anxiety 27, no. 12 (December 2012): 1117–27.
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mothers and Others: the Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
———. Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shaped the Human Species. New York: Ballantine, 1999.
Konner, Melvin, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Lurey, David. The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. Cambridge, England: 2008.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. W. W. Norton, 2000.
Offer, Shira, and Barbara Schneider. “Revisiting the Gender Gap in Time-Use Patterns: Multitasking and Well-Being among Mothers and Fathers in Dual-Earner Families.” American Sociological Association 76, no. 6 (2011): 809–33.
Sapolsky, Robert, A Primate’s Memoir: a Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons. New York: Scribner, 2002.
———. “Peace Among Primates” and “How to Relieve Stress” at www.beinghuman.org: http://www.beinghuman.org/mind/robert-sapolsky.
Scutti, Susan. “Binge Drinking—Rich Women Most Likely to Binge Drink.” Medical Daily. 24 April, 2013. Retrieved online April 14, 2014.
Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Small, Meredith. Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent. New York: Random House, 1999.
———. Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent Young Children. New York: Random House, 2002.
Smith, Harriet J., Parenting for Primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Stockley, P. and A. Campbell, eds. Female Competition and Aggression: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society/Biological Sciences, October 2013.
Symons, Jane. “Caveman Fasting Diet May Leave Women Diabetic.” Express (home of UK Daily and Sunday Express), January 27, 2013. Retrieved online April 13, 2014.
“Take Care Upper East Side.” Community Profiles. New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2006.
Thompson, Clive. “The Ecology of Stress.” New York Magazine, September 15, 2010. Retrieved online at http://nymag.com/nymetro/urban/features/stress/10888/.
Volk, A. A., and Atkinson, J. “Is Child Death the Crucible of Human Evolution?” Journal of Social and Cultural Evolutionary Psychology 2 (2008): 247–60.
Warner, Judith, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. New York: Riverhead Press, 2005.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the women with young children who taught me to be an Upper East Side mother. Initially, I was as wary of them as they were of me, but they proved what all primatologists know: we are remarkably pro-social and affiliative beings whose long, intensive, and highly cooperative parenting trajectories have in large part made us who we are. The group of Upper East Side mothers who embraced me and my project were masterful and generous native guides, showing me the Way while unlocking the belief system behind it with intelligence, humor, and a great sense of fun. They shared hilarious anecdotes, and heartbreaking ones, on all the big issues for primates—power, parenting, sex, anxiety, and loss, to name a few. They took me behind the scenes, opening up their homes, sharing their insights, thoughts, feelings, and—so important to us great apes—their food. Thanks to them, I went from outsider to knowing the warmth of sitting at the campfire in the company of others. I am equally indebted to the friends who listened and advised and put things in context. Thank you, then, to Regan Healy-Asnes, Jill Bikoff, Lindsay Blanco, Vivien Chen, Amy Fusselman, Elizabeth Gordon, Lauren Geller, Barrie Glabman, Judith Gurewich, Marjorie Harris, Eva Heyman, Suri Kasirer, Jennifer Kingson, Kelly Klein, Beth Kojima, Ellen Kwon, Nancy Lascher, Simone Levinson, Eve MacSweeney, David Margolick, Jennifer Maxwell, Jackie Mitchell, Liz Morgan Welch, Arianna Neumann, Solana Nolfo, Debbie Paul, Rebecca Rafael, Barbara Reich, Tina Lobel-Reichberg, Jessica Reif-Cohen, Atoosa Rubenstein, Jackie Sackler, Erica Samuels, Jen Schiamberg, Caroline Schmidt, Adam Schwartz, Carole Staab, Dana Stern, Rachel Talbot, Amy Tarr, and Amy Wilson.
Trish Todd’s editing was insightful, incisive, and patient, undertaken with the sensitivity of a mother who knows exactly how protective other mothers are of their babies. She was and is a book shaman par excellence. Bethany Saltman helped immeasurably with research. I am grateful to professors Katherine MacKinnon, Richard Prum, Katie Hinde, and Dan Wharton for wading into the muck and taking the time to direct and enlighten an outsider whose basic misapprehensions of their worldview did nothing to deter their generosity or forbearance. Thanks also to experts Heidi Waldorf, MD, Dennis Gross, MD, Stephanie Newman, PhD, and Rachel Blakeman, JD/LCSW, whose insights on beauty and anxiety informed my thinking on the topics.
Without the dedication of several alloparents tending to my children, I could not have written this book. Thank you to Carlos Fragoso, Elizabeth Dahl, and S
arah Swatez. My children have also formed very real and meaningful attachments to their caring cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and half sisters, to whom I am indebted. Thanks to my own mother, who somehow found the time to teach me to love anthropology, biology, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Goodall and her Gombe chimps, even as she raised three children far from her own kin, with no nannies in sight. Special thanks to my friend Lucy Barnes, who with characteristic generosity and kindness asked me almost every day, “How’s the book?” and made me the godmother of her daughters, Sylvie and Willa.
My children, Eliot and Lyle, taught me to take the risk of maternal love. I love you, monkeys. Finally, my best reader, and the best choice I ever made, is my husband, Joel Moser. Thanks to him I became a mother, and learned that the pair bond, in spite of being an anomaly and a blip on the screen in evolutionary terms, can feel like home. For that I am eternally grateful.
Primates of Park Avenue Page 23