Wednesday Martin - Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

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 primatespower, parenting, sex, anxiety, and loss, to name a few. They took me behind the scenes, opening up their homes, sharing their insights, thoughts, feelings, andso important to us great apestheir 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 Todds 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 Sarah 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, Hows 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.

W E HAD decided to move uptown in search of a better childhood for our son. Uptown has Central Park, after all, an oasis of sorts wedged between the Upper East and Upper West Sides, and lots of good public and private schools. At the time it also had the things it was so hard to find downtownkid-friendly restaurants, clothing stores for kids, and places to take your kid for a haircut where he could watch a Wiggles video while sitting in a chair shaped like a fire engine. We wanted some respite from the constant reminders of 9/11, which still hung over downtown nearly a year later in so many wayspoor indoor air quality, unremitting anxiety, and a palpable sadness. We wanted access to playgrounds and a family-focused neighborhood in an excellent public school district. And we wanted to be near my husbands parents, as well as his brother and his family, a web of loving cousins and grown-ups who lent a hand and propped us up when we were sleep deprived and dealing with teething or temper tantrums. With our commitment to staying in Manhattan, this meant one thing: the Upper East Side.

Whenever I mentioned to our downtown friends that we were moving uptown, they looked at me as if I were excitedly divulging plans to join a cult. At least a downtown trophy wife has glasses, a PhD, and her own nonprofit, a girlfriends husband observed as we discussed it over drinks one night. It went without saying that we all knew an Upper East Side trophy wife had blond hair and breast augmentation. And stayed home with the kids. And the staff. Right? I wasnt sure. I hadnt ventured above West Twenty-Third Street for years, except to visit my in-laws and go on the occasional museum excursion. Then I could not fail to notice the lacquered, polished looks of the people and the stores and every single surface and outfit and bit of brass. But the mommies had never particularly caught my eye. After all, I had never really known any Upper East Side mommies. How would that be? How would they be? Be sure to budget the money for a fur coat, my girlfriend smirked. I laughed, and my husband choked on a cashew. There was no shortage of stereotypes about uptown versus downtown, and I was eager to see for myself how true or false they were.

First, though, I had to find us a place. And I do mean I , because my husband promptly delegated the apartment-hunting project to me. This was ostensibly logical since, as the mother of a very young child, I had rearranged my work schedule as a writer to be flexible and freelanceI could put it on hold for days or weeks at a time. We also had a part-time nanny who could watch my son while I searched. But there was a deeper cultural logic at work, too: in Manhattan, women are in charge of finding a place for the family to live. They might also pay for it, or for half of it. But in heterosexual marriages, regardless of who does what, its usually the woman who finds the apartment. I had puzzled over this plenty, and in the end had chalked it up to agriculture. While our hunter-gatherer ancestors had roamed and ranged with the food supply, setting up and breaking down camp with little attachment to place or possessions, the transition to a crop-based economy changed everything. With it came the notion of propertyThese fields are mine!and increased fertility for women, who were now relatively sedentary, and so ovulated more frequently. Before you could say millet, women were transformed from gatherers with all the clout, influence, and freedom that came with supplying their bands with nearly all their daily calories, into keepers of the hearth and home with little say beyond what time the dinner they had spent the day making would be served, and little prestige other than as baby vessels. I didnt mind that I was the one taking care of the baby and tending to our home and finding us a new one. It made sense, given that my husbands career was more lucrative than mine, and given my intense desire to be with our little son. But there were days when I wondered whether what my girlfriend and her husband had said over drinks was true: that, compared to downtown, Upper East Side gender politics were even more markedly agriculturalist Bantu than freewheeling, downtown-ish, hunter-gatherer !Kung-San.

Meanwhile, I suspected that it couldnt be too hard to sell our town house and settle on an apartment uptown, even for someone as clueless as me. After all, in New York City, town houses are a status symbol of the first and highest order. For Manhattanites, having your own stand-alone dwelling, with no one above or below you, is an unusual, highly prized, and highly desirable way to live. It is supposed to confer privacy, which we prize in the West, and a certain spatial grandeur in a town where you pay by the square foot. And so, in spite of our place being relatively modestthe kitchen was small, and there was no elevatorprospective buyers were lining up to see it. I was forever making it look pristine and then rushing out the door so a broker and client could view it.