Primates of Park Avenue (20 page)

Thank God for a drop of wine.

As I got closer to many of the Upper East Side mommies around me, and others continued to keep their distance, I became more and more preoccupied with what “belonging” might mean—to me, and to the women who were now my friends, and to the ones who were not. Part of me wanted to fit in and be embraced by everyone in my adopted troop. Primates are, after all, deeply affiliative and highly pro-social, characteristics that set us apart from other species: as with chimps and baboons and macaques, connections with others mean more to us than just about anything else. Even if we are slightly cynical moms from downtown. I was still shaken by having been, all those months before, a playdate pariah. I knew that such “hazing” was not uncommon among primates of the human and nonhuman variety, and I doubted that the exclusions and performative back-turnings had ever been precisely personal. But I still harbored, in the most primitive parts of my brain, the fear that I might be excluded again. Everyone wants to fit in—whether they are hippies in Berkeley, PTA moms in Omaha, or TriBeCa transfers—those who depart the Upper East Side to move downtown. Part of me was now hell-bent on towing the line: dressing to fit in, helping with school committees like everyone else, going to luncheons. Meanwhile, my front brain puzzled over what would happen if I
didn’t
or couldn’t. How did you fall out, and what happened then?

Divorce and diminution of income—the DD plagues, as I came to think of them—seemed to be two events that could precipitate getting drummed out of the group. Once a woman is divorced, she likely won’t have the money to play at the same level—buy the tickets for the events, join the flyaway parties to St. Barth’s and Paris and Miami. There will be fewer invites for this reason—and another one, too. Women who are divorced often ignite fears that “it can happen to me, too” among her peers. And that “she’s on the make and may try to steal someone’s husband.” As one divorced member of the tribe told me, “It’s bye-bye for me. Third wheels are scary.” A divorced tribe member may keep a friend or two, but find she has a significantly circumscribed social life.

It was no doubt frightening to think your life as you knew it could fall away because your marriage fell apart. But the story I really couldn’t shake was about a woman I’ll call Lena. After the crash in 2008, the story goes, she and her husband lost almost everything. The oceanfront Hamptons home. The classic eight–classic seven combination on Park. They pulled their kids out of prestigious private schools, where they had once been big donors and board members, giving them a measure of influence over whose kids could get in, which in turn gave them massive cultural capital. Gone. They moved to 110th street. Without telling anyone, Lena took at job at an upscale department store in an upscale mall in an upscale Manhattan suburb. Seen one way, this was an act of simple necessity. But seen another way, it was brave, because it was a step down. Several women she knew showed up at the store one day, and were shocked to discover that Lena was “on the other side” now, bringing them shoes to try on. Other friends might have rallied around Lena and organized a shopping excursion en masse to the tony store where she worked, to give her a day of great commissions. They might have reached out, and buoyed her up. I liked to think that I would have. Instead, Lena’s no-longer-peers simply avoided her. This didn’t surprise me, somehow. But it angered me. It served to remind me of the foreignness of some of the women around me, the divide between what they felt and how they acted, and how I did. It was as if they lived in a caste system, and Lena was now forever tainted, ritually impure. She and her plight were terrifying—and she became a taboo object. Perhaps these women believed that Lena would find it humiliating to be around them, but I doubted it. And was that any reason to abandon a friend?

“It’s almost like the attitude in this world, when your girlfriend is down, is ‘Sink or swim’ ” a woman who was newly divorced from her wealthy and powerful husband explained to me over coffee. Queen of Queen Bees would no longer speak to her, she explained, and I suggested she might be better off for it. But I knew how her ostracism, the being dropped, must feel, and I felt sorry for her, as I did for Lena.

Eventually, the story goes, Lena and her husband left town. I was interested and relieved to hear that she had become a Buddhist, and was happy. But to a certain set of women, she no longer exists. “I think she moved to some hippie place? And joined a cult or something?” is how a woman I asked about Lena’s story described it. She was dead.

The Upper East Side culture they lived in was itself a major plague on my tribe of mommies, it seemed to me. The pressure to conform, the drive for perfection, and emphasis on appearances and keeping up appearances on the Upper East Side are extraordinary and unrelenting. My realization, early on in my life there, that I had to get dressed up to run to the corner for milk, was just the tip of the iceberg. You would have to be socially tone-deaf not to sense the pressure to be perfectly turned out, perfectly groomed, perfectly coiffed, and always at the right event with the right person at the right time. But there is something deeper going on, too. Lena’s story taught me that like the social worlds of the Bedouin and the Roma, the Upper East Side is an honor/shame culture. Shame and the fear of not fitting in or falling out or being ostracized, rather than the fear of going to hell or prison, are the main means of social control. And on the Upper East Side, as in China or among certain tribes of native Americans, one can lose one’s honor or one’s “face”—not the physical thing that you talk and eat with and put makeup on, but your prestige, reputation, indeed your very
self
. Marcel Mauss wrote of the Pacific Northwest Indians that

Kwakiutl . . . noblemen have the same notion of “face” as the Chinese. . . . It is said of one of the great mythical chiefs who gave no feast that he had a “rotten face” . . . To lose one’s face is to lose one’s spirit, which is truly the “face,” the dancing mask, the right to incarnate a spirit and wear an emblem or totem. It is the veritable
persona
which is at stake, and it can be lost in the potlatch just as it can be lost in the game of gift-giving, in war, or through some error in ritual.

Or, Mauss might add today of the women I studied, it can be lost by losing your money. Or having bed bugs.

While bedbugs and head lice are an inconvenient and stressful fact of life for people all over New York City, for a privileged Upper East Side mom like my friend Gina, they are something else. Gina sobbed for days—not just because getting rid of them is so expensive and time consuming and exhausting. And not only because she was covered in itchy bites, and could find no relaxation, only stress, in her bed at night. And not just or even primarily because the family might not be able to sell the apartment for several years after, owing to new laws requiring sellers to disclose that their largest asset has had a pest problem. No. Tina was mostly very, very afraid that her friends would find out. Her identity hinged on hosting playdates and having a perfect home, among other things. Bedbugs suggested the frightening possibility of being ostracized from the group. “Nobody will come here anymore!” she told me. If her kids didn’t have a social life, neither did she. And we know what happens to the socially unaffiliated in an affiliative, hierarchical world: social death (and even physical death, if you’re a baboon).

Many of the mothers I knew shared Tina’s heightened sense of social shame and humiliation—not only about catastrophic life events like divorce or going broke, but about that extra five pounds or having a kid who needs occupational therapy or being unable to afford two weeks in Aspen. In an honor/shame culture, a world where you are expected to have not one dimple of cellulite or one stray hair, a world where your entire being hinges on what you give away at a potlatch, or how you keep your home, or having kids without problems, losing face is easy. There is no sin, and probably no god—the tribe was monotheistic by tradition but largely post-religious—but there is shame. As foreign as we might find it, once you enter into the cultural logic of losing face, it’s clear how the very possibility of such public humiliation could stress you in real ways. Their exhausted, gaunt faces. Another drop of wine.

Candace was almost always right about the tribe, and, following her lead, I did indeed discover that there was an anxiety gender gap of sorts. Women in developed countries (but not those in undeveloped ones) are, remarkably,
twice
as likely to suffer from anxiety disorders as are men. But I had thought my tribe would be an exception. After all, I knew from firsthand experience that being a relatively privileged NYC mommy conferred a crucial advantage: the ability to buffer oneself from catastrophes like being sick with no insurance or not having the money to feed your children, but also from the assaults of everyday big city life, by means of a massage or a weekend in the country. I figured with their exponentially greater wealth and private planes, their three-week Caribbean/Aspen (or Turks and Caicos/Vail) vacations and weeklong girls getaways to Canyon Ranch, the places on Further Lane to get them further from the madding city crowds, the über-wealthy mommies from my sons’ school and playgroups should be exponentially calmer. Wouldn’t having your children in the very best school, or having the best possible nanny, one procured through an agency that charged a very hefty fee to partner parents with the crème de la crème of caregivers, give one a degree of calm and confidence about their well-being? I presumed all this should be enough to quell anyone’s worries. And that any other stress and anxiety was something the women I knew created themselves, by fretting about the wrong things and failing to be in the moment and enjoy all they had.

I was wrong.

As it turns out, the old adage is true. Once you control for factors like poverty, illness, and hunger, money does not buy you happiness. And it certainly does not buy you a reprieve from anxiety. Precisely the opposite seems to be the case, with a whole host of specific-to-their-ecological-niche factors above and beyond the everyday stressors of NYC life making rich Upper East Side mommies the ultimate nerve-racked nellies. Mothering in a state of ecological release and an honor/shame culture, I was learning, was in many ways a perfect storm for anxiety. Their perfect lives were in fundamental ways the worst thing for these mommies’ minds.

The cult of “intensive mothering,” peculiar to the West and specific to the wealthy, was certainly a plague upon the mommies I studied. Sociologist Sharon Hayes, who coined the terms, defines intensive mothering as “a gendered model that [compels] mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children.” Constant emotional availability, constantly monitoring your kid’s psychological state, endlessly providing activities, and “fostering” your child’s “intellectual development” are all expected of women of means, Hayes observes, and failing to nurture them comprehensively, or just letting them be, borders on neglect. My tribe of mommies, unlike my mom, were forever on duty, doing baking projects to teach their kids fractions and taking educational museum visits and being “involved” at school. In this paradigm, motherhood is an anxious, 24/7, depleting, high-stakes duty. There is virtually no sense, on the Upper East Side, that letting a child fail and feel frustrated could build her resilience and make her a happier, stronger person. No, if your child failed—to score 99.9 percent on her ERB, to do a great drawing at art class, to do well on an obstacle course or race—this was less a teachable moment, it seemed, and more evidence of your own failure as a parent.