Primates of Park Avenue (21 page)

But if you mother intensively, go all out, you also run the risk of being called a “helicopter mom” and chided for ruining your kids. No wonder a study of 181 mothers with young kids found that those who embraced intensive motherhood had high levels of anxiety and depression. Meanwhile, opting out and reading
Star
while the kids watch TV makes you a Bad Mom. It’s hard to imagine anything further off the evolutionary script of mothering—kids hanging in multi-age groups all day, the younger ones learning skills from the older ones so they can lend a hand at home, while moms spend time with their sisters and cousins, parenting together—than the plague of intensive motherhood. Another drop of wine on the side of the plate.

It eventually dawned on me that having choices and the money to make them was another plague upon my mommy tribe. This surprised me at first: we often say that rich people have options that poor ones do not, and having choices is a privilege, and we’re right. The option of sending your child to a private school with small classes rather than a public school with crowding issues is a distinct advantage. So is the option of choosing between the two safest cars, because you can afford either, rather than the cheapest car with a horrible accident rating. In these and other instances, choice and the economic privilege which enables it (which Volvo, cancer specialist, or Norland nanny?) not only improve one’s life quality but protect one’s life. But from observing and mothering with the mommies around me, I learned what the research shows: having too many choices is stressful. Facing more than three or four options increases negative effects like regret, heightened expectations, and disappointment. As the choice set grows larger, those negative effects escalate, leading to
anxiety
. Only one factor mitigates this effect:
if participants are not held accountable
for their choices
. Privileged, intensive motherhood presents just the opposite situation. You are utterly responsible for the potentially life-altering choice of the best and safest car seat, stroller, and organic carrots. “I have no idea whom to pick,” a mom exclaimed to me in the nursery school’s café one day, a pile of nanny résumés in front of her. She was about to return to work full-time. “And it’s not like it doesn’t matter who I choose. These are my
kids
.”

Call it a “first world problem,” but only if you understand that it is literally that: in much of the world, child care is not an issue, because “it takes a village” is a way of life, not just a bumper sticker. This allows women to work, feel fulfilled, and have a life apart from mothering without guilt. Or anxiety. Another drop of wine.

Nannies and housekeepers and mannies and cleaners and house managers are a privileged mommy’s most important allies. And frequently, as I learned firsthand and from other mothers, they can be her greatest adversaries. And a major source of anxiety. Before I had children and moved uptown, I always figured it was simple to have a good relationship with the people who work for you in your home. If I was “nice” and respectful, our nanny would be “happy” and do a good job. End of story. Women who had problems with their nannies and housekeepers, I figured, were wielding their power against disempowered people unfairly, and paying the price. But to actually live this relationship, I quickly discovered, is to learn just how much more interesting, complex, and anxiety-inducing it is than
The Nanny Diaries
suggests. First, there is the matter of money. Many of the nannies I knew made 100K per year or more and traveled the world by private jet. They had paid vacation, half or all of their health-care coverage paid for, and generous holiday bonuses. So we’re not talking about the salt mine here. This is why it always struck me as shocking when such nannies and their female bosses—yes, female, for it is very, very rare for a father of the tribe I study to take an active role in household administration—got into power struggles. “She thought I needed her more than she needed me,” one woman told me glumly about what I realized was a fairly typical downward spiral in the nanny/housekeeper/boss relationship. “Once she realized how essential she was, she kept demanding more. It got to the point where we felt really exploited.”

The truth is that, while mommies have most of the money, nannies do have power—the power to make our lives easier, or to upend our schedules and lives unintentionally or intentionally, and the tremendous power of caring for the most vulnerable members of our families. There are plenty of wonderful, loving nannies out there. One friend’s nanny attended child-care seminars at the local JCC—not because she was asked to but because she wanted to. My friend only discovered she had taken this initiative when she found the nanny’s notes, transcribed in broken, phonetic English and then painstakingly translated into Spanish, folded on the counter near her purse. Unbidden and uncompensated, this woman had gone to hours of trouble out of devotion not just to her charge and her bosses but to the idea of making herself a better nanny. Another nanny risked her life when the scaffolding outside a grocery store on the Upper West Side collapsed to find her charge, a baby. Breaking away from first responders who told her it was too dangerous, she dove into the wreckage and found and recovered the baby (who was unharmed, but might not have remained so if not for her caretaker’s bravery and devotion).

There are also nannies who are resentful, or have no background or interest in child care and are doing it “until I figure out what I really want to do” (the twentysomething, college-educated variety) or because they are unqualified to do anything else. Some are undermining. Some act out. Some have bad judgment and terrible attitudes. On a day that became so windy so suddenly that police urged people to stay off the street, a friend called her nanny to tell her to come home with the children. Her seven-year-old later reported that the nanny had hung up the phone and said to him, “Your mother is so freaking ridiculous.” The truth is that there are nannies who passive-aggressively call in sick when a mother has an important event on the family calendar. Or leave the house in disarray to make a point. Nannies and mothers get into power struggles. They have arguments. Often they simmer under the same roof, needing and resenting one another. They confront and negotiate the intricacies of socioeconomic and cultural difference (in the case of nannies from other countries) or developmental gulfs (in the case of a twentysomething) and of envy (“My kid sees her more than she sees me!” a mother may fume; “Why should she have so much and I have less?” a nanny may seethe), all within the walls of a home. It can be helpful or maddening to have a nanny, or to be a nanny and have a mother as your boss. But I have never heard anyone describe it as easy.

The chemistry with a nanny, with whom a relationship can be every bit as complex as a marriage, is a wild card, and one of if not
the
most important determining factor in an Upper East Side mommy’s anxiety levels and quality of life. At one point I might have scoffed, “But you have the power to fire them!” Having lived it, I now wonder, And
then
what? In a culture where, as Anne Marie Slaughter has observed, we have no infrastructure of care, no government standards, oversight, or monitoring of caregivers, mothers and nannies are too interdependent and options are too few for it to be quite so simple. A drop of wine.

And then there is the Gordian knot, the triple-threat plague on my people: the interplay of calorie restriction, plummeting estrogen, and insomnia that dogs just about every one of the women with young children I spoke to. There is no overestimating, I realized at a certain point in my career as a mother on the Upper East Side, how anxious and miserable it can make a person to be sleep-deprived, hormonal, and hungry. Women who delay marriage and childbearing may have a sense of perspective and a more thoroughly myelinated brain than a twentysomething, and more social and financial stability. But we are less energetic than our younger mommy counterparts. And it’s harder for us to recharge by getting the rest we so badly need. As estrogen levels ebb and in some cases plunge from the mid-thirties onward, sleep becomes elusive. Lower levels of estrogen do more than keep you awake. Researchers are now realizing that women’s vulnerability to anxiety and mood disorders may be explained in large part by declining estrogen levels. Estrogen calms the fear response in healthy women and female rats: the higher the estrogen was in the blood of women who were trained on a fear-extinction task by researchers, the less likely they were to startle. In short, when estrogen is on the wane, so is your sense of calm.

Now add to this mix the plague of one of the most bizarre imperatives of the UES: to be as fit, fat-free, and sylphlike as possible. On a business trip to Abuja, Nigeria, my husband visited a market in search of a gift for me. A plump woman in vibrant traditional dress, helping him sort through the brightly colored clothing in her stall, asked, “Is your wife fat?” When he answered, in confusion, “What? No, she’s skinny!” the woman looked down in embarrassment She had meant, “Is your wife healthy and beautiful? And are you a rich man?” She did not make eye contact, he reported, even as he paid and thanked her for her help. His wife was thin, and he had
admitted
it. He may as well have been covered in boils. But here on the Upper East Side, nothing sells faster than a 00. Women are thin, thinner, thinnest. It is our very own marker of beauty and wealth, and the standard is exacting. “Aside from Hollywood and the modeling world, I don’t know of any place where there is more pressure to be thin,” Manhattan psychoanalyst Stephanie Newman observed in her private practice on the Upper East Side, where she has treated many patients for eating disorders. And the skinnier you are, endocrinologists tell us, the less estrogen you have. Fat is not necessarily healthy, but fat cells are estrogenic, and estrogen helps blunt anxiety. Nervous and thin go together, it turns out, like Dolce&Gabbana.

Being skinny and being hungry and substituting kale juice for a proper meal, all ways of life in the tribe I studied, affect more than estrogen levels. The conditions of a famous starvation study of 36 male WWII conscientious objectors nearly replicates the daily practices of many women on the UES and the standard US recommendations for weight loss today: a 500–600 calorie deficit daily for a goal of losing one to two pounds per week (the men in the starvation study had 1,600 calories a day, and walked 22 miles per week, with a weight loss goal of 2.5 pounds per week). In that study, the men quickly began to experience lethargy, irritability, and significant anxiety, as well as dizziness, cold intolerance, hair loss, ringing in the ears, inability to concentrate, and loss of sex drive. They became obsessed with food and developed elaborate rituals when they sat down to eat, much as anorexics develop around food preparation and food consumption.

In short, the whole experiment was a lot like a weekday lunch at Sant Ambroeus. And it’s worth noting that such dietary restrictions sent a full 6 percent of the motivated and healthy participants in the WWII study to a psychiatric hospital: one man became suicidal; another chopped off three of his fingers. No wonder the women around me, women for whom “juicing” and fasting and “detoxing” and rigorous exercise for hours are a way of life, were so on edge. It was a miracle, apparently, that they were merely giving one another pointed, envious once-overs in school elevators rather than taking meat cleavers to themselves and others.

Indeed, the drops in estrogen seen in skinny women in midlife, a description that fits my tribe to a tee, make them more aggressive. In one study, researchers administered a point-subtraction aggression paradigm game to women who met the criteria for high anxiety and women who didn’t. They noted a higher ratio of attack by highly anxious women, and observed, with some surprise, that the attack option of the game had no instrumental advantage in terms of gaining points, and “so constitutes a pure case of spiteful, reactive aggression.” Aha, I thought as I read it, flashing to the sidewalk charges that were a daily affair where I had set up base camp.

And for every plague, a drop of wine. Or a glass. Or a few.

Wealthy husbands on the Upper East Side collect red wine. The wine cellars in their Hamptons homes are a form of cultural capital, suggesting that they aren’t just rich consumers; they are refined and erudite connoisseurs. They open a bottle of red for enjoyment, for sharing, but also for power. Like the right contemporary art, the right ’94 Pomerol telegraphs not just what you have, but that you
know
. It is the husband, sometimes in consultation with the other husband at the table, who orders the bottles with the three-digit price tag when couples go out to a restaurant in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, their wives drink, usually white (red, they say, keeps them awake) to get by. To be an Upper East Side woman with young children is to drink wine. Nationwide, women are the growth engine for wine sales—and everyone in zip codes 10021 and 10075 and 10028 knows it. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that Upper East Siders are healthier than all other New Yorkers on nearly every measure. But they bombed one: they are 35 percent more likely to binge-drink than anyone else in our town. One in five adults in the tribe I studied, in other words, has engaged in binge drinking in the past month. How many of those binge drinkers are women? There are no stats, but based on my fieldwork, and a fair amount of participating versus just participant-observation, my quasi-scientific answer is: a lot. It is nothing, nothing at all, for revelers at a moms’ night out to quaff four glasses of wine. At arts-and-crafts studios where mommies take their kids for birthday parties and rainy days, wine is served as early as 11:00 a.m. The mommies I knew drank—white wine, vodka, tequila, and, for those bent on male approval or setting themselves apart, scotch or some other “guy” whiskey—every night. Except Monday. That was a day for penance—a juice fast to make up for the weekend of drinking and eating. Tuesday through Friday, drinking was on.