AWhen the American journalist Wendy Martin moved with her investment banker husband and their young son from the centrally located West Village to New York’s Upper East Side under the impression of September 11, 2001, the young mother first did what every newcomer does in every new one Neighborhood would do: She tries to make contact with other mothers, to belong and to be respected. Only that peer group, to which she is looking for access, is an extremely exclusive one: the super-rich – bankers as well as top managers and heirs of immense wealth – and their wives. The latter have turned motherhood into a kind of competitive sport and extended status symbols out of their children, and it is these mothers and their social rituals that Martin registers with astonishment: music and language lessons for diaper wearers and exclusive preschools that audition and “audition” for parents and children are a hotly contested and supposedly indispensable starting advantage for your later academic career.
Many thousand dollar birthday parties for toddlers are a must, and play dates among the little ones are strategically balanced – according to the rank of the respective mother. Instead of the ancestral deification of ancient cultures, it soon happens to Martin, the deification of descendants is practiced on the Upper East Side.
The new offer for a clever overview: The most important news and comments of the last 24 hours – from the FAZ editorial team – have already been downloaded over 100,000 times.
Learn more
–
–
–
Martin was particularly well placed to participate in observing this microcosm; Growing up in the Midwest, the haven of American down-to-earth living, she moved to New York City in her twenties to study literature and anthropology and pursue a career as a writer and journalist. Her eyes, trained in this way, now turned to the money nobility of Manhattan; In her recently published book “Primates of Park Avenue”, Martin characterizes the members of this select group, to which she herself temporarily belonged, as a highly cultivated horde of monkeys with Hermès handbags and Balenciaga shoes. But as a horde of monkeys. What happened to her – who appears under the pseudonym Wednesday Martin – in their biotope is hair-raising, mostly very amusing and in the end even touching.
Excesses of a jealous status wrangle
“She looked like she had a hair and make-up stylist,” Martin describes a mother who picks up her offspring from kindergarten. “And that on a normal Wednesday afternoon.” Of course, Martin soon joins this group himself and, when the labor pains for the birth of her second child, has her hairstyle quickly spruced up – and regrets that she no longer waxes it with a bikini creates. Some things here sound like an oblique exaggeration of the quirks that the rampage pigs from “Real Housewives” reality television carry to the market, for example Martin’s description that some of these mothers hire disabled people who enable them to bypass the long lines on trips to Disneyland .
– .
