It had been a long day. Anna Wakeling took a deep breath as she opened the door to her Park Avenue apartment.
From inside she could hear the voices of her two children, seven-year-old Robbie and five-year-old Vanessa, coming from the living room. The aroma of a baking chicken made her realize she had skipped lunch in the office. Thank God for Kara, she thought. She’s a marvelous cook.
In the living room Vanessa and Robbie were playing word games with their longtime nanny, Marie. Both jumped up when they saw her and enveloped her in hugs.
One boy, two years older than the one girl, just like Carter and me, she thought. But her children’s lives had been nothing like her own childhood. In the beginning Carter and I attended public schools in Queens, she thought. I could count on one hand the number of times our mother had relied on a babysitter. Robbie and Vanessa, in contrast, had a nanny, and next year Vanessa would be joining Robbie at one of the most elite private day schools on the Upper East Side.
In the beginning Dad treated us differently, Anna thought, taking Carter to building sites, showing him architectural drawings of new projects. But I was smarter. I wanted to learn everything Dad was talking about. I begged him to let me tag along. It wasn’t long before he realized I had it all over Carter.
Unlike her parents, Anna tried so hard to treat her children equally, not like “the boy” and “the girl,” the way she and Carter had been so frequently stereotyped. She never wanted Robbie to feel entitled because he was a boy, and she never wanted Vanessa to feel limited because she was a girl.