In her 26 years in New York, Wednesday Martin has lived in nearly every neighborhood, from Long Island City to Soho to the West Village. Nothing, she says, prepared her for the Upper East Side.

“It’s the most fascinating and alienating and completely separate world I’ve ever encountered,” Martin says. “This is a separate tribe in New York City.”

Her new book, “Primates of Park Avenue” (Simon & Schuster), is a chronicle of her time as a wife and mother on the Upper East Side and the culture shock that ensued. Martin, who will say only that she’s in her 40s, used her background in anthropology to understand the behavior on display: the segregation of men and women, the abuse of alcohol and drugs, the wild displays of competition, the conspicuous consumption and, above all, the deification of children.

“There is nowhere, to me, where intensive parenting is more acutely felt than the Upper East Side,” Martin says. “You’re supposed to be enriching your child on every measure you could think of: emotionally, socially, artistically, academically. It’s your job — and it falls on the women, because this tribe is very gender-scripted. The mommy culture there is a world within a world within a world.”

Coaches, therapists

In 2004, Martin and her financier husband decided to move from the West Village to the Upper East Side. “I wanted a place where my kid could get a haircut and sit in a chair that looked like a firetruck and watch the Wiggles,” she says. “That wasn’t happening in the West Village at the time.”

They found a condo at 900 Park Ave., and the social pressures were immediate. As they moved in, Martin writes, “a debate was raging between residents over whether people with babies and toddlers should be required to take the service elevator, normally used for ferrying deliveries and garbage.”

Families up here had many children, not the average 2.5. “Having a lot of children is the new conspicuous consumption,” Martin says. “It’s how the Masters of the Universe show their wealth: provisioning their children the right way and getting them into the right classes.”

Martin’s oldest was a toddler at the time, and the pressure to enroll her child in the best nursery school was acute. On the Upper East Side, the right nursery school opens the track to the Ivy League. The average tuition for a toddler in 2004 ranged from $25,000 to $35,000 a year.

Martin’s little boy, she soon learned, was way behind. As she writes, “before nursery school, your toddler was supposed to take classes at Diller-Quaile School of Music,” which accepts 3-month-olds. “Before Diller-Quaile, you were supposed to do a certain baby group. Everything, it seemed, fed into everything else.”

Martin was further panicked to learn her child had been born in the wrong month; many women on the Upper East Side time their pregnancies and IVF treatments to school enrollment, so their child will begin school at the oldest age possible — a practice known as redshirting.

“You go to the Upper East Side, and everyone will be heavily pregnant in the same month, because the time to have a baby is October or November,” Martin says. “Those are the good birthdays.”

Still, Martin learned there were things she could do for her toddler. Since the way children play with others factors into nursery-school admission, many Upper East Side mommies hire play-date tutors. Aristotle Circle, for example, offered group play-date tutorials last year for $400 an hour, complete with a write-up of your child’s social deficits. They currently offer one-on-one sessions between toddler and therapist for $150 to $300.

“The headmasters or the administrators of the school watch while the children have a play date with other children from the applicant pool — sometimes up to eight of them,” Martin says. “It’s an audition. So the play-date tutors are for kids who don’t have enough experience with spontaneous play, because they’re so overscheduled.”

Martin’s child was accepted to their school of choice, but her relief was short-lived. She soon learned much else was expected of the Upper East Side mommy.

“Intensive mothering says that if you have all these resources and all this money, you can’t just say to your kid, ‘Go play in the back yard,’ ” Martin explains. “You have to find the best occupational therapist” — whether or not your child has disabilities.

“Especially if he’s a boy,” Martin says. “It’s to give him a leg up on his grapple motor skills and help him with his ‘sillies’ so he can sit still in school and do better on tests. Some people really need the occupational therapists. I’m not putting anybody down.”

Martin says she knows of mommies who hire food coaches for picky little eaters. “You need to hire somebody to teach your kid to ride a bike the safe, right way. Taking your kid to school is not enough. Helping with homework is not enough. There are homework tutorials for parents — we’re supposed to literally go to classes so you can learn how your child is learning math, so that you can be in a better mind-meld with your child.”

And then there are the extracurricular play dates, as crucial for the mommies as the children. “Parents try to raise their status and build relationships through their children,” Martin says.

“There’s a lot of social jockeying through play dates.”

Birkin buy-in

As an Upper East Side arriviste, scheduling play dates for her boy became Martin’s own Everest. “I was a play-date pariah,” she says. As a new female coming into a group, she was a threat. The other mommies, she says, ignored her emails and texts looking for play dates.

Martin decided to confront them, as politely as possible. “One time, I was sitting at a table with a bunch of women, and I said, ‘OK, whose kid is available to play with my kid on Tuesday?’ ” Martin recalls. “And they all looked away from me like I had embarrassed myself. I realized: I have to do something about this. I have to learn how to work this dominance hierarchy.”

Martin did what female chimps and baboons do: She submitted to the dominant female — in this case, a woman known as the Queen of the Queen Bees — by following her lead in ways large and small. Martin began taking classes at Physique 57, a posh Pilates/ballet-barre studio that charges $4,000 per year. She got blonder and tanner. She bought designer clothes in conservative cuts.

She found herself, she says, “going native.” She wanted to belong among the Upper East Side mommies who hired stylists and makeup artists for school drop-off and pickup, who got preventive Botox every three months, who perfected the flawless facade.

“The young downtown mom with the choppy hair and big plans was gone,” she writes. “I started to get a weekly blowout, upped my sunblock to tinted moisturizer, and added pinkish lip balm to the mix. I found myself wanting a Birkin, and a Barbour jacket, and whimsical emerald-green velvet Charlotte Olympia flats with kitten faces on them.”

Martin says she recently heard from a friend in the fashion industry who had taken a rare trip to the Upper East Side. “He saw this phalanx of black Escalades parked three feet deep,” she says, “and these super-fashionable women posing and walking and he was like, ‘Oh, my God, something’s going on at Fashion Week that I don’t know about — what is this?’ It was school drop-off.”

Martin had her own capitulation to Upper East Side fashion. In her early days, she was walking along East 79th Street when a woman toting a Birkin bag deliberately swiped her with it — on an otherwise empty street.

“Something about these arrogant women, who pushed and crowded me like I didn’t exist, made me want a beautiful, expensive bag,” Martin writes. “Like a totem object, I believed, it might protect me from them.”

Birkins range in price from $10,500 to $150,000. Martin became more determined when a friend’s mother told her she had seen the wife of a super-famous New York comedian throw a hissy fit at Hermes until she got the Birkin she wanted.

So Martin’s husband agreed to buy her one: a 35-centimeter bag with black leather and gold hardware. (A used version goes for up to $30,000.)

“It was a total buy-in,” Martin says. “I just said, ‘You know what? Screw you. You’re not gonna run me off the sidewalk anymore, or be nasty to me at play group.’ I wanted to win! What did I want?

“Some play dates for my son and myself some friends.”

Little helpers

As Martin assimilated, the other women began to share their own insecurities. Most of them were highly educated, yet had given up their careers to tend to their homes, their children and their husbands — and the husbands were almost never around, working late or off on business trips.

These women lived in fear of their husbands cheating or leaving them, and since they didn’t have careers or money of their own, they had no leverage. “There’s this prevailing ethos of tense perfectionism and economic dependency,” Martin says. “The men have more power than they do. It is a very traditionally gender-scripted society.”

Martin saw many in her circle self-medicate with pills, pot, wine and vodka. Some mommies serve wine at 11 a.m. play dates. Ativan, Valium and Xanax are used for sleep aids. “The women I knew took them in the middle of the night,” Martin writes, “when they woke up with their hearts pounding, panicking about schools or money or whether their husbands were faithful.”

One of Madison Avenue’s most popular spots, she writes, is the AA meeting held in the church between Ralph Lauren and Prada. Problems such as alcoholism and anxiety, however, are rarely discussed.

“It’s not just that people are proud,” Martin says. “The ­Upper East Side is a place where one must not lose face — that would be a tragedy. That’s everything.”

Since finishing her book, Martin has heard from several Upper East Side refugees. “There are many people who have said, ‘Oh, my God, we lived there, it was so over the top.’ But, you know, there are suburbs like the Upper East Side. There are Park Avenues all over the country. But I did feel how skewed it was.”

Today, Martin and her family live on the Upper West Side. They moved several years ago, when her youngest son, now 7, was accepted to school there. It wasn’t a difficult decision, though Martin has yet to go ­native there.

“It’s so different,” Martin says. “Upper East Side is immaculate and conservative and clean, and this is left-of-center, dirty, progressive. The Upper East Side is skinny; the West doesn’t care about the last 10 pounds. The Upper East is totally manicured and coiffed, and this is, like, post-menopausal gray hair . . . Let me tell you: I’m sorry, but I miss the Upper East Side.”