Real Moms of Grosse Pointe

It’s ’80s night at the Grosse Pointe Moms Club, and a mood of raucous escapism fills the room. The potluck gathering of well-heeled wives in the heart of the Pointes, a cluster of five exclusive suburbs northeast of Detroit, seems a galaxy away from the struggling city next door. Flashdance fashion and music by Boy George and Journey provide the background for lively conversation about long-ago high school antics and upcoming playdates.

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Then, between the taco salad and the Rice Krispies treats, a stray remark cuts through the music: a club member mentions that she’s putting her house on the market. Her modest three-bedroom colonial will likely list in the mid-$100,000s, she says — about half what she and her husband put into it. The price, which might as well have been from the ’80s, is met with a sigh of resignation before a sing-along to “Walk Like an Egyptian” provides a welcome distraction.

The financial upheavals of the past two years have brought a different life to the tony suburbs of Detroit. Botox parties and boutique shopping may fill the days of television’s Real Housewives, but in the Grosse Pointe Moms Club, a support group for more than 100 at-home moms, reality means bargain hunting and budget consciousness. The challenges of the prolonged economic downturn — job loss and retraining, business slowdowns, wallet tightening — spill out in daily conversations at swing sets and kitchen counters.

“The immaculate lawns and beautiful homes are a sort of facade that covers a growing loss of certainty in the future,” says Robin Boyle, a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University. Indeed, on a sunny summer morning at Diane Huchingson’s house in Grosse Pointe Park, the living seems easy. The 35-year-old mother of two is hosting a meeting of the Moms Club. About a dozen members have turned out — with twice as many kids in tow, from 7 months to 7 years — for coffee and a few carefree hours of play and conversation. As sunlight streams through the leaded windows of Huchingson’s 1920s Tudor, older children dash between the front lawn and the basement while toddlers tumble over blocks on the living-room rug. Relaxed in T-shirts and shorts, the moms plan trips to the pool and compare mosquito bites from a nature-trail hike the previous day.

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At an opportune moment, club member Gabrielle Deschaine corners her host in front of the antique buffet in the dining room with a pressing request. “Someone told me you’ve gotten your monthly grocery bill down to $315,” she says. “You have to tell me how you did it!”

The thrift is inspired by the body blows of a changing economy. In March 2009, member Sandra Wiiki lost her work-from-home job as a designer with a company that supplies interior plastics to Ford. Joy Behringer lost her position as a manager for an auto-related company in 2008 at the end of her six-week maternity leave. Her husband Jeff was out of work for 15 months until he found a new management job in June. Pamela Anderson, who helps run a local flower shop that her husband has owned for 31 years, has been coping with a steep downturn in business since 2008, when they lost a lucrative corporate account with Chrysler. Deschaine is scrimping to cope with the slow growth of her husband’s graphic-design business.

Frugality First
While the moms spend plenty of time on traditional subjects — rambunctious kids, traveling husbands, visiting relatives — their conversation also embraces a topic that an earlier generation of Grosse Pointe ladies would have carefully avoided: living with less money. “More than ever, part of your responsibility for your family is being aware of your budget,” says club president Gabriela Boddy, a former industrial engineer who left her job by choice. “People don’t want to waste the money that is so hard to make these days.”

Only a decade old, the Grosse Pointe Moms Club has changed with the times. Open to women from the Pointes and the neighboring suburb of Harper Woods, it was founded as a chapter of an international support organization for at-home moms, and at first the members focused on book clubs, knitting circles and workshops about dealing with clutter. In 2004 the club separated from the umbrella group, and today it includes a number of newer transplants to Detroit. Many members are experienced professionals in formerly two-income marriages whose decision to stay at home with the kids means a financial sacrifice. Because the club is for at-home moms, its rules state that members cannot work full time, but many women in the group work part time and at home.

The changes in the club highlight a broader shift in the Pointes. Old automaking and manufacturing fortunes have dwindled, and collapsing home prices have lowered barriers to entry. The culture of the Moms Club symbolizes a new middle class, for whom privilege is less taken for granted and luxury is less flaunted. Yes, comfortably rich women can still be seen pushing $1,000 Bugaboo strollers past upscale stores in the Village, the downtown shopping district. But for these moms, there is more cachet in high-quality finds, like the secondhand Radio Flyer tricycle that Deschaine bought recently from another mom for $15.

The frugality in Grosse Pointe is but one example of the economic struggles in the Detroit suburbs, where the grip on middle-class life has, for some families, become tenuous. The loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs among families without any real nest egg has imposed painful and unfamiliar choices — about which bills to stop paying, about going to a government office to sign up kids for Medicaid, about calling to register for food assistance.

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The Grosse Pointe Moms Club strives to foster frugality without embarrassment. For $35 a year, it offers a weekly roster of playdates and social gatherings. A walking group offers an alternative to gym memberships, and a free kids’ music and movement class provides a substitute for paid recreation at places like Gymboree. The group recently decided against participating in a fundraiser at a local boutique so members would not feel pressured to shop.

April Zaidi, 31, the mother of three boys, ages 1, 3 and 6, hosts the weekly kids’ music and movement class. She makes maracas from plastic Easter eggs and drums from empty infant-formula cans. A former glee-club member and drama-camp teacher, she knew she could offer as much as any fancy studio. “I’ve seen people pay $10 for a half-hour class with a lot of rules. Why should we do that when we can teach the kids for free in the basement?” says Zaidi, who dubs herself Miss Frugal.

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She gave up her job as a graphic designer after baby No. 2 and in 2007 moved to Harper Woods, a short commute from her husband’s job as a general-surgery resident at St. John Hospital in Detroit. She bought the furniture for their three-bedroom bungalow on Craigslist and keeps to a strict $140-a-week cash budget. “Everything we have is used, but who cares? With three boys, everything looks used as soon as you get it into the house anyway,” she says.

Huchingson is right up there with Zaidi when it comes to cost cutting. Besides her envied $315 monthly grocery bill, she keeps her two daughters and herself in seemingly effortless style on a monthly family clothing budget of less than $45. “She’s like the popular girl because she saves so much,” says Boddy. “Saving is like a sport in our group, and everyone wants to know how she does it.”

She has done it, in part, with the help of exceptionally good timing. She and her husband Chris represent a new wave of homeowners in the Pointes. The suburb was too expensive for them before the recession. The Huchingsons bought their 2,000-sq.-ft. (186 sq m), four-bedroom Tudor last year for $180,000. Four years earlier, it sold for $355,000. They both work in growing fields — Diane as a physical therapist and Chris as a website developer.

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Huchingson says they love the new neighborhood and its amenities: fine parks, schools and services. But the bargain-basement price of their house brings some guilt and social awkwardness. They have appealed for lower property taxes — on the grounds that the value of their house has dropped — with some reluctance. Driving down taxes, after all, threatens the services that drew them to Grosse Pointe Park, which in theory threatens the values of their new neighbors’ homes. This is the source of quiet tension between the new residents and those who bought at the top of the market, and it’s a fault line Huchingson walks with care. “There are some situations that can be uncomfortable,” she says. “We’re on the opposite end of this whole thing. We have friends in other suburbs who are in jeopardy.”

Club members who have lived in the Pointes for years say they don’t begrudge newcomers like Huchingson their cut-rate entry into the community. “We’re happy to have these new friends,” says Boddy at the coffee gathering at Huchingson’s home. “It’s just that you cannot help but be shocked at what’s happened to the value of your own home.”

(See pictures of Americans in their homes.)

It’s the ability to get most of those issues out in the open that makes the club a cherished haven, members say. A day before the coffee gathering, Zaidi took her three boys over to Sandra Wiiki’s house for a visit. Wiiki hasn’t been to many Moms Club events lately. She’s been busy taking courses in digital-arts animation at a nearby community college, with assistance from the state-run worker-retraining program No Worker Left Behind. Since Michigan has created tax incentives to try to lure movie production to the state, Wiiki tells her friend, she thinks redirecting her design skills from autos to the arts might be a smart and rewarding career shift.

Zaidi offers encouragement and shares her concerns. Her family will likely be moving after her husband finishes his residency, and she wishes they had rented rather than bought their home, because they will surely lose money on the sale and will need to pay back his hefty medical-school loans. Wiiki offers Zaidi a cup of chai. It’s her own recipe, made from a mixture of spices and powdered milk that she keeps in an old coffee tin — a bit of afternoon luxury that she doesn’t have to feel guilty about spending money on.

At the Huchingsons’, Deschaine says she can hardly wait to try out the tips she has picked up for cutting her grocery bill. She has already shaved about $1,000 off her monthly expenses by consolidating credit cards, switching to a cheaper car insurance and home-security system and cutting back on cable TV and long-distance calling. She beams with the satisfaction of sustaining sisterhood as she bounds out the door to take her kids to the community pool. “You gotta love this club,” she says.

The Real Housewives on TV can keep their designer dogs and over-the-top birthday parties. The women of the Grosse Pointe Moms Club are handling reality in their own way.

This article originally appeared in the September 27, 2010 issue of Time magazine.

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