It wasn’t a “toxic mom group,” per se, because the parent group I found myself exiled from included a few dads too. It wasn’t much of a parent group at all, by today’s standards—there were no matching sweatsuits or weekend trips to Vegas. But the group bore the hallmarks of a toxic one—cliques, gossip, and plenty of backstabbing—as I would come to learn the hard way.
Fourteen years ago, as I entered my third trimester of pregnancy with my second child, my husband and I enrolled our firstborn in a Hollywood preschool that was populated by artists—writers, musicians, jewelry designers, an A-lister or two—and creative-industry types, with an occasional odd-duck lawyer thrown into the mix. The school was middle-of-the-road progressive and not especially diverse, though I’m sure many of the straight, cis, white families believed they were part of an inclusive community. It was also a little bit rock and roll, which meant day drinking at off-site school functions was de rigueur. I was blogging then for a site I cofounded, and my husband was writing on a hit television show. We lived in a big Spanish house with a pool that was 10 minutes from the school, which made our home a convenient hub for playdates.
There weren’t many playdates that first year, however, because my kid, The Kid, was different from the others. They taught themself to read before they were out of diapers and didn’t watch Thomas the Tank Engine or Daniel Tiger or any other show that might have bonded them with their peers. They spent most of their time in the play yard writing numbers in chalk on the wall that separated the preschool from the rest of the campus, remaining in a trancelike state until they got to 100 and snapped to. If they didn’t have a piece of chalk, they’d simply write in the air with their index finger, in a manner reminiscent of the boy from The Shining spelling out redrum.
The Kid needed help on the social front, but I was useless at the beginning. First, I was pregnant and exhausted; by January, I was juggling a newborn and The Kid. The tiredness that came with having two young children was bludgeoning: I was prescribed Wellbutrin just so I could make it from 4 p.m. to dinner. But by the spring, our second child, a.k.a. The Baby, was sleeping more, and I decided that if The Kid was ever going to make any friends, I would have to take on a more active role.
One of the first moms I befriended was Miranda, whose daughter Harper was nice to The Kid and would sometimes pull up her mat next to them during nap time. I quickly discovered that Miranda went to college with one of my best friends, who lives in New York, but when I mentioned on a call that I’d met Miranda, she said, warily, “Mean girl? Hot body?”
While I could see the hot part—Miranda favored skinny jeans and tube tops that flattered her frame—I assumed that she’d left the mean-girl part in her past. What kind of mean girl would confide in me about her husband Evan’s depression and their financial struggles and her estrangement from her father? What kind of mean girl could easily poke fun at herself, like the time Miranda told a group of us moms that she longed to wear red lipstick but it made her look like a “cheap whore”?
At the end of that first year, I volunteered to throw the class party. One of The Kid’s classmates slipped through an inflatable ring in my pool, and her mom had to jump in, fully clothed, after her, but that near mishap only seemed to bring our group closer together. A few months later, I signed The Kid up for soccer along with everyone else, even though The Kid often wandered off the field mid play, muttering to themself about the periodic table. I made museum dates, park dates, movie dates, and heated the pool to 90 degrees so little ones could linger and never get cold. It was work, finding ways to bridge the gap between my kid and the other kids, but it paid off, and by their last year of prekindergarten, The Kid had a solid friend group.
Maddie and Isabelle were The Kid’s two closest school friends. Maddie’s parents, Claire and Brody, had never married, and they had fought in court for most of Maddie’s life up to that point. (Claire sued for full custody, but the court ultimately granted them joint.) I’d met Claire first, and we were friendly, but Brody was the parent who showed up consistently to school-related social functions, and I found that Claire’s warm smile belied an aloof, fundamentally cold personality. She wore layers upon layers of clothing, even on the hottest days: a turtleneck under a quilted vest, a flannel tied around her waist, her eyes shielded behind dark aviator sunglasses, as if she were insulating herself from the rest of the world.
Isabelle’s parents divorced when she was a toddler, and both remarried. Isabelle’s mom, Karen, had a new baby with her second husband, but whatever fatigue that brought with it was mitigated by Karen’s chronic sense of outrage. When The Kid told everyone in their class about menstruation—mistakenly suggesting that periods lasted for a month—Karen called me immediately. She wasn’t mad that my five-year-old had taught the rest of the class about menstruation—that was punk rock and completely natural, in her view—but she was offended that their teacher had encouraged the kids to talk about it at home instead of at school, which Karen thought had shamed the girls.
While The Kid was thriving, my marriage was faltering. My husband’s workaholism had always been an issue, but it reached compulsive levels by the time The Baby was born. For years I’d joked that I had a husband for two months out of the year, when he was on hiatus from his television job; but when The Baby was five months old, he took on a consulting gig for an investment firm during those hiatuses, so now it felt like I didn’t have a husband at all. We separated after The Baby turned two. We waited a few months to tell the children and nested in the meantime, one of us shuffling off to a friend’s house every night while the other stayed in our home with the kids. Not only did they not know we were divorcing for half a year, but neither did my parents, nor our nanny.
By the time The Kid had enrolled in a different school for kindergarten and The Baby started preschool, our separation was no longer a secret. My ex had moved out, and the kids were adjusting to life in two households. I was adjusting to not seeing my kids half the time, which was infinitely more painful than not having a husband around. The ex had a new girlfriend, a woman he’d met on a dating app, whom he quickly introduced to our kids. I was seeing someone, too, but I hadn’t told the kids about it yet, because it felt like one transition too many for them to handle.
The Baby was enrolled at the same preschool that The Kid had just left, so I continued to see the same parent group every day, and we were still invited to their kids’ birthday parties and holiday get-togethers—like Andrea’s Halloween party, which is where my falling out with the group began.
Andrea was a single mom who had a successful career running the production company of an A-list actor. She was always the room parent of her daughter’s class, as she liked to tell the rest of us, in case anyone dared to challenge her for that position. She threw lavish kid parties in her shadeless, scorchingly hot backyard, her production assistants darting about, setting out food and restocking coolers with juice boxes. The children were sent home at the end of the night with expensive goodie bags.
Her Halloween party was happening on my ex’s weekend with the kids, but before he RSVPed, he wanted to make sure Brody, Maddie’s dad, wasn’t going. So he called Andrea directly to find out. Why do you ask? I imagine Andrea saying, though I don’t know her exact words. I only know how my ex responded: Because that’s who Jen is seeing.
It was true, I was seeing Brody. We had become good friends across all the playdates we had with our children and the birthday and class parties we found ourselves at together. When it became clear to me that my marriage was over, I finally admitted to myself that I had feelings for him. I said as much to my husband a few weeks later. On the heels of my separation, we started dating. It wasn’t the cleanest of breaks, in that I went immediately from one relationship to the next, but Brody was not the reason for my divorce.
My toxic parent group, however, thought otherwise. Right after Andrea’s Halloween party, I discovered I was the star of the school rumor mill. I had never in my life been the object of so much attention. For a school whose families prided themselves on being “cool parents,” the group’s response to my divorce was cartoonishly puritanical. Claire accused Brody in one of their court-mandated mediation sessions of misconduct by dating a “married woman,” even though I’d been legally separated for months. She seemed to suddenly forget my name and pretended I was a stranger, referring to me as “dad’s girlfriend” in front of her daughter.
She wasn’t alone in that regard. Miranda and her husband, Evan, both stopped acknowledging me whenever we crossed paths. I experienced this with a few husbands, husbands who had once been chummy—flirtatious, even—but now looked at me like a succubus hell-bent on making them stray from their wives (or, alternately, a bad wife who might tempt theirs to follow my lead). Another mom, Stacy, who lived kitty-corner to the house I’d shared with my ex and was a big fan of the TV show he wrote for, averted her eyes when she saw me at the school, making an exaggerated point of saying hello to my children but not me. I bumped into Stacy at an all-school choir concert that our kids were in a few years ago, and even then she refused to look at me.
Karen was more solicitous, offering to take me to lunch. She told me she understood what I was going through, as she herself had cheated on Isabelle’s dad with her second husband. Yet at a moms night out after that, where I wasn’t present, Karen let her real feelings be known, questioning why I hadn’t invited Maddie to The Kid’s sixth birthday party—though I’d made it clear at our lunch that I did so to avoid creating further drama between my ex, Brody, and Claire.
In her viral essay for The Cut, “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group,” High School Musical alum Ashley Tisdale French ends her tale of exclusion from her parent group with a disclaimer: “To be clear, I have never considered the moms to be bad people. (Maybe one.)” For a long time, I did think of my fellow preschool parents as bad people. Despite the years we’d invested in each other’s lives and families, so few of them bothered to ask how I was doing or if I was okay. “But I fed your children!” was a rebuttal that rattled in my head after the fallout, as I struggled to comprehend why I was met with cruelty in such a dark time. (I’m Chinese, and in Asian cultures food equals love.)
Being branded a bad person by them felt like a death blow, especially after a lifetime of doing everything in my power to be “good.” But while death is final, I still had to get up the next morning and send The Baby off to preschool, which was located at the back of the campus—making drop-off seem a lot like running the gauntlet.
Over time, however, the group’s collective disapproval started to hurt less. I even had a little fun with the gauntlet, throwing on a sheer Isabel Marant dress and high-heel Margiela boots like the school breezeway was my catwalk. For Halloween one year, I seriously considered dressing up as Hester Prynne for the school parade, a scarlet A affixed to my chest.
So I was “bad.” So my life wasn’t perfect. So people thought my kids were weird. So what?
Getting ousted by my toxic parent group was a gift in disguise. It made the red flags I’d missed or ignored before crystal clear—the overgrown mean girl, the room parent who always had to be at the center of things—and exposed what was underpinning it all: fear. Fear that their lives weren’t turning out as planned, fear that their kids’ lives wouldn’t either. Falling out with the group freed me from that, and the freedom set me up to make genuine, lasting connections with other parents who didn’t give a shit how big my house was or what my husband did or if I had a husband at all. (Brody and I are still together, though unmarried.) It’s funny that all of this started because I thought my children needed help making friends; in the end, I was the one who had to learn to make new ones.
Names in this story have been changed.