The Tamesis
This is not a “toxic moms group” per se, as the parent group I found myself expelled from also included some dads. This is not a parents group allby today’s standards—no matching tracksuits, no weekend trip to Vegas. But this organization had the hallmarks of a toxic organization — cliques, gossip, and a lot of backbiting — something I learned the hard way.
Fourteen years ago, as I entered my third trimester with our second child, my husband and I enrolled our eldest son in a Hollywood preschool packed with artists—writers, musicians, jewelry designers, an A-lister or two—and creative industry types, with the occasional odd lawyer thrown in for good measure. The school is middle-of-the-road progressive and not particularly diverse, although I’m sure many straight, cisgender white families believe they are part of an inclusive community. It’s also a bit rock ‘n’ roll, which means it’s de rigueur to drink during the day at events outside of school. At the time I was blogging for a website I co-founded, and my husband was writing on a popular TV show. We live in a large Spanish house with a swimming pool, 10 minutes from school, which makes our home a convenient hub for playdates.
However, there weren’t many play dates that first year because my kid, “The Kid,” was different from other kids. They taught themselves to read before changing diapers, and they didn’t watch Thomas the Tank Engine or Daniel Tiger or any other show that might allow them to connect with their peers. They spent most of their time in the playground writing numbers with chalk on the wall that separated the kindergarten from the rest of the campus, staying in a trance until the number reached 100. If they didn’t have chalk, they wrote in the air with their index fingers, which was reminiscent of that boy The Shining spell out Redram.
The kid needed help socially, but I was useless at first. First, I was pregnant and exhausted; by January, I was juggling a newborn and my baby. The exhaustion of carrying two young children was unbearable: I was prescribed Wellbutrin so I could stay up from 4 p.m. until dinner. But by spring, our second child, aka “baby,” was sleeping more, and I decided that if “baby” was going to make friends, I would have to take a more active role.
One of the first moms I became friends with was Miranda, whose daughter Harper was great with kids and would sometimes pull her mat next to them during nap time. I soon discovered that Miranda went to college with one of my best friends who lived in New York, but when I mentioned on the phone that I’d met Miranda, she said warily, “Mean girl? Hot body?”
While I can see the hottest part – Miranda likes to wear skinny jeans and bandeau tops to accentuate her figure – I think she’s put the mean girl part in the past. What kind of mean girl would confide in me about her husband Evan’s depression, their financial struggles, and her estrangement from her father? What kind of little girl would make fun of herself so easily, as 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 my first year, I volunteered to host a class reunion. One of “the kid’s” classmates slipped out of an inflatable ring in my pool and her mom had to jump in with her clothes on, but that near-accident only seemed to bring our team closer together. A few months later, I, along with others, signed “The Kid” to play in soccer games, even though “The Kid” would often leave the field mid-game, muttering to himself about the periodic table. I scheduled museum dates, park dates, movie dates, and heated the pool to 90 degrees so the little ones could hang out and never get cold. It was work, finding ways to bridge the gap between my child and other children, but it paid off, and by the last year of kindergarten, the child had a solid group of friends.
