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.
