What really makes mom groups toxic

A few months after my son was born, I attended a new-mother support group hosted by a local organic grocery. I had no family nearby, few friends with kids and a colicky infant who spent nearly every afternoon in inconsolable crying jags that left me anxious and exhausted. I hoped someone in this group of women who met biweekly in the grocery’s upstairs room would have some answers. And they did. Unfortunately, they were things I’d already tried. Swaddling? Yes. Shushing? Yep. Belly and back rubs? Uh-huh. Singing and bouncing on a rubber ball? For hours. Baths? Affirmative. Gripe water? Every day. “Well, those worked for me. Good luck.” 

I toted my squalling, furious infant to two and a half meetings before giving up: The problem, clearly, was me. And as my kid got older, I started meeting other parents with stories similar to mine: “I was the only one in my baby-yoga group with latching problems, and I felt so self-conscious when I had to switch to bottles”; “Everyone else just seemed to be doing so well, and I was an overwhelmed mess.” On and offline, our common experience wasn’t a specific baby-associated struggle — it was the certainty that we were each being judged by other parents as failures because of it.

So I began reading Ashley Tisdale French’s Jan. 5 piece in The Cut, “Why I left my toxic mom group,” with a sense of familiarity and an anticipation fueled by its pop-culture angle — French, formerly Ashley Tisdale, starred in the mid-2000s Disney Channel juggernaut “High School Musical” and the titular mom group allegedly included other well-known millennial celebrities. Plus, The Cut is one of the verticals at New York Magazine, a publication whose coverage of the excesses of wealthy, dementedly competitive parents beefing with each other has sustained my resting schadenfreude levels for years.

These faithful chronicles (recent pieces cover the over-the-top care packages parents mail to their kids’ sleepaway camps and the problem of finding a nanny who won’t object to constant micromanaging and surveillance) aren’t meant to resonate with the average parent, but rather to be shared, savored and marveled at. It made sense to assume that Tisdale French’s story was going to be top-tier nonsense about, say, one member of the group copying the nursery decor of another, or not providing vegan cupcakes at a birthday party.

In fact, the piece seemed to go out of its way to say very little. The group Tisdale French once considered her “village,” she wrote, began to feel pointedly less friendly, which dredged up memories from a past she thought was behind her: “All of a sudden, I was in high school again, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing ‘wrong’ to be left out.” She doesn’t mention contacting other members to confirm her suspicion or determine the cause of a rift, but simply gears up to confront the entire group of adversaries via text — a decision that she presents as less for herself than for her daughters: “I kept thinking, Aren’t we supposed to be teaching our kids to speak up for themselves when their feelings are hurt?”

But what the piece presents as taking a stand comes off as more of a flounce. After texting that the group has become “too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore,” Tisdale French then wrote about it — twice — hinting that the group was one of accomplished, high-profile women. She didn’t name names and remained deliberately vague about details, but the internet quickly picked up what Tisdale French was putting down, and it hasn’t gone well for her. A frenzy of Instagram sleuthing has resulted in charges that, like her “HSM” character Sharpay, Tisdale French was the source of the drama. Most notably, Matthew Koma, whose wife Hilary Duff was rumored to be part of the group, tipped his hand with an Instagram post mimicking The Cut article’s photo and title: “When you’re the most self-obsessed tone deaf person on Earth, other moms tend to shift focus to their actual toddlers.” And the days since have been steeped in speculation about what happened and who exactly was involved.

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Several outlets have also leveraged the dustup into service-journalism dispatches like “6 signs it’s time to leave your toxic mom group, according to therapists” (Self), “Are you in a toxic mom group? experts reveal warning signs, ways to protect yourself and how to exit” (Us Weekly) and “Signs your mom group isn’t for you (And that’s OK)” (Modern Parenting). All seem to proceed from a notion that has long been treated as internet fact: not that mom groups can be toxic, but that they are inherently, unavoidably so.

Admittedly, there’s no lack of support for this view. Starting at the dawn of mommy blogging and picking up steam with the advent of listservs like Mumsnet and their attendant controversies, one of the internet’s animating forces has always been the understanding that motherhood’s chaotic parallels to adolescence — self-consciousness, lack of perspective, undeveloped emotional intelligence and hormonal upheaval — makes for frenemies rather than friendships.

The reality is often a lot more prosaic. When my son moved into a mellow, non-screamy stage of babyhood, we went to some parent meetups at a child-friendly coffee shop. I met plenty of parents who seemed like they would be great to hang out with under different circumstances — say, those where it was possible to finish a sentence uninterrupted by the various needs of various babies. The multitasking and compartmentalizing and timing required of parents can make it difficult to establish whether two people — much less four or five or seven — have anything in common  beyond the identity of “mother.”

The widespread acceptance of the paradoxical premise that mothers are naturally and  intrinsically nurturing of their offspring and also naturally and intrinsically suspicious of and in competition with other mothers  exists because becoming a mother is still sold to women as a matter of instinct, as easy as falling off a log — something that we are literally made for. But if that were true, women wouldn’t seek out mom groups for all the well-documented reasons they do: to ease loneliness and isolation, to get advice and support, to connect to others and realize, via sharing and listening, that mothering challenges are not mothering failures.

This paradox persists because sowing division between mothers is necessary to upholding another allegedly natural truth — that women are not truly women unless they are mothers; that they are born to serve as vessels and incubators; that their ability to create life is divinely ordained and to squander or endanger it is an affront to God. That “mother” is women’s natural role also means, of course, that they are held responsible for everything their children are and will become; this, in turn, requires fealty to binaries: a right way and a wrong way to raise children, a good mother and a bad one.

And those rigid binaries encourage mothers to learn to view different choices made by other mothers as condemnations of their own. In the process, they aid governments, corporations, religious institutions and assorted grifters and profiteers in a long con that deliberately pulls focus from the deliberately broken systems that shrink their options and autonomy, and instead spotlight stopgap fixes. Convincing mothers who have natural childbirths to look down on those who opt for an epidural benefits for-profit healthcare companies. Whipping up resentment between breastfeeding and bottle-feeding mothers obscures the fact that greed and environmental racism have a far more emergent impact on children’s health. And encouraging stay-at-home mothers to disdain those with careers keeps the spotlight off an ostensibly pro-life nation’s shameful disinterest in doing anything that helps families thrive. (Will nobody think of the shareholders?)

The mass media that spent this week fanning the celebrity mom-group flames is the same one that, back in the 1980s, stoked the Satanic Panic on behalf of religious conservatives who hoped to scare working women back to hearth and home by casting daycare centers as hotbeds of ritual child sacrifice. It’s the same one that, in the wake of 9-11, made the so-called mommy wars a focal point of American discontent, gleefully trumpeting an “opt-out revolution” among educated white mothers in 2003 and, seven years later, trying out a new tactic of hand-wringing and crocodile tears over an apparent decline in working women’s happiness.

We probably won’t ever know what pots Ashley Tisdale French did or didn’t stir, or find out that, in fact, it wasn’t a matter of anyone being toxic but an instance in which once-close friends drifted apart and, for whatever reason, couldn’t communicate about it. Mothers don’t all have to be friends. But assuming they will inevitably be enemies poisons the well for all of us.