There are some things that make a person happy they’re not a millennial mom. Ashley Tisdale’s mommy group drama is one of those things.
Because Tisdale — now Ashley Tisdale French — sounds like she might be stuck in her own “High School Musical,” and it looks as if Hilary Duff’s husband just threw a stink bomb under the bleachers.
Adding to the drama: Duff and Mandy Moore are rumored to be part of the group, though Tisdale French has annoyingly refused to name names.
“Since becoming a public figure as a teenager, it’s often the thing I least expect that people most want to talk about,” the former child star wrote in an essay for New York Magazine that echoes what she wrote a while back on her own blog. “Sometimes, I’ll say something offhandedly, only to see it turn into a headline or start a conversation on TikTok.”
Bottom line, per the essay, is that Tisdale French — who married composer Christopher French in 2014 — was pregnant during the pandemic. She missed out on baby showers and prenatal yoga classes and handing her newborn baby off to acquaintances. Then a friend brought together a group of new moms.
“[F]inally, we were able to be together, and our kids were able to be together, and it all felt right,” she wrote.
The founder of the Being Frenshe line of personal care products thought she had joined a group of cool kids who did cool things.
“I felt energized by being around women who understood the challenge of feeding a baby while taking a Zoom call.”
She literally called them cool.
“[I]t made me hopeful about finding the balance between fulfilling work and family life, since all these cool women were able to do it. Maybe we’d be able to share our secrets to success.”
Then social media burst her bubble.
“I remember being left out of a couple of group hangs, and I knew about them because Instagram made sure it fed me every single photo and Instagram Story.”
She wrote that she realized her mommy group was just like high school.
“Even though it had been decades since tenth grade, the experience of being left out felt so similar.”
But now she was a grown-up, so she took a stand.
“So that’s exactly what I texted to the group after being left out from yet another group hang: ‘This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.’”
People didn’t react well, she said. One mommy sent flowers, then didn’t acknowledge her thank-you. Another was like, “You weren’t invited? I thought you were.”
Keep in mind, this is part of a series titled “It’s Been a Year,” which includes essays about a woman learning via DNA test results that she wasn’t the person she thought she was and one from actor Rebecca Gayheart about going through estranged husband Eric Dane’s ALS diagnosis and subsequent care.
Then again, it also includes a Kathy Griffin essay about post-divorce dating at age 65 that includes some serious name-dropping — “It wasn’t my idea; it was all Sia and our friend Nia Vardalos’s fault. We were at Sia’s house, just being silly girls, when they dared me to do it.” — and a detailed discussion of condoms.
But back to Tisdale French.
“Why me? The truth is, I don’t know and I probably never will. What I do know is that it took me back to an unpleasant but familiar feeling I thought I’d left behind years ago.”
She was more specific about what happened in her older blog post, by the way.
“I realized that there were group text chains that didn’t include everyone, which led to cliques forming within the larger group. And after the third or fourth time of seeing social media photos of everyone else at a hangout that I didn’t get invited to, it felt like I wasn’t really part of the group after all.”
She also shared a revelation with her blog readers.
“If a mom group consistently leaves you feeling hurt, drained, or left out, it’s not the mom group for you. (Even if it used to be!) It’s no longer serving you in a way that lifts you up, and you don’t have to stay out of obligation or anything else.”
We will never know how far into either essay Hilary Duff’s husband got. We do know that Matthew Koma didn’t hesitate to pull out the Burn Book.
Koma got riled up enough over it that on Instagram, he mimicked Tisdale French’s repost of New York Magazine’s promotional post about the essay, slapping a picture of his own face over hers and changing the headline from “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group” to his own: “When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers,” with “A Mom Group Tell All Through A Father’s Eyes” as a sub-headline.
Alas, he posted it as an Instagram story, now expired, so we can imagine it only with the help of outlets such as People, which for the longest while has been writing about Reddit AITAH posts and the subsequent comments telling the original poster whether they are indeed the jerk in a particular situation. (Not that any jerks are being discussed here.)
Tisdale French doesn’t name names in her essay, but Koma’s reaction seems to indicate that former child star Duff, 38, might have been one of the allegedly mean moms who was definitely not being named. And Duff and Koma hosted former child star Moore, 41, and her family after last year’s Eaton fire in Altadena, when Moore’s home burned down, so some might bet on Moore also being among the mothers of small children in former child star Tisdale French’s group.
Tisdale French, meanwhile, apparently anticipated this kind of speculation in reaction to the New York essay because she had experienced it after blogging about the same topic. And apparently it’s all wrong, wrong, wrong.
“It’s a subject that has made women DM me to say ‘I feel seen’ and to share their most emotional stories with me,” she wrote for the magazine.
“It has also made wannabe online sleuths try to do some investigating like they’re on ‘CSI’ (please, don’t even try — whatever you think is true isn’t even close).”
Cool? Uncool? Christopher French, Ashley’s husband, may have made his own decision on that already.
“Underrated life skill,” French wrote on Wednesday morning in an Instagram story, quoting author and mindfulness coach Cory Allen. “Pausing to decide if it’s worth your energy.”
