essay

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.”

The University of Oklahoma has fired an instructor who was accused by a student of religious discrimination over a failing grade on a psychology paper in which she cited the Bible and argued that promoting a “belief in multiple genders” was “demonic.”

The university said in a statement posted Monday on X that its investigation found the graduate teaching assistant had been “arbitrary” in giving 20-year-old junior Samantha Fulnecky zero points on the assignment. The university declined to comment beyond its statement, which said the instructor had been removed from teaching.

Through her attorney, the instructor, Mel Curth, denied Tuesday that she had “engaged in any arbitrary behavior regarding the student’s work.” The attorney, Brittany Stewart, said in a statement emailed to the Associated Press that Curth is “considering all of her legal remedies.”

Conservative groups, commentators and others quickly made Fulnecky’s failing grade an online cause, highlighting her argument that she’d been punished for expressing conservative Christian views. Her case became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over academic freedom on college campuses as President Trump pushes to end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and restrict how campuses discuss race, gender and sexuality.

Fulnecky appealed her grade on the assignment, which was worth 3% of the final grade in the class, and the university said the assignment would not count. It also placed Curth on leave, and Oklahoma’s conservative Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, declared the situation “deeply concerning.”

“The University of Oklahoma believes strongly in both its faculty’s rights to teach with academic freedom and integrity and its students’ right to receive an education that is free from a lecturer’s impermissible evaluative standards,” the university’s statement said. “We are committed to teaching students how to think, not what to think.”

A law approved this year by Oklahoma’s Republican-dominated Legislature and signed by Stitt prohibits state universities from using public funds to finance DEI programs or positions or mandating DEI training. However, the law says it does not apply to scholarly research or “the academic freedom of any individual faculty member.”

Home telephone listings for Fulnecky in the Springfield, Mo., area had been disconnected, and her mother — an attorney, podcaster and radio host — did not immediately respond Tuesday to a Facebook message seeking comment about the university’s action.

Fulnecky’s failing grade came in an assignment for a psychology class on lifespan development. Curth directed students to write a 650-word response to an academic study that examined whether conformity with gender norms was associated with popularity or bullying among middle school students.

Fulnecky wrote that she was frustrated by the premise of the assignment because she does not believe that there are more than two genders based on her understanding of the Bible, according to a copy of her essay provided to The Oklahoman.

“Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,” she wrote, adding that it would lead society “farther from God’s original plan for humans.”

In feedback obtained by the newspaper, Curth said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment,” contradicted itself, relied on “personal ideology” over evidence and “is at times offensive.”

“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” Curth wrote.

Hanna writes for the Associated Press.