a bit of background - my DD is in Y2, and has had minor difficulties with friendships over the past year or two, mostly because she tends to find one ‘best’ friend and become very close to them very quickly, and then have no one to play with if they are away or don’t feel like playing. we’ve been working on this with school and she’s been doing much better lately, and it’s seemed like she was starting to build a wider social circle.
she’s been saying for a while that she wants to invite a particular girl, S, over for a play date, or that S has invited her to her house. we’ve never got a proper invite from S, but last week DH picked DD up and got talking to the S’s dad and asked if she’d like to come over for tea, and apparently it was all sorted. then on thursday at school S’s mum came over to me and said they couldn’t do the day we’d arranged, but they could do a different day - i said that was fine. at this point S was all ‘yay!’ and acting excited with my DD. if they hadn’t have suggested a different day at this point, i probably would have just said something vague about letting us know when they were free and left it at that.
fast forward to this morning where we had an extracurricular thing - we arrived and immediately S came up to my DD and said ‘i’d like to come to your house but i can’t because i’m allergic to cats’. my DD said, ‘but you have a cat!’ and S did a panicky look back at her mum and said ‘my eyes water near cats’. i just said oh, that’s a shame, and tried to catch her mum’s eye and give her a smile but she wouldn’t even look at me! there were 3 mums in total from our school at this event and S’s mum pointedly avoided me, instead talking only to the other mum.
my DD was a bit quiet afterwards and asked me on the way home, ‘why did S lie about having a cat?’ and i said well, perhaps she changed her mind about wanting to come round and was trying to be polite about it, and DD said ‘but she told me on friday she was really excited’. i told DD that it wasn’t her fault and she doesn’t seem to have thought too much more about it this afternoon, but i’ve felt really upset and even a bit weepy about it all day.
i’ve been wondering why exactly this play date can’t happen - it’s just afternoon tea for a couple of hours after school FFS. if S had changed her mind and decided she didn’t want to come, well, i suppose that’s fair enough, but if i was in her mum’s shoes i probably would have let her know that once you’ve accepted an invite you have to at least go and do that one thing.
and if the mum had decided that she didn’t want it to happen, why? is it DD? is it us? i told DH who is normally very sanguine about this stuff and he’s been stewing about it too - it it all just confirms my feeling that rather than being the ‘friendly neighbourhood school’ that DD’s school seemed like at the start it’s actually quite cliquey and judgey. this mum is a SAHM and i feel like there’s a big divide between the SAHMs who all know each other and have coffee and have constant play dates, and the mums who work… but mostly i just feel disappointed for DD and wish this had been handled in a less obvious way, ie not in public. AIBU?