How did you get over being left out by the other mums?

[fruitfly3]

Just that really. I have realised that there is a little posse of 6-7 of the other mums in the class that I’m not part of - actually, I’m actively excluded from. They are the sort of people I’d have a good laugh with and really enjoy hanging out with at the kids activities (professionals, similar interests etc). But they have formed a group that definitely doesn’t include me. The 3/4 other mums are lovely but not people I draw energy from (one is from a different culture and our sense of humour and chat is just different), one is a bit depressing etc and one is a SAHM whose outlook and life is super different to mine. It’s made me feel 13 again and left out by the popular kids - made me question how I come across and feel horribly self conscious. I went over to them at an activity tonight - they acknowledged me and then turned away and closed their circle. It was pretty awful. Not looking for explanations (or really to bitch about them) but wonder how you reframe it in your own mind? Adults are so so hard to make friends with.

Ah showing how kind you are by referencing the mean girls trope 🙄

If people are so desperate to be included then it’s terribly sad. What happened to dignity?

@Bushmillsbabe Well here, it was a matter of normally reciprocating IF you had a party. We quickly realised it wasn’t happening and in y4, DD went to 2. Y5 wasn’t any better and of course we then did treats for 2-3 dc. We had a lunch party at Le Manoir aux Quat Saisons for dd and 4 friends. Repeated with DD2 a few years later. It’s just a shame when dc think they have friends, but they don’t. We left them all behind in the end as DDs boarded. Completely different and friendly. Plus they had manners.

I think you've misunderstood me. I'm saying we invited children who didn't invite DS. I wasn't in some kind of quid pro quo battle. But you can't control what other people do, or how they parent. As far as I was concerned, if DS liked the child, they were welcome at parties or at playdates. I didn't know the parents, so didn't know what they were like.

But you're looking at it the wrong way. You're not being "excluded", you're not being included.

People really seem to struggle with this. There's no automatic right to inclusion, for you or your DC. People have the right to choose their own friends. Quite often when people complain about the "bitchy, cliquey school gate mums" what they're actually talking about is women who have already founded their own friendship group, often predating the school network. That is their right. It may make you uncomfortable or anxious but that's showbiz.

If you put yourself in their shoes and you had two close friends whose kids were also at your kid's school, you would feel resentful if someone was trying to inveigle their way into your group, particularly, as in the OP's case, because she appears to have identified the "cool group" and shunned the less cool group. It works both ways.

People are open and receptive to other people who have a clear sense of self, who know what they want and plough their own furrow. No one wants someone to socially engineer their way into a friendship group. They'd rather choose people organically, based on who they actually like, as opposed to who they feel they should include.

And the reason this all matters is that if you create an atmosphere of entitlement, where you huff off because people don't immediately invite you into their friendship groups, your children are going to bear the brunt of it because they pick up on the sense of paranoia and it impacts their ability to make friends organically.

I never saw it as an issue when my DD was at primary school, as all the mums were friendly and I would almost never be stood without anyone to talk to, even if it was a dad, grandparent or someone from another class. There was always a bigger circle within the class that tended to come about as a result of the kids being close friends or attending activities, but they always said hello and included everyone. I think some of the parents who joined later (around Year 3 or 4) maybe didn’t get involved with the core group who had been together since Nursery, and the parents who worked and didn’t engage in school gate chat maybe felt more out of the loop.

I’ve taken it personally in the past, especially at School, when I’ve felt left out of things and that has made people more likely to exclude me than involve me so I’ve learned not to let it get me down if people don’t include or accept me.

@Thepeopleversuswork That’s just a load of rubbish and far too complex. I do see people who deliberately excluded others and in many ways I didn’t care. We had other friends. Neither did I want to break into groups, but I did expect good manners. They did of course embrace other mums! We made the best decision to ditch the lot of them! I found people at private schools much more welcoming. Both prep and senior school. DDs and me were delighted to move on.

Everyone excludes others at some point. You can't be friends with every person you've ever been friendly with. There has to be a degree of selection in your life or you wouldn't be able to cope. Anyone who says they have never excluded anyone else is lying.

Of course everyone should be courteous and open minded about new people and willing to challenge their own prejudices. But it's childish to pretend that people are owed friendship by other adult women purely because their children are at school together.

Define ‘deliberately exclude’ though. Outside a work situation I am not going to waste time talking to strangers or people I don’t like particularly - why would I?

And if people really are claiming they feel some kind of obligation to include people you don’t know/don’t like, then more fool you!

Just because you all have children in the same school, why should the other mothers owe you their time? If you can’t deal with perceived rejection then perhaps that’s something to work on.

Huh? How kind I am?

I actually wouldn’t pull the kind of cliquey bullshit that @fruitfly3 is talking about. I think it’s rude and petty to overtly exclude someone the way the women she’s describing are doing. I think you need to re-read what I’ve written.

I’d also not waste my time on a group of women who are not interested in talking to me. I’d take a book to any kids activities and just mind my own business.

No, I probably wouldn’t approach them, but if our kids were all in the same class and I was the only parent they excluded, I would think poorly of them for behaving like that. If there are several other parents who they’re not including, then that’s different.

I’m lucky that most of our school parents are friendly. We’ll all be bumping into each other at the school gate for at least seven years, so it makes sense to be nice.

Most of the parents at the local dance school are also friendly. Strangely, most of the parents at Brownies are very unfriendly, except for the one mum who isn’t English. I do find the cold ones a bit odd. Sadly, some of their kids are cold and unfriendly to my DD.

There’s a definite pattern, the nice mums usually (although not always) have nice kids and the cold fishes have unfriendly kids who wouldn’t dream of trying to make a newcomer feel welcome.

The mean girls gif - I was just picking up on the irony of being spiteful about a group of people because apparently they are being spiteful.

Do you mix with everyone you happen to be in the same location with? That would be exhausting.

One thing we agree on though - taking a book and minding one’s own business is generally the best way forward in most situations.

Grown women can choose who they want to speak to. It’s not cliquey or nasty to do so, I speak to those I choose to, I don’t expect people to speak to me if they don’t like me or don’t know me.

Its mind boggling that people waste their lives on this once they become adults

Are the nice ones like that with everyone? I would bet they are the people pleasers who consider it more important to be nice than consider their own feelings.

That’s their choice but life is too short to spend time with people you don’t especially like.

We're all standing together waiting for our kids whether we like it or not. It's not as though I can sneak off and meet my best friend at the pub instead. So, I may as well pass the time by chatting to the friendlier parents.

Are the nice ones like that with everyone? I haven't checked if there's anyone they won't speak to, but the friendly ones do indeed have more friends at the school gate.

They also tend to be good at remembering what people have told them, so one minute they'll come up and ask me if my DD2 has recovered from her chickenpox and when the next person comes up and greets them, they'll ask what flowers they decided on for the wedding and then they might chat to the next parent about the yoga class they both go to. Exhausting, but I can see why they're so popular.

Ah that makes sense - the type to know everything about everyone.

@Thepeopleversuswork I’m not talking about friendship! I’m talking about general chat because dc are in the same class! Certainly dc are excluded by them. It’s based on jobs, money and perceived status. It’s somewhat odd in that I’ve rarely encountered it since.

“Do you mix with everyone you happen to be in the same location with? That would be exhausting.”

Back when my children were at primary school I would’ve interacted with all the other parents in situations like this, yes. That’s not the same as mixing with everyone I happen to be near. However I am kind and friendly to strangers, but perhaps that’s because my job is public facing and I’m from northern England, I’ve found that insular unfriendly attitudes like the OP describes are far more common when I lived in the south east.

Going back to the ‘school gate mums’, when I was in that environment if a group were unfriendly I just didn’t push it. I do think that kind of ‘closed rank’ you can’t sit with us type of behaviour is petty and bitchy, and I'm
not interested in that kind of drama and bullshit. It’s rude, unnecessary, and mean.

I have been customer facing my entire life so I know how to interact with people.

If someone was in trouble I would probably help but I wouldn’t go out of my way to speak to strangers as I hate it when people feel the need to strike up a conversation with someone for no reason.

Also if a group is fairly close, they have a certain dynamic. People can’t just shoehorn themselves into that because it
changes that dynamic.

I would sooner stand back than think I was trying to intrude on a group of people.

It can also depend on the playground / school gate situation. Where DS goes to school now there is a lot of space, so if you say hello to someone and they clearly aren't interested in striking up a conversation you can easily stand elsewhere. At DS's previous school there was limited space and we ended up forming a queue - if the people near you in the queue were having an exclusive conversation and ignored you when you greeted them it did feel a bit awkward and rude as you couldn't completely leave them to it when you were standing with them whether you all liked it or not.
In the current school I take it on the chin and find my own space to mill around waiting for DS, I wouldn't dream of hanging around a bunch of people who didn't want me there. If OP's situation is more like my DS's first school she would have no choice other than to stand on the side line though.

I can only go on my own experience at school, but the only time I constantly turn down play dates when asked by another mum is because I don’t want to encourage a friendship with their child, as often they are trouble makers or just quite unpleasant. If the child is nice I will always try to make it work

Whatever the situation they aren’t going to accept the OP so I guess she can continue to be upset by it or she can shrug her shoulders and take it as an opportunity to learn that some people just won’t want to spend time with you.

I just don't think its realistic to have this "all shall have prizes" approach to meeting people via the school network.

No one has the time or the bandwidth to calibrate the amount of time they are devoting to each person they meet at the school gates. People naturally gravitate towards those they already know or feel they may have more in common with. That's life, it may be uncomfortable sometimes but you can't do anything about it. You have no doubt done it to others subconsciously before.

There's no excuse for actual rudeness or deliberate exclusion but 99% times out of 100 on these threads it's no such thing: its someone getting the hump because another mum has accidentally failed to smile at them or has chosen to sit next to someone else.

Also you have no way of knowing that its based on "jobs, money or perceived status". This is your supposition and your projection but you can't know that. And honestly if you're projecting this paranoid vibe to people it's just as likely to be that.

Time and again I've seen the school environment turn into this magnified area of focus for people who assume it will be a way to boost their social life and then invariably get disappointed when they don't get invited to everything. We'd all do ourselves a big favour if we treated it as a place for the education of our children and not as an extension of secondary school.

I rather think that those who talk about “the cool gang” and tell OP she “isn’t up to their standard” are the ones who’ve never left secondary school behind!

Ditto those who can’t see that excluding one mum at a kids’ activity while they physically close ranks is unkind and bad mannered.

If they actively block you from joining in, then I think you move on and look it at it as their loss.

Primary school friendships are always usually transitory anyway

What is meant by “physically close ranks” though.

We are always expected to believe there is some sort of conspiracy to exclude people but when you look at the facts all we know is that the OP went up to talk to some people who acknowledged her and then went back to a prexisting conversation. There’s so much nuance to this its impossible to know what was involved.

If these were a group of friends having an intimate or difficult conversation and the OP came up they could have had good reasons to want to continue talking. Its possible they were actively rude but its much more likely they were just busy or distracted. People seem to want to attribute the darkest possible motives to these casual interactions.

Building relationships is a slow burn process which can go in fits and starts. It’s rarely as simple as saying hello to someone and immediately being invited into their intimate inner circle.

Its impossible to make friends if every minor failiure to strike up a lifelong friendship is interpreted as a deliberate sleight. It’s draining and tedious to be on the receiving end of this: no one wants this kind of pressure from people they meet in passing at school.

You’re far more likely to make friends if you just chill out and learn to take things in your stride.