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.

Nah, I'd never freeze a school parent out at a kids' activity. Then again, I'll chat to (almost) anyone. I won't necessarily invite you round to my house or go to the cinema or theatre with you, but if we're at the same activity, I'll include you. I'd think poorly of any group who chose to exclude one parent from the general chit-chat.

I'd think poorly of any group who chose to exclude one parent from the general chit-chat.

Maybe it wasn't 'general chit chat' on account of them being friends and not just a group of random parents who just recognised each other from school and so sat together.

I have general chit chat with people I don't know well. My friends and I have conversations we wouldn't necessarily want to invite someone else to be part of for all sorts of reasons.

Maybe they were planning or reflecting on a night out or a holiday or even the cinema or theatre or a get together at one of their houses to use your examples. The OP would still be left out of the conversation.

I wouldn't approach a group of people who were already friends and expect to be included. Would you?

Bitches. Mean girls. Jealousy.

The irony when those being those words are doing exactly the same.

This thread is so fucking predictable. Choosing not to spend time with someone can be for many reasons.

Some people are going to loathe you for no apparent reason, some will have a reason, some just don’t want to spend time with you because you aren’t that important in their lives.

Apparently you can only be a nice person if you include everyone. And if you don’t, you get accused of bullying and called names.

Why is it so difficult for people to understand that not everyone wants to be friends with you or your children?

Apparently it’s okay to do that but not okay to not want some people randomer imposing themselves.

Resilience is a great thing and I think some posters could use it.

I've read dozens of threads like this over the years. They always go the same way with people queuing up to tell the OP that school mums are "bitches" and run "cliques" because an OP isn't invited to every social event from now until the great hereafter. Invariably comparisons to Motherland/Amandaland are made and people soothe themselves by telling OP that it was hell and they are all evil.

Problem with all this is that at heart it's an attitude/mindset problem: it's internal, not external. And whipping an OP into a frenzy about bitchy, cliquey school gate mums is preventing her from a growth exercise.

A couple of harsh home truths:

• No one is owed friendship, ever, by anyone. It's a hard thing to realise but nobody has to be your friend and the sooner you realise this, the sooner you can get on with making real friends. A lot of mums seem to treat school as a social life on a plate, try hard to befriend people who they think they want to get in with, and then get the hump when they're not automatically invited to every social event. Tough titty, I'm afraid. People include and exclude other people all the time for irrational, unfair reasons. It is part of life and you can't change it.
• The more you care about this, the more you will be excluded and avoided. People can smell social desperation. Someone who is constantly alternating between being simperingly nice to get invited to things and seething with suppressed rage when they are not is not a good prospect for friendship. People want friends who can hold their own, who don't need other people to support them and who they don't have to carry, socially.

If you can't deal with this, school is not a good environment for you to be making friends in. Try finding people who you genuinely get along with, cultivating friendships in smaller groups. Using school as a venue to socially engineer your life is a recipe for disaster.

Sensible me says completely ignore the b*tches - you don't want to be friends with people who act like this.

Less than sensible me (who I listen to on the regular) says you should give them the FOMO. Plaster a big smirk on your face like you have a massive scandalous secret, walk straight past them with a skip in your step and let them wander what is going on with you. Arrange something really fun with the depressed / different Mums that you do know and your kids, then generate some conversation about it in the playground.
Who knows, you might find more common ground with the other Mums and find friends there, they sound more interesting to me anyway

I have to ask - how the hell do you all have time to do this crap?

If you don’t like someone, just ignore and get on with your life. It sounds like this is what the women who don’t want to speak to the OP are doing.

Are women so desperate to be liked (or included even if they aren’t liked)? I would never try to insert myself into an existing group, it’s demeaning and also rude. Do you have no pride or dignity?

But crack on with thinking that anyone who doesn’t include you is vile. You will come across many of these situations throughout your lives.

@Anarchy99 I'm confused, you've quoted me but nothing in your post appears to refer to my post?
I haven't said that anyone is vile and if anything my advice to OP is not to let the clichy group see that they made her feel bad and to give the other Mums another chance by arranging something fun with them instead.
I am in no way desperate to insert myself into a group that do not want me there or like me, nor do I need to be liked by everyone.
I do quite often have a big smile plastered across my face and a skip in my step as I am quite often thinking of something scandalous, but that might just be me!

@ThepeopleversusworkI think you are missing the point. I never wanted to be friends with any of them. I did expect common courtesy. Their DDs invited to a party here ( before we wised up) but my DD not invited back. By the way, my DD was well behaved and not a child anyone would normally shun. You do feel like a lemon standing outside the school and virtually no mum of a girl classmate speaks to you as they don’t need to. I get that, but you do feel on the periphery of the class and a giant spare part. I did find parents to chat to via the pta so I made an effort. However their dc were not my DDs “friends”. Feeling excluded is never pleasant.

OP, you mention the mums but what about the Dads? Our school pick ups are roughly 20-30% Dads, and the rest are Mums.

The mums in DD2's group are nice 1:1 but lots of them grew up nearby and know each other (No issues with them, they aren't controlling about their children's friendships like some of DD1's friend's mums), so I chat with the Dads more, probably more friends with then than most of the mums.

If the mum group isn't working put for you for whatever reason, maybe try something different

Because ‘plastering a big smile across your face’ or whatever just to show you don’t care actually shows the opposite.

Most of my post was more of a general point. That wasn’t clear.

All the posters calling these women names are worse than the women in real life. There may or may not be a reason for the ‘exclusion’ but why does it matter?

The issue with expecting people to include everyone is that it is a huge shock when you realise not everyone likes you.

There are people that I don’t speak to because I’m not keen on them. And some don’t speak to me for the same reason.

Outside of a professional environment, you can choose to talk to people or not. If more people were happy in their own skin, they wouldn’t waste so much time and effort trying to be liked or insulting those who don’t.

I’m AuDHD so maybe that’s why but I worked this out at a very young age (GenX so nobody was forced to include everyone). If you can get your head round that, you will be much happier.

Agree, I think it hits a nerve for some people though, who themselves have felt excluded.

well, I am foreign, and Christian and have a great but weird sense of humour. Now I know, why I too, was excluded!

Which is why it’s important to learn that resilience as early as possible

I think you're being juvenile. DS invited the children he liked to his parties, or for playdates. I wasn't keeping some kind of running tally of who invited him back. And this was in a school where I didn't make a single friend among the other parents in the four years DS attended. It was lonely, sure, but it was a fairly insular place. Everyone else had known one another since their school days, and just weren't interested in a stranger. When I knew the environment better, I was just not their kind of person and neither were they mine, though I'd done a fair bit of issuing invitations and joining things before I realised.

But DS's friendships were the important thing in this context, not mine. I made my friends at work and in other contexts.

I’m clearly missing something but aren’t you all there to pick your kids up?

You might feel silly but nobody else is likely to notice or care.

@RosewaterMadeleines Thanks for the insult. It is bad manners to swerve dc who have invited dc to parties! I don’t care who you are, but 5 year olds and older don’t rule the roost. Parents know what’s good manners and what isn’t. Not reciprocating is bad manners.

And that is the root of the issue. Children aren’t allowed to dislike anyone or choose not to spend time with them. I do remember having to do team tasks at school with various kids I didn’t like and it was grim.

So they grow up without the resilience to understand they have a choice and end up being reliant on being included even when they know the others don’t like them that much.

I can empathise with you. I always felt left out at my sons primary school. The mums were ok but never wanted to actually get together. I never had a problem with friends away from the school environment. Perhaps its because you get thrown together and its people you wouldn't necessarily choose. It did make me feel self conscious even though I'm usually quite confident.

I don't think an invite means they have to invite back, children have different 'hierarchies' in their friendship. The girl who would call DD1 her best friend, DD1 would say she is a friend but not her 'BFF'. And the same the other way, the girl DD calls her best friend has several close friends nor just DD, and sometimes it's not possible to invite them all, especially when they get older and parties get much smaller.

DD2, I had a mum of a girl who thinks she is her BF, ask me why if her DD was invited to her birthday day out. I explained that we only had space for 3 friends and were sorry we couldn't invite her daughter. When the reality is her daughter is a little bully who is very manipulative, and I'm not going to invite her daughter just because she invited mine.

The only time I have been annoyed about DD1 not being invited was when it was clear that the reason she wasn't invited was nothing to do with DD and the other girls friendship, and everything to do with me not being friends with the girl (who calls DD her best friend for several years) mum.

This happened to me. A few things have cheered me up over the years:

• The group split up when the kids all went up to secondary school anyhow. It's not as close knit as it was.
• I noticed the two bitchiest mums who'd become BFFs daughters had a toxic friendship.
• The flashy mum had a bankruptcy.
• Another mum made the local paper for having a puppy farm which didn't comply with various regs/ trading standards and got given a 10k fine and if she didn't pay it was jail (her parents paid).

They do need to learn to work with a variety of children in lessons, it develops their adaptability and can bring different strengths.

But they do not need to be forced to include them in parties, playdates etc

In the same way that you have to work with colleagues you may not be keen on during the day, but you do not have to go to the pub with them after work

Yeah, sure.

Honestky, I really regret every second ( and there weren’t many) I wasted thinking about the toddler group mums or the school gate mums.
Now my kids are older I realise how inconsequential they were to my life and how little we had in common. The few friends I msde, I would’ve been friends with regardless of our kids.
Most of these women I wouldn’t even acknowledge in Tesco.
Op do yourself a favour and get a good book to read at the kids activities ( I did uni work) and fuck the other mums off. You won’t regret it
Model confident, unbothered energy to your kids, not trying to sit at tables where they don’t fit