Daughter left out because mums don’t like me

[greyeyedgirl]

My daughter is in year 7. She’s just seen on social media that most of the girls in the year have been to a sleepover together and she’s not been invited. She’s heart broken. I can’t tell her the reason is that when she was in year 3 one of the mums took a dislike to me and has systematically turned many other mums at the school against me with untrue rumours. She is a proper queen bee. So I was excluded from the friendship group of mums which I feel sad about but have other friends. Consequently the girls are always on day trips out in the holidays, play dates, Share after school clubs go on holiday together and are tight. I thought in seniors this would matter less as kids choose their own friends which are not driven by parents friend choices. But it doesn’t seem to be the case it’s awful to see myDD left out because of my friendship dynamics. Any advice ?

What doesn’t she seem to understand? ive been here more than a decade and I’ll tell you what I don’t understand.

someone referencing a thread that they haven’t even linked when correcting someone who responded to the OP facts.

someone actually searching this information

someone posting the same story in two different threads with little differences.

I'm not going to engage any more. You're just living up to the last 5 letters of your username now.

Yup it's been edited by the op.

This! Good on your mum and your friend's mum for making it about their children not them.

In my dd's class there's a group who make it really obvious that they only want their dds to be friends with each other. I'm told that the kids are all quite spiteful to each other, probably because they're being basically forced into being 'besties' when they have nothing in common. Tbh at parties etc they always look a bit lost and miserable. The parents really aren't doing them any favours restricting them to such a bubble and even at infant school age you can tell that they're going to grow up into mini clones of their parents.

On the flip side I'm quite friendly with one mum. Unfortunately I've witnessed her child being really horrible to my child and other children and she's blissfully ignorant even when challenged. I've repeatedly told my dd that she doesn't have to play with this child and she doesn't. She has her own couple of besties who are lovely. This may cause awkwardness eventually with this mum but tbh I really don't care. My dd is the priority and she deserves to have nice friends.

We really all need to take the politics out of the playground. Kids are on the whole so accepting and unassuming and will naturally form wholesome friendships if we don't let our hangups get in the way.

In my kids school there is only one class in each year group (very small school) and 30 kids in each class. There are 11 girls in the class so if one ever gets left out it is very apparent.

I ended up being honest with dd. It’s a bit of a life lesson. I had protected dd but then in year 6 the dc said to my dd “my mum thinks your mum is a bitch”. so I explained I had fallen out with the mum years earlier.

She worked in the school in an admin role and pulled me up on something I shared from the school fb page. She messaged me constantly at 7am about how I shouldn’t share anything from the school page (which was totally open) - it was a graphic of pudsey bear and said “don’t forget silly socks for children in need tomorrow”, so no dc or anything sensitive. She was going off about me breaching policy etc. I very politely asked her to send me the policy as I didn’t understand it and work as a social media manager so am happy to advise the school if I understood what they want to achieve/and their concerns and I could support them to adapt the policy so parents can understand it. She went off on one demanding I delete my post etc. I was baffled but she then said she’d be sharing the whole thread with the head teacher. Fine, I was happy with what I wrote and quite frankly, aggressive messages at 7am would usually meet with a fuck off but I had been super professional. Head teacher called me that afternoon to apologise for the messages I’d received from her pa and said I was correct and the staff member would receive additional training and was moving into a less senior position as a result of her behaviour towards me (I think there were other issues outside of this incident). So this woman blamed me for her demotion. I didn’t even go to the head, she did 🤷🏻‍♀️

I ended up explaining to dd what happened and that I would never hold that against her dc but she sadly was holding it against my dd. Bonkers.

How does that work when they get to GCSE stage? They can't offer much of choice of subjects I assume?

Anyone who thinks queen bee is new is wrong, I'm in my 60s and I've known this phrase for decades.
In fact, I was initially put off Mumsnet about 20 years ago by a queen bee type. I worked in a library and an informal group of mumsnetters would meet in the children's library every week. They were led by an utterly vile queen bee who treated newcomers and those not in her inner circle with such contempt it was awful to see. Thankfully I came to Mumsnet of my own volition some time later, but if you were the self styled leader of a group of Mumsnet mums who met on a Monday afternoon in a West Yorkshire library, you and your feral brats were universally loathed by all the library staff!

They don't offer any GCSE's. Kids have to travel to the nearest college.

Why is a year 7 child on SM?

That was my thought too, we had over 100 girls in year 7 at my school 😂

Why is an 11yr old on social media ffs. You've f'ed up there, OP. She's too young for SM and if she hadn't been on it, she wouldn't have seen this. If she was the appropriate age for SM then she'd be old enough to process this.

I went from primary school with friends and then high school with non! It's hard being left out but your girl will come in to her own x

This is not helpful to the OP, but well done making yourself feel superior, you must be so proud.

Exactly this.

Something similar happened to me quite recently. After several years of what I thought was good friendship with another mum, she turned on me over something and lashed out. Although her son is good friends with DS in school, she tried to veto my DS being invited to a joint birthday party which the other mum had invited DS to. A few minutes after accepting the invitation I received a message from the joint party mum to say please would I not bring DS because the other mum had just told her that her child didn’t get on with mine and wouldn’t come to the party if my own child did.

I told the other mum that I couldn’t that to my child. I explained that the problem was not with the children but that the mum was angry with me. Luckily she decided instead to stand up to the other mum and call her bluff and so DS went to the party, with the other mum still swearing blind to DH on the day that her child didn’t like mine.

As an aside, this a private school, where to begin with I naively believed that people wouldn’t behave like this. People are the same all over. To misquote Willy Russell in Educating Rita, private school is a different song, not a better song.

It’s not that either the phrase or the concept is new, it’s just a bit ridiculous because it demonises and gives power to entirely ordinary women — ‘queen bee’ status is almost always in the eye of the beholder who is projecting their own unprocessed schooldays experiences onto adults encountered in the context of a child’s school.

When I moved to a new place and DS started primary school, new schoolyard acquaintances used to talk in hushed and hostile tones about the ‘alpha mummy’ and PTA queen who was apparently at the apex of all school social activity and had been since her own schooldays there (the majority of parents in the class had gone to school there.) I was fascinated, and asked to have her pointed out to me so I could gaze on all this social power. It turned out she was an entirely ordinary, rather harassed woman I’d had coffee with unknowingly twice because she’d once offered me and DS a lift home from a wet bus stop.

Queen Bee is a common term, sounds like you're in Motherland yourself. Be nicer.

Thanks for all the positive comments. Really appreciate it and feel better knowing that some of dynamics are pretty common