Ashley Tisdale French is ready to talk about her breakup with a mom group.
“There’s one recent topic that has made my phone blow up like no other since I first wrote about it a few weeks ago. It’s a subject that has made women DM me to say ‘I feel seen’ and to share their most emotional stories with me,” French, 40, wrote in a personal essay for The Cut titled “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group” published on Thursday, January 1. “It’s one that 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). The topic? Mom-group drama.”
When the High School Musical actress gave birth to daughter Jupiter in March 2021, the new mom wrote that she felt so lucky to have found a group of friends who were also pregnant during the coronavirus pandemic.
At one point, all the moms were able to be together with their kids “and it all felt right.”
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Over time, however, Ashley — who also shares Emerson, 15 months, with husband Christopher French — started feeling excluded from the group and questioning if she belonged.
“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. “I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me. … I told myself it was all in my head, and it wasn’t a big deal. And yet, I could sense a growing distance between me and the other members of the group, who seemed to not even care that I wasn’t around much.”
After being left out of another group hang, Ashley decided to text the group that “this is too high school for me, and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.”
“It didn’t exactly go over well,” the Being Frenshe owner continued. “Some of the others tried to smooth things over. One sent flowers, then ignored me when I thanked her for them. … To be clear, I have never considered the moms to be bad people. (Maybe one.) But I do think our group dynamic stopped being healthy and positive — for me, anyway.”
To this day, Ashley doesn’t know why she was excluded from the group of moms — who she didn’t name in the personal essay. (Us Weekly has reached out to Tisdale’s rep for additional comment.)
What she does know is that the dynamic took her back to a time when she didn’t feel like her best self.
“Here I was sitting alone one night after getting my daughter to bed, thinking, ‘Maybe I’m not cool enough?’” Ashley recalled. “All of a sudden, I was in high school again, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing ‘wrong’ to be left out.”
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After sharing her story, Ashley knows she is not the only mother who has felt excluded from others who hold the same title.
As a new year begins, she hopes to remind other women that they will find the right people with time.
“You deserve to go through motherhood with people who actually, you know, like you,” she wrote. “And if you have to wonder if they do, here’s the hard-earned lesson I hope you’ll take to heart: It’s not the right group for you. Even if it looks like they’re having the best time on Instagram.”
