There are some things that make a person happy if they are not a millennial mom. Ashley Tisdale's group mom drama is one of those things.
Because Tisdale—now Ashley Tisdale French—sounds like she's stuck in her own High School Musical and looks like Hilary Duff's husband just tossed a stink bomb under the bleachers.
Adding to the drama, the group is rumored to include Duff and Mandy Moore, although Tisdale French frustratingly refused to name names.
“Since I became a public figure as a teenager, often the things people want to talk about most are the things I least expect,” the former child star wrote in the magazine. essay for New York Magazine, which echoes what she wrote some time ago on her own blog. “Sometimes I say something casually only to see it turn into a headline or start a conversation on TikTok.”
The point, according to the essay, is that Tisdale French, who married composer Christopher French in 2014, was pregnant during the pandemic. She missed a baby shower, a prenatal yoga class, and handing over her newborn baby to friends. Then a friend gathered a group of young mothers.
“[F]we could finally be together and our kids could be together and it all felt right,” she wrote.
Founder To be the Frenchet line from personal care products, I thought I had joined a group of cool kids doing cool things.
“I felt energized being around women who understood how difficult it is to feed a baby on a Zoom call.”
She literally called them cool.
“[I]It gave me hope that I could find a balance between a full-time job and family life because all these badass women were able to do it. Maybe we can share our secrets of success“
Then social media burst her bubble.
“I remember being left out of a couple of group meetings and I knew about them because Instagram made sure it provided me with every photo and Instagram story.”
She wrote that she realized that her mom's group was like high school.
“Even though decades had passed since tenth grade, the feeling of being left behind was very similar.”
But now she has become an adult and has taken her own stand.
“And that's exactly what I wrote to the group after I got kicked out of another group hang: 'This is too high school for me and I don't want to be a part of it anymore.'
People didn't react very well, she said. One mother sent flowers but did not respond with gratitude. Another said: “You weren't invited? I thought you were.”
Keep in mind, this is part of a series called “A year has passed“, which included essays about a woman training based on DNA test results that she was not the person she thought she was, and one from actress Rebecca Gayheart about coping with ex-husband Eric Dane's ALS diagnosis and subsequent care.
Again, it also includes essay by Kathy Griffin on dating after divorce at age 65, which includes some serious references – “It wasn't my idea; it's all Sia and our friend Nia Vardalos' fault. We were at Sia's house just being stupid girls when they dared me to do this.” — and an in-depth discussion of condoms.
But let's return to Tisdale French.
“Why me? The truth is I don't know and I'll probably never know. What I do know is that it brought me back to an uncomfortable but familiar feeling that I thought I had left behind years ago.”
By the way, she went into more detail about what happened in her old blog post.
“I realized that there were group text threads that didn't include everyone, which was causing cliques to form within the larger group. And after the third or fourth time I saw pictures on social media of everyone else in a hangout that I wasn't invited to, I started to feel like I wasn't really part of the group.”
She also shared the revelation with her blog readers.
“If a moms' group constantly makes you feel hurt, empty, or left out, it's not the moms' group for you. (Even if it used to be!) It no longer serves you in a way that encourages you and you don't need to shy away from commitments or anything.”
We'll never know how far Hilary Duff's husband went in any of these essays. We know that Matthew Koma didn't hesitate to pull out the Burn Book.
Koma got so angry about it that he took to Instagram to imitate Repost Tisdale French promotional post about the essay in New York Magazine, superimposing a photo of her face and changing the headline from “Breaking Up with My Toxic Moms' Group” to her own: “When You're the Most Self-Obsessed Deaf Person on Earth, Other Moms Tend to Shift the Focus to Their Real Babies,” with the subtitle, “A Group of Moms Tell It All Through Dad's Eyes.”
Alas, he posted this as an Instagram story that has expired, so we can only present this through outlets like Peoplewho has been posting on Reddit for the longest time? AITAH Messages and subsequent comments informing the original author, they really are assholes in a specific situation. (Not that there are any assholes being discussed here.)
Tisdale French doesn't name names in his essay, but Koma's reaction seems to indicate that former child star Duff, 38, could be one of the supposedly evil moms who definitely was No being named. And Duff and Koma hosted former child star Moore, 41, and her family after last year's Eton fire in Altadena. when Moore's house burned downso some might bet that Moore is also among the mothers of young children in former child star Tisdale French's band.
Tisdale French, meanwhile, apparently anticipated this kind of speculation in response to the essay about New York City, because she experienced it after posting a blog on the same topic. And apparently all this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
“This topic has women DMing me, saying, ‘I feel seen,’ and sharing their most emotional stories with me,” she wrote for the magazine.
“It has also caused wannabe online sleuths to attempt to investigate as if they were on CSI (please don’t even try—whatever you think is true isn’t even close to being true).”
Chill? Uncool? Christopher French, Ashley's husband, may have already made his own decision on the matter.
“Undervalued life skills,” French wrote Wednesday morning in the Journal Instagram storyquoting author and mindfulness coach Corey Allen. “Pause to decide if it's worth the effort.”
