Ashley Tisdale French she is willing to talk about her breakup with a group of mothers.
“There’s a recent topic that has blown up my phone like no other from the get-go wrote about it a few weeks ago It’s a topic that has had women DM me to say ‘I feel seen’ and 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” posted on Thursday, January 1st. “It’s one that has also made aspiring online detectives try to investigate as if they were CSI (please don’t even try; what you think is true isn’t even close). The subject? Mother group drama.”
When the Musical Baccalaureate The 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 mothers were able to be together with their children “and everything felt good.”
Hilary Duff, Vanessa Hudgens and more former Disney stars have raised families since their young years on the Disney Channel. Hudgens confirmed via her Instagram Stories in July 2024 that she gave birth to her and husband Cole Tucker’s first child. “Mom, dad and baby are happy and healthy,” Hudgens wrote via Instagram on (…)
Over time, however, Ashley, who also shares 15-month-old Emerson with her husband Christopher French — she began to feel excluded from the group and to wonder if she belonged.
“I remember being left out of a couple of group uploads and I knew about it because Instagram made sure to feed me every Instagram photo and story,” she wrote. “I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing all the ways they seemed to exclude me… I told myself it was all in my head, and it wasn’t a big deal. Still, I could feel a growing distance between me and the other members of the group, who didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t around much.”
After being left out of another group, Ashley decided to text the group saying “this is too high school for me and I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.”
Ashley Tisdale
Courtesy of Ashley Tisdale/Instagram“It hasn’t exactly gone well,” he said be cool the owner continued. “A few of the others tried to smooth things over. One sent flowers, then ignored me when I thanked her. . . . To be clear, I’ve never considered moms to be bad people. (Maybe one.) But I think our group dynamic stopped being healthy and positive, for me, anyway.”
To this day, Ashley doesn’t know why she was kicked out of the mom group, which she didn’t name in the personal essay. (Us Weekly Tisdale’s rep has been contacted for additional comment.)
What she does know is that the dynamic took her to a time when she didn’t feel like she was better.
“I was sitting here alone one night after putting my daughter to bed, thinking, ‘Maybe I’m not cool enough?'” Ashley recalled. “Suddenly, I was back in high school, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing ‘wrong’ to get left out.”
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After sharing her story, Ashley knows she’s not the only mom who has felt excluded from others who have the same title.
As a new year begins, she hopes to remind other women that they will find the right people in time.
“You deserve to go through motherhood with people who really, 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 they look like they’re having a blast on Instagram.”