Ashley Tisdale French Opens Up About Mom Group Exclusion: “This Is Too High School for Me”

I wasn’t expecting to read something from Ashley Tisdale that would actually stick with me but here we are.

She wrote a blog post recently about getting quietly pushed out of a mom group. And I don’t mean some big dramatic blowup. Nobody called anybody out publicly. It was the other kind. The slow kind. Where you just stop getting invited to things and you piece it together later from Instagram posts.

After her first daughter was born, Tisdale thought she’d found her people. A group of moms who were working and raising kids and seemed like they had it together. She said it gave her hope about figuring out that balance herself “since all these cool women were able to do it.”

Didn’t last. She started noticing hangouts happening without her. Stuff she only found out about because somebody posted a photo. Which is such a specific kind of awful honestly. You’re not even told you were left out. You discover it while scrolling at midnight. And the one that really messed with her was realizing she’d been cut out of something connected to her own daughter’s birthday. Not a random dinner. Her kid’s birthday. Come on.

“Here I was sitting alone one night after getting my daughter to bed, thinking, Maybe I’m not cool enough?” she wrote. “All of a sudden, I was in high school again, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing ‘wrong’ to be left out.”

That quote is the one that blew up and I get why. It’s not celebrity gossip at that point. It’s just a feeling most people recognize immediately. You’re a grown woman with a career and a family and you’re lying in bed at night running through what you might have done wrong. Being a new mom with the hormones and the sleep deprivation and all of it just makes that spiral so much worse.

So she texted them. Told them straight up she was done. “This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.” Some of them reached out after. I’m sure it was all very nice. But like. The damage was already done at that point you know?

The part that made me actually laugh out loud was when she said she doesn’t think they’re bad people. And then added “Maybe one.” That’s the most honest sentence in the whole post. Everybody who’s ever been in a friend group knows exactly what she means.

A ton of mothers responded sharing almost the same exact experience. Which tracks. This isn’t rare. Tisdale said it herself. She’s far from the only mom who’s cried over people who were supposed to have her back.

And look I know this is going to sound like a reach but if you grew up watching her play Sharpay Evans you have to admit there’s something kind of funny about it. She literally played the popular girl. For years. On one of the biggest Disney franchises ever. And now she’s writing publicly about being the one who didn’t make the cut. I really doubt that crossed her mind when she wrote it but I can’t be the only person who noticed.