Why I decided to stop bad- mouthing my fellow mums

Thanks to breakaway’ cliques filled with side snark and catty emojis, once-welcoming chat communities too often turn ugly. Victoria Richards is vowing to break free from bitching

- 

Who among us hasn’t scoffed and bitched and complained; hasn’t said something mean dressed up as “joking” about someone else; hasn't ranted and moaned and said, “Sorry, but I just need to say something quickly” to their side-chat?

You know, the side-chat: that circle of safety on WhatsApp with a maximum of two to three others, siphoned off from the main chat that contains, well, everybody else? The one that’s getting a particularly bad rap these days (and deservedly so, whether or not we admit it), thanks to being called out by celebrity mums like Ashley Tisdale. That side-chat.

Tisdale, 40, dropped a truth bomb to end all truth bombs when she published an essay in The Cut this week, saying she had left a “toxic” star-studded LA mothers’ group she belonged to because of its “mean girl” behaviour.

“By the time we started getting together for playdates and got the group chat going, I was certain that I’d found my village,” she wrote. “But over time, I began to wonder whether that was really true. 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. I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me.