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Beware the outside friend who only rubs against one’s angles

Your shout book.

What Mothers Do (or, The Tyranny of the School Gate)

Ignore requests for play dates, just don’t return emails, or constantly say their child can’t do it. Or get their P.A. to decline on their behalf.

Invite every child in the class to their son’s party but yours.

Talk and talk about their own child and never ask a single question about your own.

At every mention of a problem your child has – e.g. crooked front teeth/can’t do the maths/is having difficulties with friends – comes back with, ‘Johnnie’s teeth are beautifully straight, thank God, Johnnie’s always been good at maths, he gets on with everyone,’ etc. Whether you believe it or not.

Drop their child off to your son’s birthday party without a present, pick up their child with no mention of a present, happily take a party bag, say an extravagant thank you but never give a birthday present in return or mention the situation again, as if challenging you. Of course you say nothing.

Never reciprocate with lifts to or from school, as if it just hasn’t crossed their mind to do so.

Like a butterfly buzz from school gate flower to flower, alighting on the freshest and most beautiful – the newest mum, the next best friend – before flitting off to someone else. Dropping you, just like that, into a cold, cold place. Phone calls are suddenly unanswered, coffee requests met with, ‘So busy, another time’. Felling you with silence. Because someone else is filling up their lives now, whereas once you were the loveliest and most intriguing mum in the school; fresh from London, foreign, marked by difference. Long ago. The technique is stunning: how to bring a strong woman down, torment them with bewilderment, force them to ask the question, again and again, ‘What’s wrong with me?’

Sometimes you just want to scream at these women, at the height of all the pettiness (usually towards the end of term when everyone’s frazzled). Can’t we all just value each other? Please? It’s hard, for every one of us, you’re sure of that.

And then, specifically, there’s Queen Susan:

Using the royal ‘we’ when talking about the school because as P.T.A. president she has a sense of entitlement and ownership over the institution – and access to the headmaster – that no other parent has.

Likes to slip in to conversations, often, her privileged position. For example, parking is difficult around the school and everyone wings it, including you, with illegal, jittery, hovery pulling up at pick up and drop off. Except Susan. ‘I’m president, I just can’t,’ she likes to remind everyone, often, with a rueful smile. ‘I’m president, my boy has to do his homework … I’m president, I can’t be late for pick up.’ If the job came with a badge she’d wear it.

Always includes a link to her own website at the bottom of her weekly school newsletter, as if to rub it in that she has a life beyond all this, she has managed to be one of those ones who does it all, effortlessly (she runs a website selling bespoke wooden kitchenware along with her school duties).

If you were content, none of this would infect you; it would just roll away like water off a duck’s back. But one woman, this woman, has become a focus for all your frustration and you know it’s unfair and paranoid and ridiculous, she’s a good person, you’re just jealous of her position and the way she’s worked out her life and it’s eating you up, can’t escape it. But you’d be happy to never see her again. Would never have befriended a Susan in your former existence, are not uplifted by her in any way; your heart doesn’t skip with happiness to see her and you need heart-lifters around you now, more than ever – it feels like you’re becoming more thin-skinned and vulnerable as you age. How can that be? That the great, raw wounds inflicted by others in the distant past are sharpening now, in middle age. You can’t gouge them out and you have no idea why; have lost your voice, your strength.