Two Australian women who met through a maternity support group have ended up in hospital following a row over WhatsApp. According to Northern Beaches Police Area Command, the pair had started a row about the coronavirus over WhatsApp, agreed to meet in person to clear the air (very mature) and instead ended up physically attacking each other (less mature).
Much has been made of the fact that the pair met through a parenting group, with various headlines dubbing it a ‘mummy war’. Obviously the fact that both women have children shouldn’t make it any more or less surprising that they came to physical blows. But if you’ve got first-hand experience of what it’s like to be in the pressure cooker of a mum group, you might be slightly less surprised at the physical blows that this fight ended in.
While many women find organisations such as NCT to be supportive and essential lifelines when having kids, it’s undeniable that combining a group of strangers at one of the most stressful, important and sleep-deprived times of their lives, does often lead to fireworks – even more so since technology enabled mum friends to be in constant contact with each other.
‘I went into NCT with high expectations,’ Kate, a 34-year-old writer and mother of one told Grazia. ‘Most of my friends had made some good groups of mates there, and I was excited to find the women I’d be sharing this experience with.
‘Unfortunately it really didn’t work out that way. Maybe it was a personality mismatch, but my group was really snobby. I went to the nearest one to me, which was further into the posher bit of London which I live near. I was the only one living in a flat and the only one who seemed to be worried about money, which made me feel really uncomfortable. I kept getting into arguments about everything from Brexit to the welfare state.
‘Eventually I dropped out of the meet-ups and after nearly a year I worked up the confidence to leave the WhatsApp group.I felt like I’d failed. My mum still has best friends from her childbirth classes. But with time I’ve realised that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. If you’re thrown in with a group of people based solely on being pregnant around the same time, it’s no surprise that it doesn’t have a 100% hit rate.’
She might have felt like the exception, but Kate’s story is pretty familiar – for every woman who made brilliant friends though pregnancy prep there are others who found the whole thing beyond stressful. ‘It was like going back to secondary school,’ one woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me. ‘So much obsession with which pram you had, whether your baby was walking first, talking first, everyone determined that their child was special and outperforming the rest. I couldn’t deal with it, it made me anxious. Plus, they all talked about each other behind their backs, which just sent my paranoia, already bad post birth, through the roof.’
Several of the women I spoke to said similar things – that it was a gossipy, bitchy environment. I asked why, and Sophie, 37, told me: ‘If I’m honest, I think it’s a tricky combination of being bored, being on your phone the whole time, and having limited other things in common. We all talked about each other – even each other’s babies – because our frame of reference was so small. The bitching got way better as the babies got older, and now that we’re all in the swing of it things are far less bad.’
‘It’s easy to forget,’ another anonymous mother now in her forties, who attended various baby groups in her mid thirties, ‘what a massively emotionally raw time it is. You’re all on high alert, sleep deprived, not really sure who you are or what you’re doing. Is it really any surprise that sometimes putting a whole load of sleep-deprived, emotional people into a Whatsapp group together sometimes results in spats?’
It’s certainly not all bad news, though. Kate tells me, ‘A friend with a baby the same age took me along to her NCT group and let me try it out. We’ve made real, genuine friends with them and now I’ve got a proper group. These are much more my kind of people.’
Support groups for parents are an important resource during what can be an incredibly lonely time. But, as the women we spoke to can attest, when you’re all hormonal, sleep deprived and grappling with a huge life change, it’s easy to take passing comments as major insults.
While it’s wonderful to come away from your pregnancy with a whole new group of best mates, making friends is very much down to luck of the draw. You’re not a failure if all you take away from your pregnancy or baby group is an occasional WhatsApp conversation about nipple shields when you’re both awake at 4am.