Monday 9 May 2022 02:44 AM Keeping up with yummy mummies destroyed me trends now
The five of us were squished into a broken bed in a country house attic, listening to raucous drunken laughter downstairs. My children were snoring gently as my husband whispered over their heads: ‘What are we doing here?’
We’d gone away for the weekend with a group of school parents and had realised too late that we’d been invited solely as a viaduct to the celebrity families. I was doing the people I loved most a disservice. I knew deep down that none of us belonged in this crowd, which valued status over life’s messily glorious reality.
I am an actress and writer, but in my 30s, with three children under five, I took a career break. For the next five years, I became so consumed by fitting in with the London private school set that I became a ghost in my own life.
Being a school gate mum obliterated my ambition, my sense of humour, everything that was me. I muffled my mental dips and mounting anxiety by buying expensive dresses, saying yes to every social event and being the support staff to anyone who asked.
Salima Saxton (pictured) explains how she became consumed with the playground politics of her children's London private school, to the point where she didn't recognise herself
We had the Bluebloods, who referred to their children by names that were interchangeable with their family pets, and treated both with an exasperated resignation that they were always in ‘one’s way’.
Then there were the Trusties, whose inherited wealth allowed them middle-aged, muted rebellions, but were scared stiff when they went to a Stormzy gig. They were followed around the playground by the Aspies, the aspirational mums who’d disown their children if it might improve their social standing. Finally, the Agas, kindly souls afloat on gin. These were the women for whom Boden, Jools Oliver and Farrow and Ball’s Wimborne White were the holy triumvirate.
I hadn’t come from this world. I’d attended my local school in Suffolk. And as a young actress, even after roles in Jennifer Saunders’s Jam & Jerusalem, Twenty Twelve and Spooks, I had to watch the pennies.
My husband had also come from a modest background, but when his business started to make money, our lives changed.
Ticking off certain holidays and schools felt like success,
