When Middle-Aged Women Act Like Middle School Girls

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The book club was my idea.

After my husband, David, and I were priced out of our Park Slope apartment, I invited my best friend Annie to our new place in Flatbush to talk tomes and sip wine.

I met Annie at our college English department's copy machine 20 years earlier, immediately charmed by her orange polka dot dress, turquoise booties and bubbly personality. When I was broke, she generously paid me for guest speaker appearances in her classes, and because my new digs were five blocks from hers, she helped me unpack and decorate.

I asked another friend, too, and the three of us became a monthly trio. When the friend moved out of state, Annie asked — during our weekly laundromat grading session — if she could invite her neighbor.

"Absolutely," I replied. "What's their email?"

"I see him every day," Annie cooed. "I'll tell him."

Two months later, Annie invited someone else. Worried the club was getting crowded, but trusting Annie, I said nothing. However, when Annie turned up at a subsequent meeting with her cat-sitter, I felt like a wallflower at my own party while the four of them gabbed and gossiped as they ate my chips and dips.

"Haven't seen each other in a while?" I joked, trying to join in.

"We had lunch yesterday!" they laughed.

Needing an ally, I told Annie after the meeting that I wanted to invite someone we both knew. I mentioned a few people, all of whom she vetoed. A week later, she phoned to announce she'd organized our next session.

"Who made you boss?" I snapped.

"You're too slow," she said, voice quavering.

"All of a sudden, you're my mother," I said, "grabbing dishes out of my hands because I'm not drying fast enough?"

I could hear her sniffing. I apologized.

At the next meeting at her place, Annie flung the door open for me, then turned and walked away. Sitting on the couch with the others, I jokingly said, "I'm fine, thanks." I was dumbfounded when Annie flopped down on an ottoman and bawled, "Why are you so mean?"

"She's the mean girl," I said to David that night, "and when I react, she plays the victim. I'm baffled. She's never treated me like this. Do you think it's because I called her out for commandeering the club?”

"Probably just insecure and acting out," he shrugged.

"Insecure? She was raised to think her every thought is genius. I was raised to think my every thought is stupid."

"Another battle of the good and bad mothers?" he asked gently.

Women friends with indulgent mothers were my kryptonite. Had my mother been more encouraging, I’m sure I would've been more successful. Instead, she was critical. After visiting relatives when I was a kid, she'd list everything I'd done wrong: I talked too much, ate too little and never sat still. But then she’d surprise me with Avon perfumes she'd bought from her department store co-worker or bring home my favorite cookies when they weren't on sale. She sacrificed new clothes and winter coats to pay my college tuition and sat for hours at the kitchen table, helping me fill out financial aid applications after being on her feet all day at work at age 55. She wanted me to be a journalist and get paid to write and disapproved of my creative writing MFA. "Poets starve," she said. (Annie's father, a Cornell graduate, paid for her MFA.) Both my parents grew up poor; neither had gone to high school. My mother took in laundry to help support her immigrant Polish family during the Depression. I knew she didn't want that for me. Still, I'd wished she'd been more loving.

I worried I was projecting my mother wound onto Annie.

"Who cares?" David asked, puzzled. "She's become an ingrown toenail. Just cut her out."

But I kept wondering if it was all in my head.

During the pandemic lockdown, the club pivoted to Zoom, and Annie's impatience increased. She interrupted mid-sentence and changed the subject whenever I paused to collect my thoughts. When I mentioned that the chair of our department recommended me for a full professorship, Annie muttered, "Oh, Don says stuff like that because he wants people to like him."

Then the cat-sitter gushed, "Sharon, did you hear Annie got tenure?"

I hadn't. After 25 years of teaching, five years before Annie started, I felt disregarded and humiliated — by the school and by Annie. I quit the club that day.

"Why'd you stay for four years anyway?" David asked.

"I didn't want to just hand it to her."

"And now you can move on, right?"

Nope. I had to know why she'd changed, so I emailed her. At 62, I was in seventh grade again.

"You need to accept that I never did anything to hurt you,” Annie answered. “Even my students say I’m beloved."

Annie's mother raised her to expect approval, to get it even by projecting helplessness. Mine conditioned me to hide my vulnerabilities and fight. I needed to choose my battles. Not all relationships had to last, and if I never discovered why things shifted, would that be so bad? Maybe I’d just kept an expired friendship around too long.

“Listen," I wrote back, "I wish you all the best, but I need to take a break for a while.”

"I'll try to make an effort to be nice to you," she replied.

I couldn't believe I'd left myself open to her final, cutting remark. Furious, I scrolled through her socials for a week to see if she replaced me. After her post about "leaving precarity behind" (but promising to "advocate for all adjuncts"), I spotted a stranger's smiling face, captioned: "New addition to my book club!"

The situation reminded me of the two women in My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I'd chosen that book for the club. Just like I'd chosen Annie.


Have you encountered any "mean girls" — either when you were young or more recently? Let us know in the comments below.