Why I’m calling time on the ‘Pushy Middle Class Mum’ trope

It started with a fence, then moved to offence.

Right at the end of the school summer holidays, a fence sprang up, blocking the route my daughter and I took to school and sporting an ‘ANTI-CLIMB PAINT’ sign for good measure. Nobody seemed to know who’d arranged to put this mysterious fence up or why, and it left us parents with a bit of a detour to get our kids to school.

In time, it emerged it had been paid for by some residents who resented the informal short-cut, despite not owning the land. So, when a local newspaper reporter was looking for a parent to quote in his article, I was happy to oblige.

Now, don’t get me wrong – this wasn’t Watergate. I realise there are far bigger issues out there, and I found it quite funny that I was now officially an angry person in a newspaper. But I was also confident that we hadn’t been doing any harm. We literally cut from one housing estate through to another to avoid walking along a road choked with cars and buses heading to the local high school.

I felt like in our own small way we had right on our side. So imagine my surprise when, a few days later, the newspaper shared the story on Facebook and its readers stuck the boot in.