Mommy cliques

I am party of a Mommy Clique. Okay, it's not so much a Mommy Club but four of us Mommies who live close to each other get together once a month at one of the Mommies houses (with our spouses and kids) to each chips and salsa and chat. It's nice to have four women with varied backgrounds (two stay at homes, two working) who can all agree that a poopy diaper is probably ready to be classified as a WMD.
But, I wasn't surprised when this weekend when we went to Fiona and Mark's kids joint birthday party and found myself shunned by the other Mommies. Seriously. There were about 15 families there with their kids and precisely ONE set of parents talked to me besides Fiona and Mark. They were also the only other ethnic couple there. I nearly asked them to join Husband, Boy and I where we'd flopped down our blanket and chairs so we could be our own ghetto in the white enclave.
The other Moms eyed me suspiciously. I think it's because I was an unknown quantity. I didn't belong to their Mommy Group or send Boy to their preferred day school. I wore shorts and a polo shirt while they wore clothes that were meant to hide the poochy bellies (which I wasn't hiding well myself). Boy went on his way, occasionally babbling at other children but mostly interested in his own thing. Even he wasn't ready to be part of that clique thing.
At one point, a one year old girl was pushing her stroller away from where her family had been sitting. She pushed happily along, further away from her Mom who was busy showing off her new Blackberry to the other Mommies. I cheered the little girl's drive and she smiled at me warily. (Boy was crawling through a fabric tunnel that Fiona had brought while Husband made video with our new camera) When I saw the little one was starting to head out of our picnic area, I helped her negotiate back towards where her Mommy was. As I looked up to make sure we were going the right way, someone's Grandmother shot me an evil eye. I wanted to tell her, "Hey, would you like her to head out to the street or behind the bathrooms? Sorry I'm not immediately known to you but I've been sitting ten feet away for the last hour so I'm not a freak." But I didn't. I let the little girl find her way back to her family while I sat down and absorbed sunlight.
What is so hard about saying "hello" at a gathering where we seem to all have a couple of things in common: our kids are the same age roughly and we all know the birthday family? I would smile at other Moms as their kids ran with Boy but I'd get a tight smile as if my child was an interloper that they would prefer not to run with their precious ones. Husband was far more fortunate that he was able to talk to a couple of the Daddies - Mark and another Dad he knew. He spent time with them, discussing geek stuff, while I taught Boy the properties of spraying water with a water fountain. (We called the game Bellagio)
We went to another birthday party a couple of weeks back where I knew the birthday boy's family and three other families. I managed to have a pretty decent conversation with most of the parents without a problem. It's as if they knew that we were all there for the same reason. So it isn't like any of us were superfreaky people. It was a nice party, everyone had a great time (though Boy didn't do anything the music teacher wanted and eyed the other kids who did as if they were lemmings).
What a difference. We have another birthday party the day before Boy's party later in the year. I should know about ONE of the other families that will be there. We'll see how that goes..