Feeling judged by my childless bffs
Hi everyone!
I was the first to have a baby in my group of close friends and I’m really struggling to feel understood or even “seen” by them. I wasn’t blessed with an easy baby, she was colicky the first few months, screamed her lungs out every time she was in the car (still does sometimes lol) and still doesn’t sleep through the night now at 13mo. You can imagine I was exhausted and terribly sleep deprived for months on end, which contributed to my post partum anxiety. My best friends, who I know since high school and I considered almost like sisters to me, visited the first few weeks, but then went on with their lives even though I mentioned I was struggling. This made me terribly miserable.
Now things are better with my LO, so I try to see them more often, but every time I leave our gatherings with a sense of being judged for the way I’m handling motherhood. When they ask me questions about the fact that I’m still breastfeeding or cosleeping, they do it in a judgmental way, for example asking “when are you gonna stop? There must be a limit”. Or they make comparisons with other women who are (seemingly) handling the first few months of motherhood very well (as if it was my fault if mine were hell…).
I don’t know if I’m being too sensitive, have you ever found yourselves in a similar situation? How did you handle that?
Sometimes I feel so disappointed in their behavior, that I ask myself if our friendship is worth saving. I don’t know, I feel like this is one of the biggest challenges of my new life as a mom.
Posted Sep 11, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC