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Gettyimages.com/Black mother cuddling sleeping baby son on sofa

After the first woman in my friend group to become pregnant had her baby, I felt a shift in our relationship. And, honestly, it was kind of my fault. The moment my friend became a mom, some switch went off inside of me—something that told me “Things are different now. She’s different now. You have to be different now.” I just wasn’t behaving completely naturally around my mama friend. She could feel it. I could feel it. It all came from a good place—I ultimately just wanted to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes, or accidentally do something that made her life as a mother harder—but at the end of the day, we didn’t feel as close as we had before. So, I finally just decided to be open with my friend and tell her what I’d been feeling, and ask her if there was anything I should know about being a friend of a mother. It turns out quite a few of our friends had been acting strange, too. In fact, my friend spilled a lot about her experiences as the first friend in the group to have kids. Here’s what I learned.

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Some people are too casual about it

A lot of friends (including myself) surprisingly only sent a text congratulating my friend on her baby. They didn’t send a card. They didn’t send a gift. And they even texted her about something other than the baby—something frivolous—only a few days after she brought her baby home. Since they aren’t mothers, they didn’t quite grasp what a huge deal this was.

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