What would you do? (Read post)

I have a large family - too many cousins and second cousins to count. In the last few years, most of them have gone from being VERY VERY VERY close to my immediate family to VERY strained relationships for various reasons. I still love all of my family members but having them be involved in my life, my husband’s life, and our baby girl’s life would be a bad thing because of the way they act - I’m hopeful that someday things will be different but this is just the way it is right now.

I’m now trying to plan my daughter’s 1st birthday party and the invite list is stressing me out so so so badly. I’d always planned on having a big party and inviting everyone to come celebrate with us! But with how things are right now, I feel like it would be better to do an “immediate family only” celebration with just my parents, my grandparents, his parents, his grandparents, and our siblings (plus one nephew). Even with that, I can’t invite one set of my grandparents because they disowned us and one set of his grandparents because they live up north and can’t travel. It would still be about 15 people (including us).

Help me! Is it okay to do an immediate family only party and not invite other relatives/close friends? This would unfortunately include a college friend who threw me a baby shower (but I would offer to bring the baby up to the college town to see her the following weekend).

Or would you just invite everyone and just suck it up and deal with its ?

Side Note: The only other people I’d even be slightly interested in inviting would be two of my 10 aunts and a few of my college friends. If I invite them then I have to invite my big, dysfunctional family because it would cause serious hurt feelings and even more problems which I really do not need right now. And the problem is that a few of those dysfunctional people would most likely (most definitely) show up.