To feel rotten about friends

[jennypennyloves]

Okay so I've not long had a baby...7 months ago and while I'm pretty much back to my pre baby weight my shape is different and I doubt that's going to change.

I have loads of clothes that I bought pre baby that look terrible on me now and some of them still have tags and most of them haven't been worn that much.

I put a message on our whatsapp group saying "hey ladies, just having a clear out and my arse is too big for all these clothes...most of them are new or newish and all in great condition. Does anybody want any of it before i charity shop it all?"

Now we've been friends since school so the best part of 15/16 years so I know them all well and there are 6 of us on the chat. One of them replied "I don't want your sloppy seconds" and others replied with laughing faces to her. One of the girls who replied laughing raided a bag of charity clothes I was giving away a couple of years ago and I've taken stuff off her in the past.

WIBU to offer new clothes to people for free? I feel rubbish

Tell them you've given them to charity - they'll appreciate it.

I couldn't be friends with someone so childish and pathetic.

The one who PM's you is probably embarrassed after seeing the other 'freind' make crass comments about affording her own. I'd just say to the group ' thanks, they've been taken.' (so they realise that at least someone in the group appreciates the gesture), and hand them on to the one who wants it. No need to embarrass them. I'd probably distance myself from the snobby one who made the comments, but not the others for laughing.

I think what annoys me the most is that if someone makes a joke and you show your approval of the joke it's almost tacit agreement. I think I'm over thinking it but they've pissed me off!

I'd message "The clothes are off to the charity shop then, apologies to those who PM'd and/or have accepted clothes from me before, but maybe next time. I'm sure the charity will benefit especially from the brand new items".

Off the point, but off course 'sloppy seconds' is a sex reference, usually in a misogynistic male banter situation. The sloppiness is literally about sex where one party still has traces of ahem! someone else's bodily fluids about her person, because it's not been long since the previous encounter.

Good on you for calling people on their snideness, OP. I hope they are generally nicer, or you will for me be falling into that most baffling of Mn categories, people who post about people they call friends, but whom they also acknowledge are deeply not nice!

Stigma about secondhand clothing is a definite social class marker - the aspirational lower-middle classes still find it deeply shameful deep down, whereas all the middle-middles and upper-middles I can think of circulate the same multiply-owned-but-still-holding-together Boden around for aeons. At a rather upper-middle-dominated NCT group I used to socialise with in Oxford, people would coo and reminisce over the reappearance of garments on a new baby or child, and be very happy when they could trace who had originally bought it and how many children had worn it .