“She walked straight toward me and motioned with her head for me to get up,” the woman wrote in a Reddit post
A woman says she decided not to give up her subway seat for a mother who was physically carrying her child, then had second thoughts about her choice
In a post on Reddit’s “Am I the A——?,” a 23-year-old woman said that she was “totally exhausted” after a long day of work.
“My commute is pretty long — about 50 minutes. Luckily, I got a seat and was about to doze off when, at the next station, a lady and her young boy (who looked about 8 years old) got on,” the woman wrote.
“She walked straight toward me and motioned with her head for me to get up. She didn’t even say anything, and it felt like she was just expecting me to move,” the woman wrote. “Something about her face triggered me, so I bluntly said ‘no.’ ‘
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The Redditor said that the mother “seemed surprised” and “started talking about how someone my age should give up their seat for a mother carrying her child.”
“She also made a few comments about how the younger generation is disrespectful,” the woman added.
“A few people gave me dirty looks, and I felt awkward, but I stayed in my seat,” she wrote.
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In an update, the woman specified that she was sitting in a “regular seat, not a priority seat” and that at other points during the trip, she “actually saw the child running and jumping around.”
“He seemed perfectly fine,’ she added.
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The woman went on to say that “someone else eventually offered her a seat, and after that, she just sat down and started talking on her phone.”
Although she felt like she made the right move in the moment, the woman said that while she was walking home, “I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe I was in the wrong.”
Well, according to the majority of commenters, she wasn’t.
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“The woman picked you out of all the other people who were seated. She made a decision on sight that you didn’t need that seat,” read one reply, which also noted that “if there was a reason her child needed it,” she could have always said that — or just actually asked if the woman would get up in the first place.
Another commenter noted that “plenty of young people have invisible disabilities or injuries,” and that it’s wrong to make assumptions or judge anyone’s refusal to give up their seat by just how young they look.
A third user admitted that they enlisted the opinion of their “Boomer” mother to get a more seasoned opinion.
“I asked my ‘boomer’ (lord I hate that name) Mum what the etiquette in her day was,” the commenter wrote. “She said you stand for disabled, elderly and pregnant women, when I told her this story she just laughed and said any child that could be carried could sit on their parent’s knee and she would always have made us stand for any adult to sit on a local bus/train/subway (Can confirm she used to do that).”
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