Potty training a toddler is an extreme sport. One minute you are cruising down the highway in total peace, and the next minute a tiny voice from the backseat announces an absolute bathroom emergency. Parents know this panic all too well. When you are traveling with a four year old, you do not have the luxury of waiting for the next rest stop. You have to pull over immediately and deal with the situation before your car seat gets ruined.
One dad on Reddit recently found himself in this exact terrifying scenario. The thirty six year old father was driving to an event with his heavily pregnant wife and their four year old daughter. Out of nowhere, the little girl started complaining that she desperately needed to pee. Not wanting to risk an accident in the car, the family quickly pulled into a local Walmart to handle the bathroom emergency.
Normally, the mother would take the little girl into the public restroom. However, the wife is currently seven months pregnant. Anyone who has ever been in the third trimester of pregnancy knows that walking all the way across a massive Walmart store is a marathon you simply do not want to run. She understandably asked her husband to take their daughter inside while she waited comfortably in the car.
This is where the dad made a highly questionable executive decision. Instead of taking his daughter into the men’s restroom or looking for a gender neutral family bathroom, he decided to march right into the women’s restroom. His logic was based on two things. First, he knows exactly how nasty public men’s restrooms can be. Second, he did not love the idea of his little girl walking past strange men using open urinals.
While his protective instincts were in the right place, his execution was completely flawed. He walked his daughter into the women’s restroom, put her in a stall, and then just stood outside the stall door waiting for her to finish. When they first walked in, the bathroom was totally empty. But this is a Walmart. Bathrooms do not stay empty for long.
Within a few minutes, a group of young girls and an elderly lady walked into the restroom. Imagine their absolute shock. They walked into what is supposed to be a safe space for women and found a tall, muscular, thirty six year old man just standing there. The dad noticed the weird looks and tried to stare blankly at his daughter’s stall to avoid looking suspicious. Unfortunately, staring blankly at a bathroom stall does not make a grown man look less suspicious in a women’s restroom.
The elderly lady was not about to let this slide. She loudly confronted the dad right there in the bathroom. She demanded to know what he was doing and point blank asked if he was creeping on someone inside the stall. The panicked dad quickly tried to explain that his four year old daughter was in there and he meant absolutely no harm.
His explanation was simply not good enough for the protective elderly woman. She immediately started threatening to get store security, loudly declaring that he was being weird by standing in a woman’s space. Luckily for the dad, his little girl exited the stall right at that exact moment. He grabbed her hand and hurriedly fled the restroom before mall cops could be called to the scene.
When the dad got back to the car and told his pregnant wife what just happened, she was absolutely appalled. She gave him a deeply concerning look and asked why on earth he thought it was okay to casually hang out in a women’s restroom. She correctly pointed out that it was incredibly unfair to make those women feel worried and unsafe. The dad tried to defend himself by repeating that a little girl has no place in a men’s restroom, completely ignoring the fact that a tall and muscular grown man has no place in a women’s restroom.
The internet had a field day with this story. The consensus was pretty loud and clear that he was indeed the a**hole. If a dad needs to take his young daughter to the bathroom, he takes her into the men’s room, escorts her straight into a private stall, and locks the door. If the men’s room is too gross, you ask a store employee for the family restroom. You never just invade a space reserved for women and expect everyone to be cool with it. Next time, he definitely needs to just brave the men’s stall.