It’s called identifying with the abuser, very much apart of being abused and excusing it at all cost to avoid confronting your abuse.
9 Likes
Some trunks are big enough to hold 3:
6 Likes
I feel like some measure of both was required in this situation.
I keep reading about teachers who, even if they get covid, they aren’t allowed to take time off as they’ve used up all their sick time at this point (sometimes they’re required to get a PCR test to “officially” be recognized as having covid, but there’s a multi-week waiting list to get one), and that’s in the reasonable states. Grade school teachers are showing up for class with covid symptoms because the alternative is either they don’t get paid or they lose their jobs.
Obviously the reasonable response would be for both to wear n95 masks with the windows down, but it seems like anti-mask sentiment is so prevalent in some parts of the country that no one even thinks about wearing them, even when they actually are fearful of covid. Which seems to be leading to all sorts of situations where someone’s afraid of being exposed and they start acting like real idiots. They’ve rejected the reasonable options they have to protect themselves, so all they can do is act irrationally.
7 Likes
Probably so… none the less, this was a really fucked up thing to do.
15 Likes
I’ve seen some reprehensible behavior, this one takes the cake.
11 Likes
It is right on up there, for sure. There is really no excuse for this, at all, whatever her reasoning.
But if she was doing it out of fear of getting it because of problems getting sick days, then that also shows how fucked up our national priorities have gotten… but I know I’m preaching to the choir here…
13 Likes
I can’t really comment the rightness or wrongness of her actions given that I have a work van & a pick up truck. If it was me & my kid they’d 'a locked me up in a new york minute when I pulled up with the boy bungee corded to the ladder rack of the van. Or ratchet strapped into the pick up bed
2 Likes
14 Likes
child abuse is a real chuckle, eh… /s
10 Likes
She should have rented a U-Haul trailer and kept her son in that
1 Like
I am with the mother on this. She made a rational judgement of the risks.
When I was a kid in the 80s, it was common for people to ride in the back of a pickup truck, a similar level of risk. I did it hundreds of times. Not the safest thing, but not 'felony child endangerment".
Realistically, what is the chance of her getting into an accident on the trip, when she is driving very carefully vs to her getting Covid, transmitting it to people in her school, and it resulting in someone getting hospitalized or killed?
The police tend to completely disregard the danger of Covid, which is a problem in itself. In the early days of Covid, pre-vaccination, I flew into LAX. Instead of waiting in the terminal for my ride with a bunch of potentially infected people not wearing masks, I went out to sit out near the curb. The police came by to tell me that I could not do that, because a car might jump the curb and hit me. So we have something close to a “Final Destination” scenario vs a very realistic chance of getting infected. I didn’t argue, because I was more likely to get infected by the police themselves, who were interacting with people all day, every day, not wearing masks.
1 Like
I really hate living in this timeline, where following the law is wrong because individuals are better at making their own judgments in the moment.
13 Likes
When we were kids we begged our parents to ride in the trunk(*). And sometimes on short trips were allowed to. Ah. the 70s.
(*) Why, you ask? Because!
2 Likes
Just for clarity of narrative, the kid is a teenager. He likely wasn’t begging to ride in the trunk, but neither was he being forcibly crammed into the trunk. Most probably his mom – in a bad solution to a problem she was facing – asked him to ride in the trunk and he obediently said OK. It was still child endangerment, and shouldn’t pass without consequence, but it feels like the ratio of stupid to malicious on her part is very high here.
At all y’all defending this woman’s idiotic and dangerous behavior:
21 Likes
If I was presented with the problem of getting my sick child to health care without being infected myself, I would never, in a million years, have thought of shoving them into the boot. (Or trunk, whatever.)
Maybe that just shows a lack of imagination on my part?
12 Likes
Looks like she was taken into custody Saturday and released on bond.
2 Likes
Often we focus on a person’s solution to a problem, ignoring that it was their lack of character and priorities that made the situation a problem for them in the first place.
1 Like
They conveniently overlook that the child was allowed to use the back seat after she’s called out on what she did. So, her choices changed once there were witnesses. Also, those folks sharing flashbacks from their childhood seem to forget laws change. Laws about seatbelt use, car seats for infants or children, and use of seats without restraints are things that have changed since the '60s and '70s.
Some posting here sound almost like new grandparents whose children won’t let them drive their kids anywhere. Why? Because instead of focusing on safety and the law, they want to tell a story about how they survived without 'em - so newfangled inventions and rules are no big deal. 
21 Likes
Welcome aboard!
ETA: @clutchingpearls, both of y’all.
