A mum who took her young daughter with her to a coffee shop has been left furious after another customer branded her a "horrible mother" and claimed she had "no decency" - for seemingly no reason.
Sharing her story on Reddit, the anonymous mum explained she works from home and occasionally needs some time out of the house with her toddler to get them both some fresh air and a change of scenery.
The mum and her daughter, who are from the US, have begun frequenting a coffee shop in a local shopping centre, where the mum always makes sure to sit at the very edge of the seating area so that she doesn't disturb any of the shop's other customers.
In her post, she wrote: "For context, I occasionally take my daughter to a small coffee shop in the local mall.
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"I'm a work-from-home mum trying to run my company and to finish my postgraduate degree while raising my kid, while my husband spends all day at work, and it gets a bit much sometimes. His workplace is one of those that demands a ton of team building activities, so he's often away long after hours.
"Anyone who's been home alone with a baby will know how tired you get and how hard it is to keep them a good company when you're cooped up all day. So now that Covid-19 has been clearing up in my area we've decided to start going places a bit more.
"There's a local mall with an open-plan locally-owned coffee shop. The place has 3 walls and is otherwise completely open into the mall lobby with a fountain and some of those coin-slot kid attractions and such. I decided to try it and have a coffee there a few months ago and found out my daughter loves it!
"She will look around sitting in her stroller while I drink my coffee in peace for once. The waitresses love her and know her by name and come to greet her. We leave a big tip to make up for any inconvenience we might cause."
As her toddler has started to walk she now gets out of her pushchair and takes little walks around the lobby of the shopping centre surrounding the coffee shop - but this has seemingly angered another shopper, who has felt the need to call out the mum for having "no decency".
She added: "She recently started walking and loves to use any open space. We go [to the coffee shop] when there are the fewest people because I don't want to bother anyone, and we never stay longer than 30 minutes. She sits in her stroller and when she wants to, I take her out and we walk around the lobby.
"When someone smiles at her and they initiate a conversation, we stop and she smiles and babbles a bit at them and then we go. I steer her clear of anyone with a laptop/headphones/book/studying/on a meeting, and if she ever gets cranky we're outta there immediately.
"Recently an old lady would sit down at the table next to us and stare. She'll whisper under her breath some things.
"Last time when we were leaving I felt it appropriate to at least say 'goodbye have a nice day' to the lady as we were saying so to the waiters and a nice gentleman who'd made funny faces at my kiddo. She looked at me like a spat at her and started mumbling something about 'horrible mother' and 'no decency'."
The woman then asked her friends about what had happened as it was "bothering her" - but some of them told her she was being "out of line" by taking her child to a coffee shop, as people often go there for "peace and quiet".
Commenters on the Reddit post disagreed though, as most were on the mum's side.
One person said: "Kids need socialisation, and you need sanity."
While another added: "Your kid needs to go out and so do you. You’re doing your best not to disturb anyone and that’s fine."
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