Entitled Parents

A flight in which a mother encouraged her children to trigger my PTSD

So a few years ago, as a present for graduating from uni, my parents took me on holiday to Tenerife. This was a pretty big deal for me: I have severe mental health problems including PTSD and agoraphobia which make traveling pretty much impossible. However, I'd been fairly stable in recovery for a while and thought this would be a great opportunity to challenge myself. As most of my triggers are sensory, I popped an eye-mask and noise-canceling headphones in my hand luggage thinking that would help me get through the flight. Oh, how wrong I was.

Everything was going surprisingly well up until we boarded the flight. In the row behind us was a mother (EM) and her two children (aged around 4-5 & 8), the younger of which was crying from boarding. I went to pop in my headphones and discovered they'd broken since arriving at the airport. My mam was nice enough to let me borrow hers (which unfortunately weren't noise-canceling) and whilst my anxiety was skyrocketing, things weren't unbearable. It sucked my headphones broke, but hey, these things happen.

About ten minutes after takeoff, I felt a jolt in the back of my seat. The crying child had begun to boot the back of my seat as hard as her little legs could. Trying to control my breathing and twitching, I turned around and kindly informed EM that her child was kicking my seat. EM looked up from her tablet, smiled and nodded at me; I assumed she was going to deal with the situation and put my headphones back in. The kicking continues. I begin to get a nasty flashback, so my mam (who was aware of the situation) let EM know her crying child was still kicking my seat and that I had major sensory issues it was impacting. EM says there's nothing she can do and suggests I swap seats with my mam, to the one in front of EM.

At this point, EM hadn't behaved unreasonably. I know my disability is my problem, some random shouldn't have to accommodate it. So I swapped seats with my mam and focused on trying to stop panicking and dissociating. This is where EM started acting like a colossal bellend. Around five minutes after I move, she puts her child on her lap and the child resumes kicking my seat. I swap back to my original seat and she puts the child back behind me. I swap with my dad, who had the seat in front of the older child as that child had been placid all flight. My mam hears EM whisper something to her older child and they immediately begin kicking my seat, substantially harder than the smaller child. Crying my eyes out, I return to my OG seat and proceed to have continuous panic attacks and flashbacks over the next hour as my mam tries her best to help me through them. Eventually, the child begins shoving her hands through the gaps in the seat, grabbing near my neck (a major trigger). I completely break down. My mam again asks EM to please try and control her child. EM responded that her kids were just bored and could do whatever they wanted including grabbing people; who were we to tell her how to raise her kids? Knowing making a scene would make things worse, my mam just turned around and just helps me get through the flight.

Unfortunately, there's no happy epilogue to this story. The whole mess continued until arrival and we never saw them again. Thankfully our return was a lot easier, but I haven't been on a flight since. Whilst this EP is nowhere near as shitty as some of the others on this sub and I have to take some of the blame in this story as I probably wasn't ready to be flying, I thought the fact she seemed to encourage her kids to behave like little wank stains made it appropriate for this sub. I also forgot to mention that mid-flight she ordered tuna melts for her and her brood, but thankfully nasty smells aren't a trigger for me so she just mildly annoyed everyone around her. It was so petty, my family got a good laugh out of it later.