It's not Feminism, it's common sense...

"Expectant mother Nora Hsu never expected to be ticketed while simply looking for a place to sit down. 'I got on, wherever the doors were open. There was no seats and the train wasn't moving. We were in the middle of the station waiting for the express train,' she said. Hsu stood there hoping someone would give up their seat for her, but they didn't. So she did what a lot of people do when a car gets too hot or crowded or even just smells bad: she opened the door and went to the car next door. She said she didn't know going through that doorway was illegal, and that's when the police called her over, issuing her a $75 ticket."

And that's when Mean Mommy blew a gasket. I was immediately taken back to my own days on the public transit system, heavily pregnant with #1, trudging my fat ass into the city to teach in fourth floor classroom, of a one hundred year old building, with no accessible elevator. Sure, the morning commute, was not that bad, I hadn't just spent seven hours on my feet, herding my class up and down all those stairs, to and from the basement lunchroom, and leaving the house at 6:30 each morning pretty much guaranteed me a seat on the bus and two trains I took to get to work, but the way home was a different story.

Contrary to popular belief, most teachers do not zip out of the building the minute the last bell rings. The ones who are doing their jobs properly are still at school, making wall charts and grading papers well past 3:00 and despite the early hour at which their workday commences, are usually leaving the "office" with the rest of the work force - and many times, later. I have developed a pat response that prevents me from going on a socially awkward rant, when people tell me upon hearing I was a a teacher, pre-kids, that teaching is the perfect job because of the hours - "Not if you're doing it right." But I digress. My point is, my ride home differed from my ride in not only due to the hours I had spent bent over tiny desks checking fraction worksheets, but in the dearth of seats to be found on mass transit.

More often than not, the first leg of my trip home involved pushing my way onto a packed 6 train, which,to be honest, was pretty easy considering the fifty extra pounds I was carrying. But once I got on the train, managing to stay upright, carrying my loaded school bag, and holding onto the overhead rail without bumping the latest John Grisham out of some seated passengers hand with my belly was almost an impossibility. The bus ride between New York and New Jersey proved to be even more precarious as the seatless are required to stand in a narrow pathway down the center of the bus and there was decidedly nothing narrow about my body in its fecund state. The safest way to survive the swaying trip through the Lincoln Tunnel is to stand sideways, as if surfing - not an option when you are the human equivalent of a double-wide trailer.

Now I can not lie and say that there were not people who saw me and all my dangerously chaotic swaying and offered me their seat, and there is a special place in heaven for them, but nine times out of ten those people fell into one of two categories - women and minority men. That's right, whitey-white boy, I was given more seats on the six train headed toward the Bronx, than I ever was on the bus to Hoboken. I can't believe my belly isn't imprinted with Alan Greenspan's stipple portrait with the number of Wall Street Journals it has knocked out of the hands of Brooks-Brothers-wearing, finance assholes. You think I'm kidding? I almost got into a fistfight, nine months pregnant, when a guy gave me the stink eye for rumpling his paper as I tried to prevent myself from being thrown to the coffee-covered floor (thanks to the latte he was holding, unsuccessfully, between his feet) and going into labor. At which point I'm sure he would have worried about my getting placental matter on his shoes and scrabbled over seats to get away.

The problem is men's warped sense of feminism. Notice, the guys who were least likely to stand up are the guys who had the most exposure to some sort of feminist education during their college years. These are the men who walked by women's centers on their campuses and saw fliers for Take Back the Night marches. Has the belief that women can do anything men can do made them afraid to perform any chivalrous act, lest they offend women? This is the charitable point of view. It is more likely they are lazy assholes.

Now don't get your boxers in a bunch, my white, male readers, those of you I know would leap out of your seats to let an obviously pregnant woman sit down (I say obviously because no one wants to make that mistake), but I want to put the message out there. Evenly the most staunchly feminist of us could use a little consideration when we are, you know, carrying a tiny human being inside of us. Women are incredibly strong, and yes, as Helen Reddy said, we can do anything, but defying the laws of physics is not possible. So the next time you see an expectant mother, offer her your seat, or hold the door open, because she is doing something so incredibly important - the least she deserves is a plastic seat, sticky with spilled soda, next to the homeless guy who smells like a urinal.

And that cop? May he have to pass a kidney stone with no pain medication sometime in the near future.