Am I the asshole for what I did at my son’s varsity game last Friday?
I (42F) came to this country from the Philippines eighteen years ago with nothing but a nursing degree they wouldn’t recognize here and a suitcase. I work double shifts at the hospital, my English has an accent, and I know some of the other parents look at me like I don’t belong in the bleachers. I have a mortgage, a son on the varsity soccer team, and I have been at every single game for four years. Every one.
Marcus (17) has been the starting midfielder since sophomore year. I am that mom – the loud one, the one who brings a thermos of arroz caldo and cheers too hard and claps when nobody else is clapping. The other parents know me. Or they think they do.
There’s a woman named Brenda (48F) who runs the booster club. She organizes the snack tables and the fundraiser shirts and she acts like the soccer program would collapse without her. We have never been friends but we have been polite. Or I thought we were.
Last Friday Marcus scored the goal that tied the game in the final four minutes. I screamed. I was on my feet. And Brenda turned around from the row in front of me and said, loud enough for the whole section to hear, “Can you please calm down? Some of us are trying to watch the game.”
I said Marcus was my son and she said, “I know who he is. I’m asking YOU to be a little more CIVILIZED.”
Civilized.
My stomach went cold.
The woman next to me, Patrice, grabbed my arm. Her eyes were wide. Even she couldn’t believe it.
I sat down. I didn’t say anything. I let it go. The game ended, Marcus’s team won, and everyone poured onto the field. I walked down to hug my son and I smiled for the pictures and I did not cry until I was in my car.
But then I got home and I started going through the booster club’s Facebook group – the one Brenda runs, the one where she posts every update and every photo and every fundraiser. And I found something.
I found a thread from two months ago that I had never seen.
My hands would not stop shaking.
I screenshotted everything. All of it. And the next morning I sent one email – to the principal, the athletic director, and every parent on the booster club contact list.
What I Was Looking For
I want to be honest about this part.
When I got home that night I wasn’t looking for anything specific. I was still in my coat. I hadn’t even put down my bag. I just needed to do something with my hands because if I sat still I was going to cry again and I was so tired of crying in this country over things that should not require tears.
So I opened Facebook. I went to the group. I told myself I was just going to see if anyone had posted about the game, maybe a photo of Marcus’s goal. That was it. That was the whole plan.
The group has 340 members. Brenda started it in 2019. Every post is cheerful and organized and formatted like a newsletter. Snack sign-up for Friday. Reminder about the spirit wear deadline. Photos from the end-of-season banquet with little heart emojis in the captions.
I scrolled back two months because I remembered missing a few weeks of posts when I was doing back-to-back overnight shifts in October. I hadn’t had time to check anything.
I found the thread on a Tuesday night post from October 9th.
Brenda had written a general update about the upcoming fundraiser. Normal stuff. But the comments. I read the comments and my chest did something I don’t have a word for in English or Tagalog.
The Thread
It started with a woman named Sheryl, who I have spoken to maybe four times. She wrote, under Brenda’s fundraiser post: “Quick question – are we still doing assigned seating sections? Asking for a reason lol.”
Brenda replied: “Still working on the logistics. Why?”
Sheryl: “Just some of us were talking and it gets a little… overwhelming sometimes in certain parts of the bleachers. The noise level.”
Brenda: “Oh I completely understand. We can definitely look at organizing things better going forward.”
Then a man named Doug, whose son plays defense, added: “Honestly it would just be nice to actually hear the coach calling plays. Some parents don’t understand that this isn’t a, you know, a different kind of sporting event.”
Three people liked that comment.
Three.
I sat there in my kitchen at eleven-thirty at night reading the phrase “a different kind of sporting event” and I knew exactly what Doug meant. I knew because I have heard that tone my entire eighteen years here. It is the tone that never says the actual word. It just gestures in your direction and smiles.
There were eleven more comments in the thread. Not all of them were bad. Two parents pushed back, mildly, said something like “I think enthusiasm is good for the kids.” But nobody said stop. Nobody tagged Brenda and said this is not okay. The thread just ran out of steam and Brenda posted a smiley face and said she’d “look into the seating situation.”
My son had been playing on that field for two months while these people were in a Facebook group talking about managing where I sat.
I screenshotted every single comment. Timestamps, names, profile pictures, all of it. I made a PDF. It took me until one in the morning.
The Email
I am a nurse. I write clinical documentation every shift. I know how to be precise and I know how to remove emotion from language when I need to. So I wrote the email the same way I would write an incident report.
I stated the date, the time, and Brenda’s exact words, including the word civilized. I noted that Patrice had witnessed the exchange. I attached the screenshots of the Facebook thread. I named the participants. I quoted Doug’s comment about “a different kind of sporting event” directly.
I did not call anyone racist. I did not use that word once. I just presented what happened on Friday and what I found afterward and I let the two things sit next to each other.
I sent it at 7:14 Saturday morning.
Then I made coffee and I waited.
What Happened Next
Marcus doesn’t know about the email. He knows something happened in the bleachers because I was quiet on the drive home and he kept asking if I was okay and I kept saying I was tired. He is seventeen. He has enough to carry without knowing that parents of his teammates were organizing around his mother’s presence.
By nine Saturday morning I had six replies.
Patrice was first. She wrote: “I’ve been sick about this since last night. I should have said something in the moment. I’m so sorry.” She was the only one who apologized directly.
The athletic director, a man named Glenn, wrote that he had “received my message” and would be “reviewing the concerns raised.” Standard language. Nothing there.
Then four parents wrote back, three of them to tell me I had misread the thread, that Doug hadn’t meant anything by it, that Brenda was a dedicated volunteer who did so much for the program. One of them cc’d Brenda. So Brenda knew within the hour.
Brenda did not email me. She called me.
I almost didn’t pick up. But I did.
She said she was “deeply hurt” that I had sent that email without coming to her first. She said she had never had a problem with me personally and that word – personally – landed like she’d flicked something at my face. She said Doug was just “blowing off steam” and that the thread had been taken out of context.
I said: “You told me to be civilized in front of forty people because my son scored a goal.”
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said she had been stressed that night and she was sorry if her words came across wrong.
If.
I said, “I’m going to let the principal and the athletic director handle this,” and I hung up.
Marcus
He found out Sunday. Not from me. From his teammate Darius, whose mother had seen the email chain.
He came downstairs at noon and sat across from me at the kitchen table and didn’t say anything for a minute. He’s got his father’s face, my son. Big eyes that go very still when he’s thinking.
He said, “Mom. The Facebook thing.”
I said yes.
He said, “How long has that been going on?”
I told him I didn’t know. That I’d only found this thread. That there could be more or there could be nothing else, I genuinely didn’t know.
He was quiet again. Then he said, “You should have told me.”
I said I didn’t want him to carry it.
He said, “I already carry it. I carry it every game.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I put my hand on the table and he put his hand on top of mine and we just sat there in the kitchen for a while. The refrigerator hummed. Outside a neighbor was doing something with a leaf blower.
He said, “I’m glad you sent the email.”
Where It Stands
The principal called Monday morning. There will be a meeting with the athletic director and booster club leadership. She used the phrase “community standards” four times in a six-minute phone call, which told me she was being careful and that she had already talked to a lawyer or was thinking about it.
Brenda has not been removed from anything yet. Doug posted in the Facebook group on Sunday like nothing happened, a photo of his son at practice with a thumbs-up emoji.
Three parents I barely know have reached out privately to say they’re glad I said something. One of them told me there had been a similar conversation the year before about a Black family who left the booster club after one season. She didn’t know if it was connected. She said she’d always wondered.
I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know if anything changes or if Brenda stays in her position and I become the difficult parent who sent the email and made everything uncomfortable. I have been the uncomfortable foreign presence in rooms before. I know how that story usually goes.
But I have been at every single game for four years.
Every one.
And I will be at the next one too, with my thermos, in whatever seat I choose, cheering as loud as I want when my son does something worth screaming about.
Which, if you’ve seen him play, is often.
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If this one sat with you, pass it along to someone who needs to read it.
For more tales of unexpected drama and interpersonal fireworks, check out what happened when My Wife’s Coworker Knew Something About My Marriage That I Didn’t or the story of I Brought a Cake That Took Three Days to Make. Then She Said That.. And for a truly wild ride, you won’t believe how I Followed a Stranger Off a Bus and She Said My Dead Daughter’s Name.
