Am I the a**hole for standing up at my son’s basketball game and saying what I said in front of every parent, every coach, and every kid on that court?
I (42F) came to this country from the Philippines seventeen years ago with nothing. My son Danny (16M) was born here, speaks better English than I do, and has worked harder at basketball than any kid on that team. I work double shifts at the hospital three days a week so he can go to the good school district, so he can have what I never had. That is the whole point of everything I have done for the last seventeen years.
This season, Danny made varsity. He was the only sophomore on the team and one of two Filipino kids in the entire school. I went to every single game. I cheered loud. Maybe too loud – my English gets worse when I’m excited, and I know that. I know.
The other parents in the bleachers have always been a little cold to me. I figured it was just the way things were. But this season, one mom – Brenda Kowalski (45F), whose son Tyler sits the bench more than he plays – started making comments. Little ones at first. “Ooh, someone’s enthusiastic.” Laughing with the woman next to her. I let it go.
Last Tuesday was the regional semifinal. Danny scored eighteen points in the first half. I was on my feet screaming his name.
That’s when Brenda leaned across two people and said to me, loud enough for the whole section to hear, “Can you maybe keep it down? Some of us are trying to watch the actual game. Not everyone wants to hear whatever language that is.”
Whatever language that is.
I sat down. My face went hot. The woman next to me pretended she didn’t hear. The man in front of me looked at his phone.
Danny looked up into the stands between plays. He saw my face. He knew something happened. He looked confused and then he looked back at the court and I watched something go out of his eyes for just a second, and that was the part I could not let go.
At halftime, I walked down to the scorer’s table. I asked the announcer – a kid, maybe seventeen – if I could use the microphone to make an announcement. He said the PA was open during halftime for parents sometimes. He handed it to me.
The gym was loud. People were getting up, getting food, talking.
I pressed the button and my voice came out over every speaker in that building.
What I Actually Said
I did not plan it. I want to be clear about that. I had no speech prepared. My hands were shaking a little and the microphone was heavier than I expected and I just started talking.
I said my name. I said I was Danny’s mom.
I said that I had been coming to this gym for three years and I had never introduced myself because I was embarrassed of my accent, and I was sorry for that, because my son deserved a mother who was not embarrassed.
I said that someone in the stands tonight told me to be quiet and asked what language I was speaking. I said that language was called Filipino, and before that it was called Tagalog, and it was the language my mother sang to me when I was small, and it was the language I prayed in when I was scared, and I was not going to be ashamed of it in this building or any building.
I said Danny had scored eighteen points in the first half. I said he studied until midnight most nights and still woke up at five-thirty for practice. I said he was going to be somebody, and I had worked every double shift and every holiday and every overnight for seventeen years so that he could stand on that floor, and no one was going to make me sit down and be quiet about it.
I said: I am his mother. I am allowed to be loud.
Then I gave the microphone back to the seventeen-year-old and I walked back up to my seat.
The gym was not loud anymore.
The Thirty Seconds After
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe nothing. I wasn’t thinking about after.
Brenda was looking at her phone. Her face was red, but she was looking at her phone very hard, the way you do when you want everyone to believe you are somewhere else.
The woman who had pretended not to hear me earlier, a tall woman named Gail whose daughter was a cheerleader, she touched my arm when I sat down. She said, “Good for you.” Quietly. Like she was a little ashamed of herself. I don’t know what to do with that.
The man in front of me, the one who had looked at his phone during Brenda’s comment, he turned around and he shook my hand. He said his name was Don. He said his mother was from South Korea and she had sat in bleachers like this one for twenty years without ever saying a word either.
I did not cry. I wanted to, but I didn’t.
The second half started.
What Danny Did
He didn’t know what I’d said. Not yet. He was in the locker room during halftime, getting the coach’s adjustments, doing whatever sixteen-year-old boys do in locker rooms at halftime of a regional semifinal.
He came back out for the second half and I was on my feet before he even reached half court.
I screamed his name. In English and in Tagalog, both, the way I always used to before I got careful about it. Anak! Danny! Go, go, go!
He looked up. Found my face in the stands. And something in him, I don’t know how to describe it exactly, it settled. Like a knot coming loose. He pointed at me once, the way players point at someone in the crowd, and then he turned back to the game.
Danny scored nine more points in the second half. They won by six.
I don’t think the speech did that. He’s just good. But I am still his mother, and I am going to say it.
What Happened After the Game
The coach, a man named Pruitt who I had spoken to maybe four times in three years, came and found me in the parking lot. He said he’d heard what happened. He said he was sorry it had happened in his gym. He seemed like he meant it, though he also seemed like a man who was very uncomfortable and wanted the conversation to end, and those two things were both true at the same time.
Brenda left before the final buzzer. Tyler, her son, the bench-warmer, he was one of the kids who rushed the court when the game ended. He looked genuinely happy. He’s just a kid. None of this is his fault.
Danny found me by the car. He’d heard from three different people by then. He stood there in his warm-up jacket with his bag over one shoulder and he said, “Mom. You got on the PA?”
I said yes.
He said, “What did you say?”
I told him. Close to word for word. He listened with his arms crossed, looking at the ground.
When I finished, he didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
Then he said, “You should’ve done it in Tagalog.”
And he hugged me. He’s taller than me now by about four inches and when he hugged me I could feel that he’d been sweating and he smelled terrible and I didn’t move for a long time.
The Part I Keep Thinking About
Here’s the thing I haven’t said yet.
I almost didn’t do it. I stood at the scorer’s table for a full minute before I asked about the microphone. I told myself it would embarrass Danny. I told myself it would make things worse. I told myself I was being dramatic, that Brenda’s comment was rude but not worth the trouble, that the smart thing was to sit back down and cheer quietly for the rest of the season and let my son finish high school without his mother making a scene.
I have been telling myself versions of that story for seventeen years.
Be smaller. Take up less space. Don’t make it hard for Danny by being too much. Too loud, too foreign, too obvious about where you came from and what it cost you to get here.
I sat in that hospital during twelve-hour shifts and I watched doctors and I watched nurses and I watched the way people talked to each other and I learned how to make myself easy to overlook. I got good at it. I thought that was what you did. I thought that was the price.
But Danny looked up from that court and something went out of his eyes when he saw my face, and that was the price I was not willing to pay.
Not that. Not that one.
So. Am I?
Some people are going to say yes. Some people are already saying yes, probably. That I embarrassed Brenda publicly, that I could have handled it privately, that making a scene at a kids’ sporting event is never the right call, that two wrongs, et cetera.
Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not going to pretend I thought it through.
What I know is that I have a son who is sixteen and he is watching me every single day to see what it looks like to be a person in this country when this country doesn’t always make it easy. He is watching me to learn what to do when someone tries to make you feel small. He is taking notes on whether his mother folds.
I don’t want him to fold. So I couldn’t fold first.
Brenda said whatever language that is like it was garbage. Like it was noise. Like the words my grandmother used and the words my mother used and the words I counted in during hard moments and prayed in during scared ones were just interference, just static she had to tolerate while she watched a basketball game.
I pressed that button because I needed my son to see that those words were not static.
He’s going to have a whole life of people like Brenda. Moments like that one, small and cold and designed to remind him of exactly where he stands. I can’t go with him. I can’t take the microphone every time.
But I could take it once, in a gym in November, with the smell of floor wax and popcorn and my son’s whole team watching from the locker room hallway.
I could be loud, just once, in a way that he would remember.
I think he will remember.
—
If this one hit close to home, share it. Someone out there needs to read it tonight.
If you’re looking for more intense personal stories, check out I Followed a Stranger Through a Grocery Store Because She Walked Like My Dead Brother, My Wife Walked Into the Kitchen and Saw My Face, or My Little Brother Wanted to See the Rockets. His Teacher Had Other Plans..
