The Day My Wallflower Volunteered

For a couple of weeks, I'd been overhearing Koko and his classmates talk about their upcoming Buwan ng Wika activity whenever I picked him up from school. I didn't pay much attention to what he might need for it because I knew my son. Or at least I thought I did.

Koko was painfully shy. Singing in front of people, dancing, or volunteering for anything that involved standing somewhere other people could actually see him was simply not his thing. I knew he could sing because I'm his mother and mothers know these things. Convincing him to let anybody else find out was another matter entirely.

Then one Friday, his class adviser approached me and said Koko had volunteered to play the lead role in their presentation. I honestly thought she had the wrong mother until she mentioned his name.

Nope. Definitely my child.

She asked if I was okay with it, and of course I was probably more excited than the child who had actually volunteered. I immediately wanted to know what he needed, what he had to wear, and what I had to prepare. His role was Mamang Sorbetero, and his teacher said it would be nice if he had a prop.

I had six days.

I'm not what anyone would call an arts-and-crafts mom. I have ideas. Whether my hands can produce the thing my brain has designed is another question entirely, but I already had a little sorbetes cart in mind. So I started gathering cardboard, scissors, tape, rulers, pencils, and whatever else looked remotely useful.

Koko helped decide what he wanted on the cart. Since it was for Buwan ng Wika, we wanted it colorful and unmistakably Filipino. We used what we had, cut up an old cardboard box, and slowly turned something that once held an appliance into something that vaguely resembled a sorbetes cart.

Then came the paint, decorations, lettering, wheels, and the practical problem of how my child was supposed to carry the thing while singing and dancing without spending the entire performance wrestling with a cardboard box. That required a trip to the hardware store to find something sturdy enough to use as straps.

After several days of cutting, taping, painting, adjusting, and discovering that school props are considerably easier to imagine than to actually make, we finished it.

Five pesos pala ang ice cream. Very reasonable. I can't speak for the quality because Mamang Sorbetero had no actual inventory, but I thought our branding was excellent.

I was ridiculously pleased with the cart, but when presentation day came, it stopped being the thing I cared about. Koko went out there and performed Bahay Kubo and Mamang Sorbetero in front of the Lower Grade School students. He sang, danced, carried that cardboard contraption around, and played the lead role that he himself had volunteered for.

That last part was what made me proudest. It wasn't because I suddenly wanted my quiet child to become outgoing or start volunteering for every school program. There was never anything wrong with him being shy. But I knew my son, or at least I thought I did, and I knew how far outside his comfort zone this was.

He had chosen to try anyway.

Of course, Koko wasn't the only one performing that day. Kiera's grade level had its own Buwan ng Wika presentation, and she danced with her classmates to Saranggola ni Pepe.

She even made it through the whole thing without a tantrum, which at her age deserved recognition of its own. There she was in her little Filipiniana, dressed and ready to perform, while I got to be the mother watching both of her children willingly participate in a school program on the same day.

I wasn't going to question my luck.

I went home tired, but it was the satisfying kind of tired that came with scraps of cardboard on the floor, leftover tape and paint, costumes that would eventually be outgrown, and pictures I knew I'd want to keep.

At the time, these school activities can feel like another requirement parents have to squeeze between work and everything else. There's another costume to find, another prop to make, another deadline written in a notebook that your child may or may not remember to show you until three days before it's needed.

But years later, I doubt I'll remember how tired I was from making the cart.

I'll remember the Friday a teacher walked up to me and told me my shy little boy had volunteered to take the lead, and how certain I was for a moment that she must have been talking about somebody else's child.

Apparently, Mom didn't know everything after all.