What would you do if your mom was being bullied? What would you do if your mom was being bullied by your friends?

Okay, let's take a step back. Its not your mom, but someone who could be your mom. A group of women, married and many with children, gather one night a week to get some much needed away time for themselves and for their bodies that just aren't what they used to be. They practice basketball. Some are still polished, but most are there just for some good ol' fun. Many are probably disappointed that their bodies don't do what they used to. Things just aren't as neat and tucked away like they used to be, but these women are trying to look past that.

Enter some single, young adults. For some reason, they feel some sort of possession over the gym the women practice in and want to get rid of them so they can play their volleyball, privileging their sport over the women's sport. One young man is very belligerent and just wants to show these "old women" up.

I'm 26.

He hasn't seen what a mother goes through. The tantrums, the pee cleaned off the floor after the third accident, the inability to reason with an upset child, the kicks in the face and crotch and sore breasts as you try to change a child, the slow pace at which they move, the inability to do anything other than breastfeed and change diapers, the struggle to know which crying child to answer to first--the loudest or the most helpless, an exhausted child that refuses to sleep and poops their pants when you want them to nap.

He just sees some old women taking up 30 minutes of his "court time."

Why won't he just let us play? He doesn't know and probably never will understand what this time, this measly one hour a week, means for our sanity and for the good of our children.

I feel sad for him, since our shared court spaced is supposedly because we both believe in the same God and the same loving Jesus Christ. I'd like to tell myself that one day, one day, he'll learn. But I don't know if he will. Motherhood, I'm learning, is hard to understand without experiencing it and fathers experience parenthood differently. But I do hope he will learn compassion.

Its a cold, but not too cold, but very gray day in mid-February. We've entered the winter doldrums. It had briefly warmed up and when the sun disappeared again (because it is winter, after all), it cast me into a seasonal depression.

I had bullied myself into going to a Relief Society exercise class, so here I was. One and a half hours late, but better late than never. I now proved to myself that it was thing and that people went and that I could too. Partway through doing the stretches for yoga, I noticed someone else who had appeared later than everyone else. She looked not like the other sisters. Her hair over her ears looked shaved, a "punk" look. She, like me, probably didn't know anyone in the room.

Gratefully, Grace gave me a means to talk to her after the yoga music stopped.

"My daughter says you are going to the library too."

And the conversation that followed had nothing to do with the library.

"Oh probably...we have a huge bill there. My eight year old lost books this summer. We're going to use our tax return to pay off bills. I'm so sick of living paycheck to paycehck."

"Makes sense. No better use for a tax return," I quip.

I tune out for a minute because by infant daughter who had been content up till this point in her infant carrier was being rocked and startled by an adventuring new walking baby.

When I tune back in, I hear this woman say, "Death can do that to your routines."

Uh oh, i chose the wrong part of the conversation to tune out,