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.