This morning, as I sat in the nursery at church, holding a tiny girl in my lap and listening to the moms gossip, I reflected that I really know very little about being a woman. I am pretty much a master at childhood, having gone through it all from beginning to end, and remembering much of it. I feel incredibly mature and polished when I am with the teenagers. But everything turns around with the women, and I feel awkward, young, and a little foolish. There they are, some of them only a few years older than me, talking about their babies and their hubbies. Someone knows someone who has an attack of shingles. "Oh, my cousin had troubles with that. Here's what she did." My baby's right eye is runny. "Oh, my grandson had the same thing, and we..."

You get the idea. It's a different world. Where does a single, unattached college girl fit? I'm an anachronism. So what if I've read Plato? So what if I have been learning huge gobs of history in the past few years, things I never understood were important in the previous 20 years of my life? These ladies don't want to talk about ideas when there are real, live babies to feed and cuddle and chase. Since I have no baby of my own, I can do little but listen.

And that, I suppose, is all right. I truly am ignorant. It is good not to talk.

In other news, I might come back to PHC for Liberty Ball after all, since I hear it is being scheduled for the weekend after the graded draft of my history project is due. It just so happens that I have enough Frequent Flyer miles saved on American Airlines for a free ticket. Even my mom, amazingly enough, thinks it could be a good idea. So we'll see.  ¶ 8:53 PM