Oh, there is just so much right now. Last night, as we were falling asleep, Jesse and I agreed we needed a summer. Not just the warmth, the reprieve from this awful winter, but a summer. We’re living semester lives, with no spring break, with no Martin Luther King Jr. day, with no summer.

The blog I thought I was going to write today was full of enthusiasm, my typical gushing, my typical excitement. Because things really are going quite well. Another draft of the book is finished. I watch several lovely children who are growing and learning things. I lead a group of amazing women I absolutely love, and they are going to change the world. Against all odds, the checkbook stays balanced, and we are in the black. I’m going back to Congo in t-minus ten weeks and four days.

But, right now, everything is just so heavy. I’m not doing anything that I can let slide. Everything is important, and everything has implications that affect other people. This is going to sound stupid, and probably painfully lazy, but I wish I had something I could just slack off on. Not because I want to do a so-so job at something—but because I feel, especially after last night, the weight of what I’m carrying, and there are days when it feels particularly heavy.

Last night I stood in front of a room full of people—of advocates, leaders—and told them I believed that small group leaders are the leaders of the church. Which makes us—the advocates—the leaders of the leaders. So, it’s our ship. And it’s either going down, or it’s going to sail. And I don’t know if anyone else heard it louder than I did, the level of responsibility and authority in that. I’m not even twenty-seven yet! I can’t lead a church! I don’t know Greek! (Actually, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to know Greek? But unfortunately I don’t think that gets you any closer to understanding, because most of us can barely understand things written in modern English, so I’m not even sure that knowing Greek really means as much as we think it does.)

I posted on Facebook a line about pod stuff, and I think some context is appropriate. Our church has groups called “small groups”—they’re meant to be little communities where people can love each other and challenge each other. They’re supposed to make a big church feel small. And each small group leader is put into a “pod” with other small group leaders. And those pods are led by advocates. I’m an advocate, so I’ve got a pod, four women who lead groups, and my job is to make sure they’re the best leaders they can be, that they’re constantly growing, and that their groups are as healthy as possible.

We meet once a month as a group; we eat together, we listen to a message, we talk about the leadership book we’re studying. If it’s someone’s birthday month, she wears a tiara (a real one—no plastic tiara for my girls! Okay, but they are rhinestones, not diamonds, but I’m going to say that’s not because I’m poor but because I don’t want to put a bunch of conflict diamonds on one of their precious heads. Ha!) and the rest of us wear birthday hats and bring her presents. Everyone else looks at us like we’re crazy, but we know they’re secretly jealous. (Is that okay in a church environment? Probably not. Well, I’ve never claimed to be a role model.) One of the things that works best is we have a group identity. The pod is its own character, and we love the pod. We’re committed to the pod.

I’m currently doing evaluations on their groups and their leadership, something I’ve never done before, and I think it’s going to be another game-changer for our group, because we’re about to get real specific, real intentional. The proverbial rubber will meet the road. I’m excited because I’ve never felt like I had the authority to come into their groups and intentionally observe them as leaders. But that’s changed in recent months, and here we are. And I think it will work because I think they know I’m on their team. I so desperately want them to succeed, and when that means telling them the truth, no matter how brutal, that’s what I’ll do. Because I want their success as leaders above everything else, including my popularity or “nice girl” image.

And I told the group of advocates that I spoke to last night that I feel I have yet to reach the level of “bare minimum” of what an advocate should do and be. Heavy. But that’s how big I feel the job is, and I slacked off on this job for a year and a half, and I’m not going back, not ever. I’ll quit this before I go back to not really leading the group, to being a “facilitator.”

Which brings me back around. Look at that. There really isn’t anything in my life that I can slack on. Part of that is because I’ve jettisoned—or am in the process of jettisoning—the commitments I could slack on. The outliers, the ones my heart wasn’t in. But the unintended result of that is a night like last night, a morning like this one, where I feel the weight.

I’ve got the day off today. I’m going to write. I’m working on an essay I’d like to start shopping around (if it goes well, which we’ve yet to determine). I’m going to do yoga in my living room. I’m going to make biscuits. I’m going call Simona and lie around in my PJs and maybe watch a Rob Bell video. And I’m going to pray and read and just be at home, with my cats, with no audience but Oliver and Gracie, who love me no matter what…as long as I’m on time with their dinner.

Got up at 5:40 this morning. (See? I’m too tired to even begin that sentence with “I.”) Had a busy day lined up and wanted to get a few hours of writing in before it officially started. Hopefully my early-morning writing abilities exceed my early-morning typing, talking, moving, and thinking abilities.

I spent the rest of the day, the non-writing part, chasing a two-year-old, running errands, and paying bills. I hate paying bills. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I hate paying bills when we have so little money. I rather enjoy the nuts and bolts of the bill-paying experience, the writing of the checks, the updating of the checkbook register, the simple math I feel entirely capable of doing. It’s therapeutically simple. Until I see the number to the far right going down…down…down, and I’m mentally tallying the bills that are still to be paid this month. Fabulous.

I’d say chocolate would be in order, except I read on the New York Times website today that the mood-lifting properties of chocolate are exaggerated. “One… study showed that a 130-pound person would have to eat 25 pounds of chocolate in one sitting to significantly alter the mood.”

And the problem is…what exactly?

I think I’d better go get some caffeine instead, though. The light’s fading and I’m fading with it, and I’m meeting some girlfriends (if I were not aging, I’d probably use the term “gal pals,” but heck, thirty’s coming fast) for fondue at 8:45 tonight and I’d like to be awake for that. If possible.

My favorite expressions these days is “through the wringer.” As in, “You’ve been through the wringer lately,” or, “Jesse and I have been through the wringer together.” As in, this sucks. Or, that sucked. Today I feel exhausted and, well, flattened. Yesterday was one of those wringer days.

It actually starts on Thursday night, when Jesse showed me this short film about a three-legged dog who dies. The film (“Last Minutes with Oden”) was well made, and I was fine in the beginning, before I realized that Oden was a dog. The dog who loves and accepts everyone, no matter how outcast they are. The dog who loves his tattooed owner and his balding friends, who doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve done. A dog who has cancer and is in pain. I lost it when Oden stood, revealing one front leg missing. One thing you must know about me is that I will instantly bawl upon seeing an animal of any variety that is missing a limb. You know that two-legged dog they parade around on talk shows? Yeah. I cry like a baby.

“But why?” Jesse asks. “It’s happy! It’s triumphing over adversity!”

That’s just it. I don’t think I can fully explain it, but there is something about a creature who has never hurt someone, never been obnoxious or rude, who (probably) cannot understand what is happening to it, there’s something about a creature like that, who shouldn’t even have lived, hopping around the stage of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. There’s something about it.

So you can imagine my state as the tattooed man carried the three-legged Oden to the car, as his friends said goodbye, asking the dog to tell Jesus hello for them, as they drove to the vet’s office. As a grown man covered in ink, his hands looking worn and his face gently lined, sobbed on the floor of the vet’s office, sobbed as the needle went into one of the remaining legs, sobbed as the dog closed his eyes, as his head sunk in the man’s hands.

I was a mess.

That was Thursday night, just before bed. Friday started early, because I had the Pampered Chef party to prepare for. The day was normal for about twenty minutes. The sun wasn’t up, not because it was too early for that, but because the sky was a stubborn mess of clouds. I got a phone call with some bad news and spent the rest of the morning a complete mess again. Finally I pulled it together and went to my babysitting job. At which I whimpered again, looking at a precious blond two-year-old and telling him he didn’t need to know about the sad parts of life yet, that he could wait longer for that, knowing he wasn’t understanding what I was saying.

At naptime, I took the boy upstairs and we went through the nap-rituals, and I sang “Old MacDonald” to him as I rocked him, as his head fell back onto my shoulder, heavy and tired. I sang until I ran out of barnyard animals, and then I kept singing, adding things like monkeys and, when I became really desperate, cheese. Finally, I put him in his crib and went downstairs.

The house is a lovely older home, eclectically decorated, with a large window in the kitchen that overlooks the backyard and a series of birdfeeders and squirrel feeders, which are densely populated in the mornings. The neighborhood is nice—no, more than nice. But a couple weeks ago, the boy’s father told me to keep the doors locked if we left for a walk, as there’d been some incidents of people looking for open doors, looking for easy targets for a burglary.

So, after the singing and the sleepy baby, I tiptoed downstairs, a dirty diaper in my right hand to throw into the trash can on the back porch. I walked into the kitchen. Where the back door stood open.

I instantly freaked out, spinning around, sure I would see someone standing behind me. No one was there, so I spun back toward the open door, and then stood frozen in the kitchen, the diaper raised like a weapon. If I were in my own house, I would have grabbed a kitchen knife or a broom or something. But, there, in a house that wasn’t foreign but also wasn’t my own, I just raised the diaper and turned back and forth, from the open door to the rest of the house. The sky outside was still a slate gray, the sun hidden, and the house was dark, except for the weak light from the windows. I listened for a moment, then finally became conscious of the diaper, which I quickly threw away before searching the downstairs for the intruder I thought was surely there.

But the dog was in the playroom, asleep. And I found no one in the house. I pushed the door closed, and locked it, hoping it had opened because of the wind. And for the next two hours I stayed very still and very quiet, listening, watching.

After that, the day was a shocking flurry of errands, which I performed without excitement or drive, my mind preoccupied with the news I received that morning, with the open door, which seemed like an omen. The sky never brightened, the sun having given up at some point in the afternoon, the clouds staying the meanest shade of gray, so that the whole day felt like the morning had never ended, that time was not really passing.

Little things that would normally be annoyingly amusing got under my skin. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, the trunk of my car kept slamming shut, so that by the time I turned to my cart to get another bag, it would blow shut, and I would have to open it again. I finally propped it open with one hand and loaded it with the other, which given my back injuries, the weight of the my trunk lid, and the fact that the remaining purchases were cat litter, soda, and other heavier items, meant I could add a backache to the festivities of the day. When I unloaded the groceries at home, a two-liter tore its bag and landed on my foot. When I went to move a bag of cereal to the pantry, it came open and spilled generic Golden Grahams all over my clean kitchen floor. Oliver took the opportunity to jump onto my clean kitchen counters, and when I chased him to put him into the master bedroom to keep him out of trouble, I skidded onto the carpet next to the dining room table he had run under. Only then did I remember the jeans I wore had holes in the knees. (Knees which, therefore, were rug-burned.)

The evening went on. The house was cleaned, the kitchen prepped, the carpets vacuumed. The party was fun. It wrapped up late and a few girlfriends stayed and we talked some more, and the conversation turned to child predators, and it felt fitting somehow that the day would end there, that the sun would not in fact ever show itself.

And today the sun is out, and all I want to do is go outside in a bathing suit and soak it up, all I want to do is be in warmth, to be internalizing the sun. But I know it’s far too cold for that. I know it will be months before I will warm up. But I also know that summer will come, one day when I’m not expecting it, and I will go to the beach by myself, and I will lie flat, face-up, and spread my arms and feel relief.

So, the year in review, twenty-ten so far: Watching kids who are growing faster than I realize. When they’re this size (“this size” being dangerously close to age two), I don’t perceive that very much is changing on a week-to-week basis, but I have a feeling that the year will breeze by and in January of ’11 I’ll think back to now and murmur to myself, My, how fast they’ve grown. Or something else suitably nostalgic and maternal.

Also, The Great Calendar Hunt of Twenty-Ten. I thought I’d be clever and wait until after New Year’s to get my calendar. Thought I’d get a good deal. Ha. Apparently, in a recession, everyone waits until January for their new wall calendars. The selection at Barnes and Nobel consisted of Betty Boop, Playboy, and Twilight. None of which I want on my kitchen wall. So, after a day of searching in what apparently were all the wrong places, I went home calendar-less. Which, for me, means: disoriented and slightly panicked, with no idea what she’s supposed to be doing the next day.

After much lament, I decided to give my computer’s calendar program another whirl. In the past, I just haven’t warmed to the digital calendar. But this year might be different. Twenty-ten, you know, it’s the future. Right? And of course, since deciding this and taking the time to set up my recurring appointments and obligations, I found plenty of calendars, all half-off, just lying around waiting to be bought by me. But I still want to give the (free) iCal a chance, a really fair shake this time. And paying six bucks for a wall calendar when January is practically over (okay, fine, almost half over) makes me feel I just won’t be getting my money’s worth. You don’t just get those two weeks back.

And there’s the Pampered Chef party I’m having next Friday. (If you’re in town, come over. If not, order kitchen stuff here: http://www.pamperedchef.biz/amydegler — just put in “Erin Bond” and buy stuff! I want free kitchen accessories! I’m poor!) Sending postcards and setting up online invites and realizing I really have to have my house cleaned up by then. Just tonight I finally did the last load of laundry from the holidays. Said load is still in the dryer and must be put away, but I’m nearly there…

Tonight was nice—easy, calming, a late dinner of bone-in chicken breasts roasted in garlic butter, and one or our favorites, corn maque choux, a creamy, buttery, tangy mess of deliciousness. Corn maque choux is comfort food at its ideal—even making it is comforting. Chopping the onion and the red pepper, slicing the kernels off the corncobs, stirring in the cream. While the chicken roasted, I prepped everything on the enormous butcher block that came home with me over the holidays. It’s so nice and big that I could push each veggie off to the side while I chopped the next one. When it was time to make the dish, I just scooped each new ingredient into my hands and dumped it into the waiting pan. Like a cooking-show host, just without the cool glass bowls.

The slow evening was the perfect follow up to a blissfully productive day. I had a meeting with Sue, who has agreed to mentor me in leadership, and she’s just a brilliant woman. Girl knows her stuff. I’m doing this for the pod, because I want it to be incredible, because I want us all to grow, because I want twenty-ten to be transformative, to have an unstoppable momentum. And Sue was perfect; I left her place charged up and ready to go. We talked about vision, about leading with the end in mind, about scheduling, about communication, about flowers. (More on that later.) I came home and made a master task list and got to work, not allowing myself to get on Facebook until this evening. Tonight, before bed I’ll make my “six things” list for tomorrow, the six things that must get done (and no more, so I won’t get frustrated if I don’t finish the list).

Until today, twenty-ten has felt busy without being particularly productive, freezing cold with no snow, time passing both quickly and slowly. Is January not over yet? Memories of a rough January last year. But it’s supposed to be sixty-four on Friday, and tomorrow I’ll have six things that will get done, and disappointments will eventually fade into memories, and there’s a whole year of changes still in this story.

I believe the holidays are causing a loss of brain cells. By that, I mean mine in particular. And at all those Christmas parties—I haven’t had a single drink! I blame the sleep deprivation and stress. When I showed up at Sharon’s place this Tuesday to watch Story, I just bust into tears for no good reason at all. For some reason, Sharon still felt okay leaving her child under my watch.

As Story and I cuddled on a giant bean bag, reading and re-reading books with happy pictures printed in primary colors onto glossy-finished cardboard, I think I regained a shred of the sanity that had threatened to high-tail it maybe an hour previous. That night, I went to the last party of the week and stayed late to help clean up (we got home sometime before midnight). Little sleep and hours of chocolate fondue probably got rid of my recovered shred.

Wednesday morning was more child-watching, and then the afternoon was nearly blissful as I realized the Thursday block on the calendar was empty. Big, white blankness. Bolstered by the thought of nothing scheduled the very next day, I went into a wave of productiveness, breezing through the grocery store and stopping by the bank. I made the good old beans-and-rice “stoup” for dinner, which we ate after nine because Jesse had to work late. And then, around ten, I suddenly felt the need to bake. I managed to botch chocolate sugar cookies, whose directions consisted of little more than “mix well, shape, bake.” Well, they were still tasty, even if the texture was all wrong.

Then, a Facebook friend posted that she would be attending something called K-K-K-K-K-Karaoke, and I posted the joke—and this is literally what I wrote—“Is that bowling for white people only?” And it took me a full second to realize what I’d written. I scrambled for the “delete” button. I’m still not sure how my brain confused the off-key singing of cheesy songs from the ‘90s with pushing glossy, heavy round things down glossy lanes at a collection of red-ringed pins. But it did.

Today was surprisingly productive. I put away the approximately three loads of clean laundry that had been piling up in our bedroom. And then I washed the three loads of dirty laundry waiting in the hamper. I knocked out the dishes. I wrote like three thousand words. Three freaking thousand words! I rushed to the library before it closed to snag a book on tape about Nixon and Kissinger and a few Vietnam-themed movies. Another trip to the grocery store for cold-related items for poor Jesse, who was working late, again, and whose immune system is in protest.

On the way home, I stopped by the gas station, which apparently is what everyone else in our town was also doing. I waited in line behind a van whose driver was nowhere in sight. I figured the driver was paying and would soon return and drive the vehicle away. Turns out, she was prepaying. So, I waited still longer as she pumped her gas. Finally, she drove away and I pulled my car into her slot. I climbed out, credit card in hand, and looked at the side of my car. The side the gas tank is not on. I’ve driven the same type of car since I was seventeen. The gas tank has, shockingly, never been on that side.

If I continue at this rate, I’m not sure what state I’ll be in by Christmas, but I believe this picture might sum it up:

Dear December,

First, let me begin by saying how much I absolutely adore you. Really, I do. And this year doubly so, because I was so bummed at being all alone for Thanksgiving, and then you came along, December, with all your non-Thanksgiving-themed merchandise, music, and festivities—and, with the hope of seeing family at the end of the month. You showed up just in time.

I love how gaudy you are. None of those muted fall colors of Thanksgiving, the depressing browns and mustard yellows that only reminded me of how wrong it felt to be celebrating without our families. How I welcomed your candy-apple reds and neon greens! How I loved setting out the little dancing mouse Becki gave us one year, how adorable I found him, all red-scarfed and holding a string of flashing lights. I love our mismatched outdoor decorations, the kitschy joke ornaments indoors, the multiple nativity scenes.

And the TV! Movies and shows so bad we’d never dream of watching them at any other time of year. But during you, December, they’re lovely and make us think about being nine again. I even like your music; Jesse and I sing loudly and off-key whenever we’re driving, and it just lifts the mood. (Though I’ll admit to changing the station when anything resembling “The Christmas Shoes” comes on—even I have my limits.) I can’t forget the food, either. I’ve eaten my weight in your goodies, and my blood sugar complains, but do I listen? No, I think not.

But, December, it occurs to me that there is only so much celebrating one month can handle all on its own. And this year, we may have reached that limit.

Take the Christmas parties. For Jesse’s work alone, we will have attended three separate Christmas parties. Three! Now, if he were receiving three salaries, that would be something else entirely. Add the volunteer position he has, and that’s another party. Don’t forget the small group one next week, too.

Don’t get me wrong—I love parties. Especially those that involve overeating cheesy side dishes and visiting houses decorated in bold colors. Plus, I’ve gotten to trot out my leopard-print heels for at least one of the bashes. But…couldn’t we spread them out a bit? You wouldn’t mind too much, would you, December? Sharing some of your parties with, say, March? I know she has St. Patrick’s Day, but so far, North Carolinians don’t seem to be all about the green-without-red holidays. Except the college students, that is. And Easter’s so inconsistent. March one year. April the next. I’ve got my birthday in May, but there’s just this sad little lag between Valentine’s Day and summer. Those months could use some tinsel, wouldn’t you say? And August. Really? What is there to celebrate in August? As someone without school-aged children (or any children, for that matter), and who no longer pays tuition of any kind, August is just a dry, hot month with a whopping electric bill. I sure could use a gift exchange then.

At any rate, December, you’re still my favorite month of the year. And, yes, excess is part of your charm. So, I’ll go straighten my hair tonight and maybe experiment with purple tights and enjoy another evening of merrymaking with friends, all thanks to you. But, next year, let’s think about slowing it down just a bit, shall we? Thanks.

Love,
Erin

The only way to accurately describe this week would be through a series of grunts, but I haven’t quite figured out how to translate those to words on a screen yet, so I’ll do my best without them.

Let’s see, on four of the past five days I have taken care of one of three different babies. (And, in case you’re tempted, just know that I will punch the first person to say, “God’s preparing you for something…” Well, okay, I won’t punch you, but I will scowl at you angrily. Fear the scowl!) And on three of the five past days, I’ve had lunch or tea get-togethers with friends. Plus small group, as always, on Tuesday. A dinner party Wednesday. And I’ve had this random pain in my side that is quite preoccupying and distressing. It goes away. It comes back. It hurts to breathe or sleep on my left side. If you notice me bending awkwardly to my right, clutching my ribs, and making a funny face, don’t worry, I’m just dying from some rare and sudden Left Lung Disease.

The house has been in varying degrees of disrepair all week, and by “varying degrees” I mean “unkempt to messy to messier to even messier to no one can step foot in my house.” Yesterday, I finally slogged my way through a couple sizeable mountains of laundry and one enormous summit of dishes, and today I tackled the bathrooms (including the tub).

And on top of everything, I decided this was the week to start new writing goals. I want to finish a draft of the book by the end of January. So, I’ve got this month and the next two, plus three major holidays in between. For the rest of November, my target is five thousand words a week.

With the kind of week I’ve had, normally I would have written some terribly small number of words that I would later just delete in one fell swoop. But, determined as I was with my brand-new goals and my nearly frantic desire to have a draft of this book done soon, I actually went over my goal! Happy grunts (while clutching side)!

Now that I’ve successfully navigated this week, I’m going to grab the brownie Jesse bought me from some charity bake sale earlier in the week and curl up in front of his computer to catch up on Ugly Betty. Friday, I love you.