I have not written anything in a long time.  Not even in my journal because I ran out of pages and the new one my husband made for me for my birthday last year is lost in the boxes sitting lonely and unopened in our Colorado church house.  I miss that place.  I want to go home.  In the meantime I am in St. Louis helping my husband who, as I told him, is "lucky to have me because [he] spent seven years making a mess of [his] house and now I'm here to clean it up."  Today I feel the weight of how I have been feeling for a long time-- tired and overwhelmed, deflated, anxious and my back hurts-- because we are leaving tomorrow, which is about a week and a half overdue. 

I started to sit down and write something a few days ago but then I stopped.  After a minute I realized I was scared.  Maybe that's because I write so rarely that it feels like when I do it should be genius or something, and I can't deal with that kind of pressure.  Really, I think I just feel a constant sense of pressure.  Pressure to be a good friend and wife and writer and sister, pressure to be responsible for me and my husband and all the things I didn't even realize I was signing up for when we said, "I do."  Pressure to live up to every bar I've set for myself ever, or every bar I've perceived was put there by somebody I respect or fear.  When I really think about it, I'm pretty sure all that people really want from me is for me to be. me. and wait to see what happens.  Even the people I respect or fear.  But that's not how I operate.  Something in me just doesn't believe it, I guess.  

Now that I'm writing again, it really isn't that scary.  I actually really like it.  I'm wondering how I've stayed away so long.  It's kind of like riding a bike for me.   Not in the proverbial way, really, where it's just something I won't unlearn but rather in the way that I always forget how fun my bike, Larry, is to ride until I start riding again after a hiatus.  Right now I don't even care how any of this sounds because I am remembering and enjoying the fact that I can write for me.  No pressure.

On a completely unrelated note: today I stopped by this old lady's house with Nathan and she started telling us about how she is upset that her daughter is pregnant.  She said a number of things about it but then she just started crying and revealed that the real reason she is upset is because she believes she won't live to see her new grand-baby grow up.  It was the first time she cried about it, she revealed, and I stood there in awe at this skinny, wrinkly woman with vulnerable tears and wondered, God, how is it that I get to be here for a moment like this in someone's life?  How is it that I can be the only person in the world who knows something so personal about a relative stranger?  I still don't get it but it feels like an honor.