Beth Troy's Blog, page 13

Day Five: An Elective

I’ve taught college for 17 years and only the survey courses
freshman have to take.

I like doing this. Check that. I LOVE doing this. It’s an
honor to teach people at a pivotal point in their life. It’s a challenge to
make required material relevant and interesting. Beth Troy, unleashed, is Beth
Troy teaching world history.

So I never hankered to teach an elective, but through a
series of events unimportant to my 2019 accounting, I took an opportunity to
develop a Women in Entrepreneurship course. I’d read a statistic that if a
woman meets with one – just one – female founder in this 18-22 age range, she’s
30% more likely to take an entrepreneurial chance, and I thought, “Well,
shoot!” I’ll develop a course where students could meet with more than 20. Then
they won’t graduate saying they never saw, never heard, never knew how a woman
could impact the world through her work.

I built the course, 18 students signed up for it, and we
spent the first few weeks of 2019 visiting with female founders and leaders in
Cincinnati and San Francisco. I have an entire journal dedicated to this
experience (I will share the nuggets in tomorrow’s post), but here’s the memory
I haven’t forgotten.

January 7 in Cincinnati, and the first founder we met asked
how many students were interested in founding a business. After a few seconds,
a couple students did some low-key hand raises.

January 16 in San Francisco, and the last founder we met asked how many students were interested in founding a business. Every student raised their hand – right away, straight up.

It’s not hard to make an impact. It starts by seeing the women around you and asking questions to find out where they are. Then it moves to telling your story of then-to-now with honesty and grace. Do this, and you will build a bridge for them.

My students didn’t raise their hands on the last day because they knew “what” they would start or “how” they would start. They raised their hands because they heard they could, 20 times over. Boom! So, yeah. In 2019, I discovered I LOVE teaching electives, too.

Day Four: Parenting

Before I leave the beach for the rest of 2019, there’s a memory I didn’t write in a journal.

I can still see the three girls – same age as my boys – in
their matching swimsuits and messy buns. They stand behind their family car.
They stand in a line. They don’t pinch, they don’t tease, and when their
parents hand them beach gear, they take it without complaint and walk single
file to the beach.

This is where it gets really crazy. The parents bring chairs to the beach and sit in them for the next two hours – talking, reading – while the girls swim (not too far), wander (also not too far), and build sandcastles (together, like as a team).

It’s not the first time I’ve wondered about parenting – like the actual word, “parenting.” I’m not saying that what I witnessed wasn’t “parenting.” I’m not saying that what Matt and I were doing in those two hours (reprimanding, running, reminding, yelling, running, bemoaning, running) wasn’t “parenting.”

I just wonder if the word is big enough to hold our end of the spectrum to theirs.

Day Three: Family Vacation

2019 started with the end of 2018, and our grand plan to
surprise the boys with a trip to Disney on Christmas. We could afford just one
day at the park, so we wrapped the rest of vacation at a condo in Siesta Key.

Oh, Disney. Possibly never again. But oh, Siesta Key! I’d brought my new journal from Day Two, and carried it to most places – the beach, the porch swing, the cute coffee shop across the street – but I forgot how I downshift on vacation. I look around; I listen. I nap every afternoon and eat pizza for dinner every night. On this vacation, we also watched a lot of SpongeBob.

Where Disney cornered us, bringing out our family’s sharpest
angles, the beach was wide, accommodating our varying energy levels and
diverging ideas of fun (often leading one brother to seize another brother’s
sandcastle. Not sure why they kept building them toward the end.)

I spent most of vacation observing. I wrote only ten pages,
and I’m glad this was one of them.

The boys have always been part bear, but this morning
they were full on polar bear in water around 70 degrees and air at 50. Jess
stuck to it the longest and went out the farthest to crash into the waves.

Ez is always the first to exit and search the beach. This
morning we found a pretty cluster of seaweed.

“Do Troys eat seaweed, Mom?”

“I do.”

“Gross.”

Tommy made lines in the sand with his toes and tried to smash clumps of it in his mouth. I don’t blame him – it’s soft and white and lovely – but it didn’t taste as good as it felt. Wiping it from his nose was complicated because his fingers were sandy, too. Then he found the sleeve of my yellow cardigan, wiped the snot, spit, and sand on that, and was good to go.

Day Two: Excerpt [Journal 1, Page 1]

I’d wanted to start a fresh journal for vacation, and then a friend brought me this one on the day I was packing. It’s ornate and has an elephant on the cover – nothing I’d pick for myself. But the reason she gave it to me was less about the elephant and more about the title – “Remember the Journey.”

I’m too destination oriented. She knows this. I know
this. I hope God changes this – I’d much rather live in the journey – that
not-quite-yet.

Day One: Journal Fire

One month left in 2019, and it’s time for the annual journal
burn!

Kidding. I’ll probably just throw them away – a practice I
never gave much thought to until I told a friend and begot a response.

“Why would you throw away your journals?” she asked, trying to keep a poker face.

“Why would I keep them?” I asked her.

It’s a fair question on both sides, and it’s not just the
journals that need to go – it’s the dead plants in pots all around the house,
the toys that no longer match my boys age/stage, the clothes that no longer jive,
the anything/everything filling up space, holding back, weighing down, or
blocking the view. It’s everything that once had a job to do but no longer
does. Think of it as my physical manifestation of the unseen work God is doing
in my heart, soul, mind, and strength to move.me.on.

I will do it again this year. I will “burn” the journals, but my friend’s question has prompted me to first take an accounting of this last year in all its tones and textures. There are memories sharp as the first time they played, but I’d like to re-read the moment I recorded them. There are things I’ve forgotten that I need to remember and write down in a more permanent way. There are moments I’ll re-remember one last time and be pleased to let go.

It’s my own kind of Advent. December gives us 31 days, and I’ll blog through every one of them to gather, render, and release in anticipation of what’s to come. You can sign up for the posts to come straight to your inbox, but why don’t you “for real” join me in an advent of your own? Gather the journals. Read through them. Give thanks. Make ready for the new by lighting up the old on December 31.

Day Sixteen: The Last Day

I ran into a friend at the library.

Boom!

No, not that kind of a run-in. More of a hello and how are
you. Her Internet wasn’t working, and her daughter’s birthday was on Sunday.
How does one do this without Pinterest? She was trying to answer this question
with a stack of party-planning books. Several attested that Ring-Around-the-Rosie
was still a thing, so that was now on the party agenda.

“I don’t want to bother you,” she began, “but my mom has
been bothering me. How’s the second Lu coming along?”

I smiled. “That question doesn’t bother me.”

“Really? You don’t feel pressure?”

“No because people could be asking another question, like
‘Beth isn’t going to publish another book is she?’”

She laughed. “That’s true.”

“Tell your mom I’m in the middle chapter 19, and that I’ve
also written the last 6.”

Of course this conversation was awhile ago. I finished the draft of Lu2 this summer.

Feeling like you just busted into the middle of a conversation? Maybe you did. Let me take you to Day One of this series so you can begin at the beginning.

Day Fifteen: One More Thing

I’m still not running. I walk to work and back, which is not
all the same. I’m dealing with it.

And the last time I made chicken noodle soup, I used broth
from a carton. Also not ideal, which goes to show what we put off in deed is
much easier than putting off in our minds.

One more thing.

Feeling like you just busted into the middle of a conversation? Maybe you did. Let me take you to Day One of this series so you can begin at the beginning.

Day Fourteen: Waiting

Whether I could see through the writing of a book was an
unanswered question for me for a long time. Answering that question –
publishing Lu – raised more
questions.

On another morning with another cup of coffee, I went back
to my writing room to look over the Post-Its on my closet doors.

Could I keep doing
what I’d said I always wanted to do? What if I didn’t? What if I did?

I traced my fingers along the question marks. I read my
reasons to stop; that shy bone was behind every Post-It. It still felt strange,
but it wasn’t wrong. The vulnerability wasn’t like my bum left knee and hip. It
wasn’t a sign that I needed to stop.

I was in a new place, a place I came to through a big risk to
make the time to write, to see the writing finished, and to share it. Of course
vulnerability would be on the other side of this. Why I hadn’t anticipated that,
who knows? I guess my imagination can only take me so far.

My closet doors were yellowed with good reasons to stop. I
put them off. I took every Post-It down and threw them away. I put writing back
on. The form it would take, I didn’t really know because I was writing from a
new place, but working through this little series on my site has helped me to
understand it in part, if not the whole. It’s reminded me of what the writing
has always done, long before Lu and
blogs and back to the time I wrote in my first journal and locked it with a
key.

Writing is a tool I use to make sense of what I believe, who
I am, and what I do. It’s sometimes creative, but it’s always how I create understanding.

Simply put, it’s my mode. I’m sure you have yours. You
should put that on if you haven’t in awhile.

Only two more thoughts in this go-round from me.

Feeling like you just busted into the middle of a conversation? Maybe you did. Let me take you to Day One of this series so you can begin at the beginning.

Day Thirteen: Roads to Somewhere

Lu isn’t about me,
but all fiction contains real bits, like on Page 1 when Lu is heading back home
and comparing her current drive to the Sunday drives of her childhood:

­It was easier to get
lost on these roads than to get somewhere. I knew this from experience, thanks
to the Sunday family drives of my childhood. I was a bit more expectant then,
with my nose to the glass and my imagination wondering where Dad would land us
on that day.

Nose-to-glass, metaphorically, is how I am on any drive –
even routes I’ve driven dozens of times. My favorite scenes take three forms:
flat horizons of big sky, old houses with porches, and roads that curve to where
I can’t see.

Such roads (particularly those with overhanging trees) raise
the same questions as train crossings – ones that don’t need answers. But what
if I did veer off the route to answer one? I have sometimes (with the requisite
crank up of the radio and crank down of the window). The reality of the hidden road
has never quite matched the scene in my mind, but I’ve never regretted doing it
– not even that one time the car skidded into a ditch and I had to leverage
those tire-replacing skills my dad taught me when I was a little girl.

Just kidding. That didn’t happen. My dad never taught me how to replace a tire, and the one time I ditched was when I tried to reverse out of my friends’ circular driveway. I paid for a tow that day. But … should any of these or other misfortunes befall me on my detours … I’d like to think I’d still be happy to have answered the question rather than always leaving them to my imagination.

Feeling like you just busted into the middle of a conversation? Maybe you did. Let me take you to Day One of this series so you can begin at the beginning.

Day Twelve: Train Crossings

Having boys changed train crossings for me. A train between
here to there is no longer an interruption. It’s a surprise. It’s exciting in
all the sensory. The sound, the speed – you can’t catch any of it. It crowds
out everything else, in particular that sense of where you’re supposed to be
going.

I put the car in park, fold my hands on the top of the wheel
and lay my chin on them, watching the train pass by.

Where’s it going?

What’s it carrying?

How much more fun would it be riding somewhere on that train – anywhere – than to where we’re driving in this car?

Feeling like you just busted into the middle of a conversation? Maybe you did. Let me take you to Day One of this series so you can begin at the beginning.