Beth Troy's Blog, page 14

Day Eleven: Post-Its

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

It’s the answers to the questions that were scary, not the
questions, except now that I look at it, that first question is scary. Not to
get all English-geek on you, but it starts with “could,” not “should” or
“would.” Could is a question of wherewithal – whether I have the capacity, the
means, to do something.

This is where those Post-Its come in. I don’t always like
it, but I tend to live in a world of binaries, and if I “think” something is
wrong, my first reaction is to try to unthink it. I certainly won’t write it
down. I’m a writer. I understand that to write is to give voice – to put
something out there. I’d prefer to give voice to the beautiful and the true,
but sometimes the true isn’t so beautiful, and in my binary world, truth (not
perfectly, but usually, and hopefully, ultimately) wins.

So one morning, I made a strong cup of coffee and walked the
mug down to my writing room. I closed the door. I put on appropriate theme
music, lit a candle, grabbed my Post-Its and a pen, and started writing all the
reasons I felt I couldn’t keep writing. One reason per Post-It, and I could
throw them all away after I’d emptied my mind. Those are the brainstorming
rules.

I’m tired. I’m scared.
I feel like I’ve failed. I feel like I’m failing my family. It’s too much work.
There’s too much other work …

I covered the doors in the end – no gray and yellow, just yellow. Each was enough reason to stop. Taken as a sum, who would argue? I left the room, but I left the Post-Its up, shutting the door behind 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 Ten: Encouragement

Four months into my writing quiet, and I received this text
from a bosom friend:

Are you trying for an
‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ approach with your fans? No blogging in
2018? Just checking in and saying hi, I miss you. No pressure to write, but you
know, you’re really good at it, and I think you usually enjoy it.

Sending it might have been the smallest moment of her day, but it landed as the biggest moment of mine. I’ve carried it in my metaphorical pocket ever since, as a reminder on two levels. First, the good our words can create in another’s day when we’re brave enough to share them. Second, texting will do. It gets a lot of hate as a communication medium, but look at what my friend did with this one. She made my day with it. She helped me stay the course with it. Her text didn’t speed up my quiet; it encouraged me to see it through.

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 Nine: Saying Hello

How my mom tells the story is that I loved talking to
strangers. I’d go right up to them and introduce myself. “Hello, my name is
Beth Barovian, B-A-R-O-V-I-A-N.” Any chance to show off my mad spelling skills,
really.

I don’t remember doing this, but I do remember racing to the
phone whenever it rang. Speaking of which, do you remember when phones plugged
into walls, and the family had to share them? This explains the racing. I had
to beat out my dad, who answered the phone never.

There is the matter of my sister, who rivaled my dad for
quiet. When we were growing up, she was the shy one. There’s another story
about Mom having to peel Jeni off her legs to join parties instead of playing
shadow.

Jeni’s since grown out of her shyness. I’ve grown into mine,
but I didn’t realize it until I read this from Brene Brownabout her viral TED talk on empathy:

­­ I’m glad I did it,
but it still makes me feel really uncomfortable.

Oh my. Yes, that’s it. That’s what publishing a book feels
like and what posting blogs feels like, and it feels like it all the time for
me. I’m glad to have done it, but it makes me feel really uncomfortable. This
last part doesn’t come from a lack of confidence with the writing. It’s a shy
bone when I thought I didn’t have one.

By the time I stopped this blog, the shyness had grown so big, like a sunny-day shadow – the kind that are three times the size of the source. It followed me everywhere. I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there, and I couldn’t step around it. It was my companion. I needed to figure out how to say hello to it.

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 Eight: Artifacts of Waiting

Post-Its. I love them. They’re a come-and-go by nature, and
the closet doors in my writing room make for a sturdy surface to house all
these thoughts, sometimes random, sometimes targeted on a topic. The important
thing is the ideas are out of my head where I can see them and do something
with them if I choose. If not, I throw them away. There’s a lot of freedom in
that. Plus, the Post-Its are light yellow and the doors are dove gray and that
color combination is fantastic.

Journals. Some finished, some not, but it’s a serious pile,
regardless. I was about to say it’s a “serious problem” but that’s a matter of
perspective. If I were to meet another girl who had as many working journals as
me, she’d be a bosom friend. And if said girl also happened to be a fan of Anne
of Green Gables, well then.

Receipt of the final season of Fixer Upper. This is not
procrastination! Except when it is. But really, there’s something about watching
Chip bust down walls and JoJo rummage through her warehouse that emboldens me
to keep reworking drafts until they read right.

Saturday morning Bible study. For years, I participated, led,
and hosted official ones, but I was tired of filling out answers to all those
questions. Turns out, three other women felt the same way. So every Saturday we
meet at one of our local coffee shops to talk about whatever chapter of
whatever book of the Bible we’ve decided to study. It’s even more fantastic
than yellow Post-Its on gray doors.

Honest questions. I always tell my students there are heaps
of bad questions, and we need to ask those out of the way to get to the good
ones. The best questions are the honest ones, and it took me months of
Post-Iting, Journaling, and Bible Studying to build up the courage to ask
myself two big ones that needed answering before I took the next step.

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

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 Seven: Patterns

Ecclesiastes talks about the flow of our lives, the coming
and the going. We don’t need to look back too far in our own histories to see
it play out, to understand it. Dealing with change in the present is more of a
wrestle.

The year of Lu was
change for me. I published it, and I returned to full-time work for the first
time since the boys. I anticipated these as logistical changes only, and even
when they turned out to be much more than that, and the vulnerability set in –
of my name on a book all the time and my being away from our home all day – I
tried to hold onto old patterns. There was a lot I couldn’t do anymore, but it
wasn’t just a matter of pressing Stop – not if part of how I understood myself
was in the doing of those things.

I knew the Beth who wrote in the corners of her home before
everyone was awake. I knew how to be my only reader. I knew the Beth who saw
only the four boys of her family on most days. I knew how to structure those
days – how to do things like make chicken broth to break up the monotony and go
for runs to clear my mind.

My life was in that time for a long time. When the new time
cycled in, it was difficult for me to release my old patterns and say no to
marathons and chickens. They needed to go, but it was okay that letting them go
was hard. Women have a hard time with hard. I think we associate it with “bad”
or “wrong” when it can just be “hard” and nothing else. I think we also have a
keen sense of where we want to be, and we prefer to have arrived there
yesterday. It’s a warped sense of time – a game of catch-up instead of
progression. We feel guilty, and we pile it all on to make up for it.

But the first step in crossing that gap of who we are and
who we will be looks like letting go. It’s putting off what was. For what, we
don’t know. When it will arrive, we don’t know.  The best we can do is make room and wait.
There’s faith in the wait, especially when that wait stretches longer than anticipated.

Last December I put off writing this blog. I thought it
would be until the Spring. If I’d known it’d stretch to over a year, I wouldn’t
have put it off. But I had and Spring became May, and I thought June. Then I
thought August.

Do you see the pattern? Me, too.

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 Six: A Story About Chickens

For me, the freezer in the garage was a story – a big one
that cost me $25 at a time when $25 was a stretch. We’d had it for years, but
the top frosted over last Spring, and opening it was a circus act that required
my left arm to lift the lid and my head to support the now-detached lasagna
layers of lining while my right arm poked around in the dark.

I got really good at discerning the shape of frozen meat
last year, and I didn’t mind. As long as the freezer continued to keep our meat
frozen, I’d work around the usability because I liked the story of The Time We
Bought a Giant Freezer for $25. That’s me.

That’s not Matt. Matt prefers the story of The Freezer We
Can Use. He bought one from a place that would take the old one away. We just
needed to empty and thaw it, which I suppose makes for its own story of The
Time the Troy’s Stored Their Meat in Freezers All Around Town.

“What about these?” He asked, pointing to what remained – a
heap of meat in white bags in the bottom right corner.

“You mean the chicken carcasses?”

He looked at me, his eyes asking the question. Why?

“I’m going to boil them down into chicken broth.”

He kept looking at me. When?

“I’ll get around to it.”

The routine went: butcher chickens, organize meat in bags
according to chicken biology, and pile the carcasses in the nether corner of
the freezer to boil down for broth every two weeks. It’d worked every year
until … last. My quick estimate of the pile told me I’d made chicken broth
maybe three times in the last year. I still had 20 carcasses to go.

I knew it’d be a full year with returning to teaching
full-time, and I’d happily put off the tasks I didn’t like. Ironing went to the
dry cleaner. We hired a cleaning lady. But the chickens? Not the chickens! I
faced a binary choice – cling to the future hope of making chicken broth (and find
a freezer to store them) or throw them away. A or B, but it wasn’t so simple. I
think every woman reading this understands the layers, that what looks like a
question of logistics is really one about hopes and dreams – a battle of
expectations vs. reality and what I want vs. what is. There’s what I think I
can handle and what I really can handle, and the only thing I despise more than
that gap is having to look at it.

I looked down at the carcass pile. I sighed.

“I guess I’ll have to throw them out.”   

“I’ll do it,” Matt offered.

He’s always a good guy; in that moment, he won VIP of Team Troy. It wasn’t until later I remembered that Matt doesn’t like chicken.

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 Five: List of Never Again

Stuff I should never have put on …

The watermelon getup on my first day of public school in
sixth grade. I’m talking the watermelon shirt held with a watermelon side-clip
and topped off with giant watermelon earrings. 
I carried the color theme through the pink scrunchie in my side pony and
two layers of pink scrunched socks. It could have gone so badly. Thankfully
enough other sixth grade girls were digging watermelon fashion that year, and I
scored a seat at the lunch table.

The one time Matt and I got a cat. That made for a month.

So did the month I volunteered at the horse therapy barn.
I’m allergic to horses, you see. I know this, but I set the knowledge aside (bad
example of putting off). I thought a Benadryl pill would take care of it. It
didn’t, and I took two. When that didn’t work, I added a daily Claritin
followed by a post-barn shower to wash away the horse dander. A puff from my
inhaler preceded a glass of wine. Volunteering shouldn’t require such a bender.
I put off that dream.

“And no one can you say you didn’t try,” Matt concluded.

But Matt’s not always right. Like when he suggested we go to
Vegas on our honeymoon. I put off that idea at first, but then he convinced me
to put it on.

You have to be on the lookout for other people’s tricky
put-ons. Jesse pulled one on me big-time when he was nine months old. New
Year’s Day 2009, and I made like any good Polish mama and fed him his first
big-boy meal of pork, kraut, and Brussels sprouts. He gobbled the latter with
such zeal that I put on some mama pride about my son’s wide dietary range. I didn’t
bring the sprouts back for another year, and by that time, he had put them off.
I insisted he put them on. No, yes, no, yes. Jess finally put one in his mouth
and then puked it all over the table.

“I guess Jesse won that battle,” Matt concluded.

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 Four: Ephesians & Why

We need to make holes. In the Bible, it’s the put-off,
put-on principle, and you can’t reverse the order. If you put on first, you
cover up what needs to go. Go too long like this, and you might forget you ever
needed to put off anything at all. Make a habit of putting on without first
putting off, and you’re too layered up – like that little kid in his puffy
snowsuit from A Christmas Story, except that you’re a 37-year-old women and
only a fraction as adorable.

Not sure if this was the image the Apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote to the early churches, but it’s no matter. This is what a Perpetual Yes Girl looks like.

Off Before On = No Before Yes. The exchange isn’t always immediate, which is why I think we avoid those off’s and no’s. Making the hole is usually the precursor to that slow part in the story where the waiting sets in.

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 Three: Life Equations

Truth is my running days were over before the marathon told
me so. I’d heard all about it over the last couple years, what with my left hip
and left knee barking at me every time I ran more than a couple miles, but I
didn’t pay attention to what they were saying.

Why the stubbornness? Well … because I am. I want stuff to
work when I want it to work, and when it doesn’t I sometimes pretend it still
does while hoping it will. It’s my imagination, sideways.

But why hold on so tightly to this one aerobic exercise so
easily swapped with another? Rewind 10 years, and I’m the girl who never ran
and never wanted to. And then one day, a day in a time when I really wanted to
run away, I found I could at least run. Just a little, but that’s a how it goes
at first. It’s more walking than running. Keep at it and 1 + 1 = 2 takes over,
that basic equation of getting into shape.

But to me it was 1 + 1 = 3. It was a classic story that
opened with a girl like you, like me, chasing down something she couldn’t catch.
What made this day different from all the days before was she was awake to the fact
that she couldn’t and she knew why. What she’d been chasing was never hers to
have. So she stopped. She asked, “What now?” The answer didn’t come for awhile
(a slow part – every story has one), but when it did, it required a turn to a
new way. There’s a lot of doubt in the new. Those first steps were hard, but
she took them, and she found some things to help her keep going. Running was
one of them.

Running was good for me for a long time. It was hard to see
it’d gone bad. Even when I was sidelined on the marathon, I plotted how I’d be back.

But it was time to let the running go. Letting it go left a hole, and it felt like one, too. I wondered what would fill it because it couldn’t stay like that. It was a hole.

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 Two: Sunset Moments

There are the moments you build up to, like marathons.
Tricky, those. I’m not sure if they can ever meet expectations, even when you
do finish strong. And then there are the moments that happen simply because you
turn your head left.

Matt is supposed to be doing the dishes. I am supposed to be
putting the boys to bed, but I’m sitting on the yellow couch by the front
windows, stealing time to finish a library book due back tomorrow. I squint,
ready to turn on a light, but then the light from the windows breaks through,
turning the white page rose.

I turn my head left and look outside. Pink is everywhere.
I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation for why some sunsets are so pink,
but I’m happy not to know it. I put my chin in my hand and imagine that the
clouds are cotton candy. They reflect the sun but can’t contain it. My eyes
follow the color down to the treetops and houses, thinking about how everything
looks prettier on this side of pink.

Matt is standing in the middle of our street – right in the place he’s always telling the boys not to go. I watch him watch the sky until the sun goes down. Not long, but long enough that I know I won’t finish my book on time. I doubt the excuse will work with the librarian. (It didn’t).

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.