Born to Bounce Back: Regain your zest for life after it knocks you down

By Frances Teagan

Most of us would rather take a one-way trip to the moon than divulge our private wounds or expose our deep secrets, but Frances Teagan has chosen to reveal her seven deeply personal episodes of what she names "Instant Pivotal Crises" that visit all of us at one time or another. From broken relationships, illnesses, accidents, deaths, losses, ruined plans, etc., none of us are immune to these visceral events which hit us with such velocity there is no possibility to prepare or protect. We feel bottomless pain and a bruising of the soul. Life will never be the same.

Teagan's own stories not only instill empathy due to the familiarity they instill, but she goes a step further in teaching us how to find the value they provide. Even though feeling at the mercy of misery, we are not. She provides the tools with which we can take our personal power back and go forward not in pieces, but as a better person for the experience. Our stories are our legacy, the footprint we leave on this earth.

Secondly, and of equal importance, Teagan explains the importance of vulnerability (not weakness, but courage) in bringing people together. While judgement tears us apart, it is our stories and willingness to share them that is the Great Equalizer. Empathy replacing judgment; personal responsibility replacing blame. Our stories become our defining times to capture the lessons rather than remain a victim. The way to heal ourselves is to help others heal.

True stories have the power to change lives

The book is a powerful read full of pathos, humour, knowledge and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9780228880950

Frances Teagan

Throughout the lengthy life of Frances Teagan, she has lived her life's purpose throughout education, relationships, marriage, motherhood, divorce, entrepreneurship, business woman, single mother and widow. Born with innate talents for writing and teaching, both have been present in all of her endeavours. Noteworthy are: a 50-year marriage; the creation and operation of three successful, proprietorship businesses; teaching English as a foreign language in Asia (the subject of her first book); enrolling in University at age 74 to study Psychology. An unquenchable thirst for knowledge has been the driving force throughout her life.She values family, friendships, pets, keeping one's word, writing, voracious reading, independence, humour, making a contribution and Love in all its forms.

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Born to Bounce Back

Copyright © 2022 by Frances Teagan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-22888-094-3 (Hardcover)

978-0-22888-093-6 (Paperback)

978-0-22888-095-0 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Privacy

Dedications

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Story #1   Adonis

Story #2   Bad Boy

Story #3   Life as a Single Mother

Story #4   Everything is a Mirror

Story #5   The First Ten Years

Story #6   Family Ingredients

Story #7   The Rest of Our Lives

Epilogue

Recommended Reading

Remember Your Invitation

Privacy

A wise woman once taught me

we do not have the right to tell

someone else’s story. That is difficult

to do when telling my own story

wherein others are involved

Therefore,

names and locations in this

book are fictitious to ensure the

privacy

of all individuals

- Author, writing under the name

Frances Teagan

Dedications

This book is dedicated to

Penny

Marie

Debbie

who held my hand, supported me, cheered me on and offered

shoulders upon which I, at times, drenched with tears.

And then we danced!

This book is also dedicated to the many fractured families enduring division, estrangement, pain, separation and lost hope for compassion and reconciliation. Our hearts beat as one.

Acknowledgements

I may have done the writing, but getting a book written requires a support network like none other. Firstly, to Penny and Lorne, a huge thank you for opening your home to me and providing the soft and quiet place for me to do my work.

Thank you to Marie, Penny and Debbie, who listened during my low periods and celebrated with me at high points, read and commented on the drafts and simply acted as my strong foundation. Thank you to Christina Hills for her Website Creation Workshop programme. Her teaching method is exemplary. A huge thank you to Carole (wordaffair.com), whose editing prowess cleaned up all my spelling, punctuation, run-on sentences and assisted in the effort to help the sentences flow. My gratitude to the staff of Tellwell Publishing who morphed my script into a beautiful dream come true.

Thanks to everyone who provided encouragement and supportive words over the many months of gestation this book required…neighbours, friends, family, printing professionals, fellow authors, social media contacts, and everyone I love and will come to love. You are all responsible for birthing Born to Bounce Back.

Thank You!

Introduction

There are two reasons I wrote this book.

The first is, Instant Pivotal Crises. IPC’s represent something deeply visceral, an event that detonates your world out of orbit and you find yourself tumbling in space before the thought ‘blindsided’ is even conscious. It arrives with such velocity there is no warning, no possibility of preparation or protection and suddenly there is no way to breathe. Pieces of words or phrases are senselessly flung around in your brain while you can only silently scream.

In these moments you subconsciously know that your life is irrevocably changed. What was, is gone forever and you begin to grieve even before your pounding heart reaches full throttle.

I was born in 1942. Right in the middle of the world’s worst manmade conflagration ever envisioned. World War II, the war to end all wars. D-Day was a long way off. Hitler had yet to prove his cowardice by taking his own life, the first nuclear, atomic bomb had yet to be released over a civilian population and incinerate them. Chaos reigns.

Today, as I write, around the globe we fight another war. The pandemic of the COVID-19 virus is raging, extinguishing lives by the tens of thousands. More lives than were lost during WW II. Economies are tanking, populations are isolating in their homes, hospitals run out of equipment and space to put the sick. We are all endlessly handwashing in the manner of Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, wearing face masks and disposable gloves when we go outside plus remaining at a two-metre physical distance from any other person. When this is over and a vaccine has been developed, perhaps within one to two years, we will have a ‘new normal’ and no one can know what that is going to look like. Again, chaos reigns.

The multiple decades of my life have been lived sandwiched between these two catastrophic events. On a one-person, not world-wide scale, I liken IPC episodes of my life to be on par with these global episodes. There are occurrences in our personal lives that can, to us, feel as terrifying, hopeless, unsolvable and miserable as any global disaster, with one huge difference. Even though you feel at the mercy of misery, you are not. I’m going to show you, in this book, why and how to take your personal power back.

The second reason I wrote this book, is to let you in on a secret. To begin, take an imaginary walk down Anystreet. There are people behind closed doors and every one of those people have stories of their own IPC’s, but choose not to talk about them. We would rather take a one-way trip to the moon than divulge our private wounds or our powerful secrets. Why do you think that is? Well, it would mean having to be vulnerable, exposed. However, there are ways to do this safely and I will share them.

If we knew other’s stories, the pain they have overcome or are still stuck in, we would stop being so judgmental, our empathy would replace it. One of our greatest human faults is how quickly we make assumptions and judgments without knowing facts. This may pile on more pain for someone with the addition of gossip or bullying. Perhaps ask yourself, when was the last time you put yourself in another person’s shoes, went to their aid?

We hear that we are on this planet to learn and I believe we do our greatest growth when we are enduring the hardest times. We will all be faced with monumental experiences wherein we have no choice but to make a choice. We won’t have many of the magnitude of IPC’s, maybe two to five in a lifetime, but these will be our defining times. If you want to retain command over your life you will be called upon to make a few momentous choices, and remember this; "not to decide, is to decide". So you can keep your hands on the steering wheel and continue to drive or you can take them off and crash.

To give you clear examples of IPC’s and Bouncing Back, I’ve chosen to use my own experiences. I’m about to lay myself before the dragons and tell you my seven stories. I’m taking a huge gamble for which I open myself up to judgement, assumptions and criticism, but I also realize a person’s need to criticize disguises a longing for recognition, appreciation, and validation. So be it. I chose to capture the lessons rather than play the victim or the blame game. Not because I’m smarter than anyone else, far from it. But because it came naturally, almost unconsciously. I’ll roll the dice because true stories have the power to change lives.

I’m about to pay forward the lessons I discovered and divulge how I survived them because I believe the way to heal ourselves is to help others heal. My fervent hope is that these stories and their outcomes will give you hope, courage to make the hard rather than easy choices, belief in yourself and your Creator and the unshakable knowledge that you are born to bounce back and regain your zest for life when it knocks you down.

The secret to surviving ‘Instant Pivotal Crises" is in learning how to take Personal Responsibility for your actions and reactions, plus allowing yourself to be Vulnerable (meaning courageous, not weak). Let me show you how.

In Love, Laughter and Song

The author, writing under the name Frances Teagan

"If we can open up a bit more with each other

and share our stories,

that’s what breaks down barriers"

Michelle Obama

Becoming

What was the most memorable event of your teen years?

Is it a first love, school year’s graduation, getting into the University or College of your choice, or not? Well, these are the expected milestones of your teen years, but what else was going on? What was happening in your world, as an individual person? What happened during your summer holidays, at home, on a job, while travelling, with family, with friends, what event occurred that affected the rest of your life?

I don’t mean this as the best or worst event, but the most ‘memorable’. What leaps out of your memory bank and instantly yells, with arms waving in the air, Pick me, pick me!

That’s the one you want. It is one of your stories. If it is a story of hard-won success, that’s fantastic. If it’s a story of trauma that’s good too, plus anything in between. The idea here is not to judge it. It’s memorable for a reason. Jot it down.

As an example, I’ll begin with one of my own teen stories.

Story #1

Adonis

It began as my Grade 10 year was finishing.

The year was 1958, I was fifteen years old. Elvis was on the scene, Madonna and Michael Jackson were born, gas costs 25 cents per gallon, the first microchip was developed, the Hula Hoop was invented.

It was a beautiful June afternoon when Mum arrived home from work and announced that she, myself and my younger brother and sister were going to pack up a light supper and go down to the beach for a swim and a picnic.

Once the beach blanket, towels and food container were placed on the sand, we kids took off for the water’s edge and splashed our way into the cool lake.

Speaking of cool, the single, most important thing to a 15-year-old boy or girl was to at least look ‘cool’, even if they didn’t feel ‘cool’. Wearing my mother’s cast off, faded yellow, too-large bathing suit did not contribute to my cool-ness. So, attempting to appear small and insignificant I swam out to the raft upon which several boys and girls were alternately sitting, standing, diving and generally kibitzing around.

After climbing up the raft’s ladder I walked over to one edge, sat down and let my legs dangle in the water. One of the cool fashions was to wear a bathing cap, the ones with the strap that came under the chin and fastened with a snap on the other side. It was allowed, on the coolness scale, to undo one side of the strap, let it hang down and flip up the ear flaps. We would never admit that this was actually to hear better, that would be much too practical, because it was the cool look that mattered. I’m sitting on the raft striving for coolness, when said bathing cap was unceremoniously snatched off my head! I watched, open-mouthed, as it sailed off a fair distance, plopped into the water and began to sink.

Startled, ticked off and making all the appropriate indignant noises, I looked around behind me. There stood (rising crescendo of music please) a tanned, green-eyed, wide shouldered Adonis of a man-boy grinning teasingly at me. I’m sure my mouth was hanging open, slack-jawed in the extreme, and my voice abandoned me. It seemed like a half-hour, but was probably only about five seconds, when I managed to squeak out some sounds while frantically waving my arms in the direction of the slowly disappearing bathing cap.

At which point, said Adonis, executed a side-dive into the water, performed several masterful swimming strokes then half summersaulted and vanished beneath the water. Within a few blinks of an eye, up he popped waving my bathing cap. Once back on the raft, he strode, dripping, toward me and gallantly returned my head gear. All that was missing was the sweeping bow made by knights of old.

I’m sure I didn’t say ‘thank you’, just returned my very wet cap to my head, slid off the raft and made for shore without a backward glance while beseeching whatever teen-God there might be that my cool-ness had not completely abandoned me.

Wrapped in a towel, sans bathing cap, I sat with my family on the beach blanket after eating our picnic supper and was enjoying the late afternoon sun shining on the water and surrounding hills. I must have made some level of favorable impression on Adonis because, lost as I was in my daydreams, I suddenly realized, standing in the sand beside our blanket, there he was again! That voice of mine ran off once more and I sat there desperately praying I wasn’t gaping. I must have regained the ability to introduce my mother, sister and brother, say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and tell him my name. Mum gave him our phone number, I couldn’t seem to stutter it out, after he asked for it (no area codes yet). The rest of the conversation was lost on me and likely between he and Mum. Oh yes, he did have a name and she shared it with me.

Within an hour of being home, the phone rang…for me. It was not a girlfriend. Yup, it was He, Adonis himself. I have no recollection of the conversation but somehow, he had wrangled a date for the following evening.

I think we went to a movie. I also think we left the movie early because he didn’t like it. Something to do with the romantic scene no doubt.

The second date was much more memorable. I recall we were in his Dad’s powder blue, early 1950’s model Cadillac driving down a two-way street late in the evening. On the left side of the road was a park with some very large, old trees lining the roadway. He turned left off the street and parked beneath one of those trees.

I almost went into cardiac arrest! Into my very young mind jumped the words, Why are we stopping? There is nothing around here to do, nowhere to go, Oh No! Maybe this is a make-out place! Is that what he wants to do? I’ve never even kissed a boy! How do I do that? Oh help, he is sliding across the seat toward me! What am I going to do? You know, when you are in moments of high stress, all these thoughts seem to run concurrently over a period of one second while you are frozen to the spot.

His right arm slid along to top of the seatback landing softly on my right shoulder. His left hand came up under my chin and gently lifted it, his face came toward mine and planet Earth spun off into the ether, the ground quaked at 7.5, my lungs quit and my heart cannoned head-on into my ribs with every beat. The sensations that catapulted through my body scared the crap out of me! So, what did I do? I swallowed.

What happens when your head is tilted back and your throat is clenched with nerves, then you try to swallow? The air loudly gurgles, squeaks and ratchets its very slow passage all the way down your throat and esophagus until it lands with a thud in your stomach.

I am mortified! I’m gasping as I attempt to will my lungs to either take in or release air and still my brain is sloshing back and forth in my skull. I’m so embarrassed, confused and unnerved that it takes me a few moments to realize there are tears on my cheeks. What must he think! This girl not only makes the weirdest gurgles and creaks when kissing, but then she cries!

He asks me if I’m okay. I manage to mumble, Please take me home. Without a word, he does (Sir Galahad). I’m out of the car almost before it has stopped and slink my way into the house knowing that I will never see Adonis again.

But I do. He calls the next day as if nothing had happened.

We ‘went steady’ the rest of that summer, had lots more kisses for which I was much better prepared, however, Adonis had ideas for much more. I fought him off at the pass (pun intended) every time. You see, in grade eight a girlfriend and I pored over a sexual medical book of her parent’s and I knew everything I needed to know from body parts and their functions to Venereal diseases, circumcision or not, orgasms, erections and pregnancy. I was having none of it at fifteen years of age. Three cheers for DIY Sex Ed. But, unfortunately, it took a few more decades before prudish school boards allowed it into schools.

School reconvened in September and I’m entering grade eleven. Adonis is changing. I feel a distancing happening. He’s not calling me every day. While waiting for the school bell to ring, I watch him from the school grounds but he stays across the street hanging out with some other kids. A few days of quiet limbo follow and I decide I can’t let this go on. So, after the morning bell has rung, I wait for him to enter the school grounds where he can’t avoid me. He stops but doesn’t say anything. I can’t recall what was said I only remember the feelings. I think I asked him what was going on for us and if we were still together. I just remember him being so quiet. I eventually asked if he was breaking up with me and his reply was a shrug and a muttered, I guess so.

This time my heart fell into my feet, again my lungs failed me, adrenaline shot through my veins making me shake uncontrollably. The sense of loss was like an amputation without anaesthetic. I loved this man-boy and he didn’t want me anymore. I knew I had to go to class, but I was crying and didn’t want to be seen. From somewhere I had to find the strength to stop crying, get into the school, dry my tears, blow my nose and put on my false happy face. I learned nothing in school that day, but I did learn what it was like to experience an Instant Pivotal Crisis, my first.

Seems I did nothing but cry myself to sleep for many nights. When I was alone, I could finally let my pain go and mourn. At that age the human brain is far from its full development and so much of what we experience will affect the rest of our lives. I continued to spot him each school day morning as he waited with friends across the street.

Eventually another girl joined him. I don’t know how long they lasted as a couple but I still remember