Teagan's Books

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Welcome, all.  I know that many of us are in dire need of positive things.  So, I’m giving you fair warning.  This post is bleak.  If you need sunshine and rainbows, then go ahead and skip this one.

I’ve struggled for months about how to discuss my own reinventions, mostly because the subject matter is too dark. I’d rather bring you bright and shiny things.  At the same time, in the spirit of fair play to my guest Re-Inventionators, I feel I have to share something — after all, I’m the one who started this stuff.  I said this post is bleak, and that is an enormous understatement. I’m leaving out the darkest parts (though you might find that hard to believe), and I’m being matter-of-fact. Also, I’ve left out loads of truly awful things, including the reinvention that was my marriage to a violent psychopath. (That term is not an exaggeration.) Understand that I absolutely am not looking for sympathy and especially not platitudes.  

This is basically a report of someone who got away with murdering a child, and then went on to live a very long, satisfied life.

To save myself — and you, laborious explanations I’m including preliminary links to definitions.

The first, brainwashing and Stockholm syndrome — if you don’t already know, then click the links.  With adults being susceptible, often in short periods of time, how much easier is it for a parent, with constant, almost exclusive access, to brainwash a child? 

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Secondly, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (lately called Factitious disorder imposed on another). Most authorities continue to refer to this as a mental illness or a mental health condition, but I am of the firm conviction that it is no illness at all. Recently, it was differentiated from an actual illness that gave a name to something similar where the abuser can’t control themselves, but now that AI has taken over search engines, I couldn’t find the information or the name of it again. If you have not personally experienced Munchausen by Proxy, then don’t even think about arguing with me.  This is no compulsion — they are not enacting abuse over which they have no control. Usually when death eventually results, it is not an accident. These people (almost always women/mothers) plan their crimes carefully and in great detail. They have definite self-serving objectives in mind. They are abusers and murderers plain and simple. 

Reinventing Teagan

I removed a photo of my own class because it wasn’t safe. It’s one of only 3 childhood photos I have

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Though reinvention involves making a conscious change, one isn’t always aware of having a particular objective.  My first reinvention started during my first year of school.  While I was away all day, my little sister started getting sick.  By my second year of school, she was sick repeatedly.  The doctors didn’t know why.  She was in and out of the hospital for the whole year that I was seven years old. 

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The nurses loved my mother — lived in the hospital rooms with her. She brought coffee to all the nurses and looked truly happy when she was chatting with them.  I felt relieved when I saw this — everything must be better. But it wasn’t.  Seeing me, she abruptly stopped the happy conversations and angrily rushed back to my sister’s room, snapping the curtains closed. I wasn’t allowed to go inside.  A week later my sister (and so my mother) got to come home.

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However, before long she was sick and being rushed to the hospital again.  One of those times I was fascinated that the room had a window to the inside of the hospital, not just to the view outside the building.  I was glad of that because I thought I might get to see my sister, and I ran to the window.  My mother looked at me and wordlessly yanked the curtain shut.  It was an “intensive care” room — an unexplained term I was given.  I already knew not to ask what things meant.

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“She just wants some privacy,” a nurse suddenly behind me said, although to my young self, it seemed like she had nothing but privacy for months and months.

My father was distressed.  My mother was… weird, constantly wanting privacy with my sister.  Though Mother complained vehemently about us wanting different soups for lunch, we weren’t allowed to eat each other’s meals. When I offered to eat the same soup, she told my sister that I was trying to take her food and that she should be mad at me. 

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Then one day my five-year-old sister, who had lost so much weight that she wore baby clothes, looked so forlornly at her soup, not eating it but hungry, that I quietly switched our bowls.  She looked grateful, and we exchanged conspiratorial smiles… until I tasted her soup.  It was as if an entire shaker of salt had been dumped into it.  Shocked, I said something about it to our mother, who angrily said my sister “did that again”, and got the child to say that she had over-salted her own soup. However, my sister’s expression of confusion and sadness told me that she had done nothing, and was agreeing with Mother, like a good girl. Mother said that she wouldn’t love us if we didn’t make her happy.

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Thus began my first reinvention.  I was just trying to become someone who could stay in my family, the kind of little girl that could be loved… loved by the warped definition of it that I had learned.  Love was extremely conditional.  This meant that I was silent, that I followed rules without objection, and that I couldn’t take part… in much of anything.  This telling doesn’t make a lot of sense, with me leaving out dozens of grim details, but it was my first time to consciously change the person I was. Or at least I tried. My problem was that I didn’t know who to be, or how to be.  I wasn’t allowed to be the big sister anymore, because my mother kept splitting us apart, separating us, and being alone with my sister, and telling her that she didn’t want to be with me.

A couple of weeks after my eighth birthday, my sister died.  Before we left the hospital, the very kind doctor was concerned about me being present for the discussion from which my parents were indifferent about protecting me. He explained what no one else bothered to, but I told him, “I know what dead is.”

  They didn’t know what killed her.  The doctor wanted to do an autopsy.

My mother pitched a very loud fit in the hospital hallway.  People came out of rooms to look.  They didn’t do the autopsy.

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My mother and I finally went to a place that was neither hospital nor funeral home.  While “the body was prepared” we went to the fancy dress shop for girls, where we never got clothes.  A dress had to be bought for my sister, and for me too. 

Mother wanted to dress us alike.

She was hateful with me when I objected.  Even the elegant saleslady was horrified. To my relief, there were no matching dresses in both sizes.

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Physical details of the burial weren’t something they cared about protecting me from either.   My mother wanted one of the tiny infant coffins. They were pretty and very elaborate.

The funeral director explained that even though my sister weighed very little, she was too tall for the infant caskets.  My mother distraughtly pressed the issue. 

The man told us that it could be done, but my sister’s legs would first have to be broken.

I don’t remember how Mother got talked out of that one. My father might have put his foot down, but more likely the funeral director refused.

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“The body” was finally ready.  My grandmother stood me in front of the casket to look at my sister.  We had to stand there for a long time, until everyone had turned to watch.

“You have to touch her, or you’ll have nightmares about her,” my grandmother insisted.

Then to demonstrate, she lovingly caressed my dead sister’s face, repeatedly.  Everyone murmured how much she must love the child.  My grandmother looked gratified.

At her insistence, I touched the cold little face.

I had nightmares anyway.

The fragrance of carnations reminds me of funeral homes to this day.

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I was worried about Mother at the funeral home.  When she refused to leave for the night, I was afraid to let her be there alone, and I stayed the night in the funeral home. Three days passed.  It was late July, and sweltering hot everywhere except inside the funeral home.

The funeral director said the body needed to be buried.  She was changing color.  Mother refused on the excuse of waiting for an out of town relative.  The mortuary people put more makeup on my sister.

A week after her death, the man said they could not “keep her” any longer.  My mother insisted again.  That time the man did not relent.

He told us that even the extra air conditioning and flowers didn’t cover the smell.

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About a week later, my parents were arguing about something. There was always something.  Suddenly, Mother demanded that he take my cat away.  I had nothing else.  I was utterly distraught.

“He keeps looking at me! He thinks I did something to your sister!” she said.  “Now you’re looking at me.  Maybe he needs to take you off too,” she sneered at me, and pitched such a fit that my father took my cat and dumped him somewhere.  That was all I had.

(I have debilitating problems with grief even now, and it’s all tied to that cat.)

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People were very kind to my mother.  Afterward, she cried whenever anyone visited our house for the next few years.  I was mostly invisible, but occasionally someone would say how grownup I was, or how well-adjusted I was.  She took the compliment and quickly brought the conversations back to herself.

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The video below is The Monkees from their television series (1966 – 1968).  It makes me think of the summer of my first reinvention.

Summer was over, and school started again.  I remember nothing about third grade except learning that my first day had actually been the second day for everyone else. On the first day, teachers had explained to students that their classmate’s sister had died. 

I remember a little boy screaming angrily at me, because he had had to learn about death. 

I remember his father talking to Mother — and how she insinuated that I was responsible for my sister’s death.  I remember the man’s contempt at her words. 

I remember that her brainwashing kept me from processing that conversation.  Like many other things not mentioned here, it got tucked away in one of the dark places in my mind.

That stage of undefined, incomplete reinvention continued for a year.  That’s how long it took for the outpouring of sympathy for my mother to wane.  I became her new target on the day a family visited our church, on the stage, asking for “love offerings”.  They were poor and had a mentally retarded daughter (that’s what doctors called it then, whatever the PC term is now).  It was as if the wheels turning inside my mother’s head were visible.  She was calculating and looking at me. Parents with that kind of child got money from churches and from the state for disability. 

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I was about nine years old they, I knew she was doing something, but (see the links to brainwashing and Stockholm syndrome) I couldn’t process what I knew compared to what it was necessary for me to believe. Love was conditional. Mother was my only friend.  No one else really loves you. Even my grandfather said he wished I had been the one to die.  So, my mind blocked the acknowledgement of the truth.  She convinced most of the church, all the neighbors and their kids, everyone else, that “If she’s not retarded, then she’s slow.” Or is that wasn’t believed, “Well, there’s something wrong with her!” — And so began my next reinvention.  For the next decade I loved down to the identity of the girl who was somehow… just not right.

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During that time, I saw an old movie with a boring boy and a cool guy.  The guy called the brother “Shakespeare,” and he called the odd sister “Blue Roses.” I didn’t understand half of it, but I was fascinated by how the guy reacted to the strange girl.  Mother had said of me, “Then there’s something wrong with her.”  Something was wrong with Blue Roses too, but there was something ethereal about her that I liked, and the cool guy liked her too.  Not emulating the character, but trying to find a compromise with what my mother told the world and what I knew of myself, I became the eerie girl who (actually either remembered things others didn’t notice, or I figured out things) could describe things that happened so long ago that I couldn’t have known, and within 10 minutes of a TV episode say “who done it,” and similar things, freaking out the adults.  Or I just generally acted a little weird, like Blue Roses. Long after the character and the movie had left my mind, I was the unicorn with the broken-off horn.

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My schoolteachers were the only ones who adamantly didn’t buy my mother’s story, so she didn’t get any disability payments. Although, like all the other adults, they didn’t do anything beyond refusing to put me in the “special class.”  Also, she had used up the money from the life insurance policies she had gotten on my sister. (Yes that was plural.)  My father didn’t know about the policies until I commented on the insurance man visiting. (Any visitor was exciting, since I didn’t get to go anywhere other than school, church, or to the houses of a couple of nearby kids.)  For years after that, I kept finding sheets of paper where she was practicing the signatures over and over of everyone in the family, including me.  I asked why. She made a game of it. I wasn’t to talk about that — just like anything else.

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I worked hard so I could graduate high school at age 16. (Not bad for a “retarded” kid.)  I gradually shed the “something’s wrong with her” part of that early reinvention, but nothing else. 

 My next reinvention didn’t come until my mid-thirties, and it was a big one and a positive one.  After my divorce, and my family (especially my mother) kept betraying me and my location to the violent psycho, the light finally broke through my mother’s brainwashing.  (Although, no one believed me about my mother any more than they did when I was a child.)  I spent three years finishing my degree and at graduation, I saw myself as a phoenix.  My phoenix-self was a new beginning.  Yes, there were reinventions after that, but the phoenix was not just life-changing. It was a life-saving change.

I went on to a career in technology-related writing and editing and after a few years, I moved across the country, discovering the high-desert southwest, and another reinvention of myself.  Years later, I achieved my goal of a federal career (something with a real retirement plan) requiring a move back across the country and to Washington, DC.  That extreme culture shock brought another reinvention, which wasn’t particularly good, because I suppressed many of the parts of myself that I valued the most.  However, it also eventually brought me to writing my own stories fulltime when I found it necessary to retire from that career at the beginning of 2019.

 Now, as I mentioned months ago when this series started, and the reason for the posts about Re-Inventionators, I’ve had various changes in life, health, and other circumstances that caused me to suddenly say, “I don’t know who the hell I am anymore.”   I know my author-self — that hasn’t changed and is not likely to change.  However, another personal reinvention is required, simply for my wellbeing.  I still don’t know who that person is… but the stories shared by the other Re-Inventionators have brought me a step closer to finding her.  Maybe there’s a little bit of that phoenix waiting to rise from the ashes again.

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(Above was 2019.  I don’t think I’ll ever show anyone another real photo of me again. LOL, well… maybe occasionally as a “One Eye” à la Resa, like this one last winter.)

Sympathy for my origins really isn’t good for me, but friendly comments about this series in general are most welcome.   This post was extremely difficult for me to share. I won’t be answering personal questions about my past — experience has taught me that people always have questions about what I disclose… then when I answer, they have more and more and more questions…. Please forgive me if I suddenly have to disable comments, but I will try to leave comments open. Thanks for visiting and for supporting this series.  Hugs.

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COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED

An additional note:  Something I did not state in the introduction is another objective I had in writing this post.  I know that others with similar histories are out there somewhere, and my intention is to support them.

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Naturally, the obligatory shameless self-promotion must be included.

Brother Love – a Crossroad

Strange things abound in 1950s Parliament, Mississippi.  Jinx the magpie can fill you in on the details.

Universal Purchase Links

Kindle:  relinks.me/B07V25SXFR

Paperback:  relinks.me/107952309X

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Copyright © 2025 by Teagan Ríordáin Geneviene

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