Return to My Soul

By Gabrielle Bergan

How would it be to embark on an inner journey so painful yet so beautiful that it changed you forever? In Return to My Soul, Gabrielle Bergan shares such a journey.

 

Tracing her life from her early years in Australia to marriage and settling in Norway, Gabrielle tells of her search for a sense of belonging and the wish to find her real self. No longer knowing who she is after many years of marriage, she asks the question that most of us ask at some point in our lives: Who am I? Dramatic events follow that lead to the breakdown of her marriage, the fragmentation of her personal identity and the emergence of her soul.

 

With openness and honesty, Gabrielle takes us through each phase of her amazing journey. She offers unique insights into the nature of the soul and the ways in which the soul works its magic. 

 

Return to My Soul offers hope and inspiration; points a way to the self; reveals the magnificence at our core

 

`Superbly crafted, raw, and powerful.´

Shawn Marie Paul, author of Life in Motion

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gabrielle Bergan
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9788299941518

Book preview

Background

Childhood

My mother had a dream. Sitting upright in bed with outstretched arms, she called out, ‘Where’s the baby? There’s no baby. I’ve gone through a whole pregnancy and a birth but there’s no baby.’

We were driving along Canterbury Road while Mum told me about her dream. I was fifty-eight years old. Mum was eighty-one.

‘I didn’t have a baby,’ she said.

With tears in my eyes, I put words to a feeling I had never dared to express: ‘I didn’t have a mother.’

Mum’s response was instant. ‘How could you have a mother when I didn’t have a baby?’

I grew up in Melbourne in the fifties and sixties. My parents were descendants of immigrants who had arrived in Australia from various parts of Great Britain during the 1800s, as free settlers at the Swan River Settlement in Western Australia, from Scotland via India and New Zealand, and from England via Africa. There was also a convict among them. My maternal great-great grandfather, Ben Taylor, was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment at the Port Arthur Penal Settlement, Tasmania, in 1845 for stealing eight shillings from a Mr Owen in London. Ben arrived at the penal settlement in 1846 but was released after serving fifteen months of his sentence. He later married a well-to-do Scottish woman called Katherine Stewart and lived a respectable life in Clunes, north of Ballarat. But according to my mother’s cousin, the family didn’t talk about Ben because of his past.

My father, Edward, was the second youngest of six children brought up in a strict Baptist home. His father (my grandfather, Laurence) spent long periods of time travelling throughout Australia searching for oil, gas, opals and gold. This meant that my grandmother, Maude, had to raise the children mostly on her own. Dad grew up largely without an adult male figure with whom he could identify and relate.

With his father virtually absent, Dad’s early years were coloured by the women in his life. In photos of him as a child he has long golden curls and is dressed as a girl. I always thought this odd, until I learnt that it was normal for mothers to dress their sons in girls clothing during the Victorian era and that this custom was still followed in the early twentieth century.

When he was five, Dad contracted scarlet fever. He was sick for two years, and was nurtured back to health by a nurse, Jane, who lived in the family home. Photos taken of Dad and Jane together show there was a close bond between them.

I think the combination of a strong female presence and a weaker male one during my father’s early childhood had a direct impact on his sense of identity. Reflecting on his life during his later years, he told me he didn’t know he was a boy until he began to play football at the age of eight.

Upon finishing school, Dad joined the Royal Australian Air Force and trained as a fighter pilot. He wanted to fly for the Allies during the Second World War, but the war ended just before he completed his training. Disappointed, he left the air force and followed a new career. He earned a Graduate Diploma in Music at Melbourne University.

The eldest of two children, my mother, Rose, grew up in a troubled household. An underlying resentment gnawed at her parents’ marriage. Her mother, Clara, loved another man. Clara had wanted to marry him, but her father didn’t approve so she married Mum’s father, Henry, instead. Henry knew that his wife’s affections lay elsewhere and it caused unhappiness for them both. Their relationship suffered. They argued often, and fiercely, voicing their painful emotions as verbal abuse. To add to the family strain, Henry was a controlling father. As a mother, Clara was aloof.

Born in Melbourne, Mum had moved to Adelaide with her family as a child. She was happy living there: she had friends and went to a good school where she excelled at sport, especially athletics and tennis. During her teens, her life changed abruptly when her father was diagnosed with tuberculosis and the family had to move back to Melbourne so he could be treated.

With my grandfather hospitalised, the family lost its main source of income. These were the years of the Second World War and female wages were low. In an effort to make ends meet, my grandmother, Clara, moved in with her own mother, but there was no room in the house for Mum. At fifteen, my mother was forced to find work and a place to stay. She found a job in a local shop and lived at the back of the premises. It was here that she contracted scabies, a contagious skin infection, and had to have her head shaved. She had blond hair. When it grew back, it was black.

When she was sixteen, Mum was taken in by distant relatives and cared for. Her brother, Robert, attended boarding school. After two years in hospital, my grandfather was told that he didn’t have tuberculosis, but a severe lung infection. He was finally discharged. Reunited again, the family moved into a house of their own in an outer suburb of Melbourne.

My parents married in their early twenties. They were a typical couple of their generation. Dad worked full-time, teaching music at a private boys’ school while Mum stayed at home and took care of the household.

We lived in Kerr Street, Blackburn North, in an L-shaped weatherboard house that my parents built when they were first married. Mum said they were pioneers during the early years: the land around them consisted of duck farms and empty paddocks. She also told me that money was tight: they sat on cardboard boxes and ate vegetable peel soup.

The house was situated on a quarter-acre block and had nicely landscaped gardens. My father enjoyed working outdoors. Small rocks formed a border across the front yard. An oak tree stood next to the letterbox; a graceful willow had been planted nearby. There were rose bushes, hydrangeas and rhododendrons, and a neatly kept lawn. The backyard was long and narrow. Flowering shrubs and plants lined the back fence; sweet peas covered the garage wall. There was a vegetable garden, a large green lawn and chooks in a pen.

When he wasn’t gardening, Dad would paint the house. He was a perfectionist and painting the house always meant one layer of undercoat and two layers of topcoat in white, deep pink or pastel green.

When I was growing up I was told I was a miracle baby. I was born in 1951 in a small private hospital in Melbourne. My birth was dramatic. The labour took more than thirty hours. I got stuck in the birth canal and couldn’t move. When I finally arrived, I came on an angle with one foot first and the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. My shoulder was damaged. Because I didn’t cry, I was held upside down and submerged repeatedly in warm water and then cold water in the hope that I would cry and fill my lungs with air, but still I made no sound.

Visiting me after the delivery, Dad saw that something was wrong. He hurried out to the nurses’ desk and asked whether it was normal for a newborn baby to be blue. He was told not to worry, that he should go home and that I would be all right. But I wasn’t all right: the staff found me suffocating. I was placed in a humidicrib and isolated. The doctor told Mum that if I survived the first twenty-four hours, I would live. My grandmother, Clara, urged Dad to consult a specialist, but Dad ignored her advice. He believed God would take care of me.  

My mother was placed in a four-bed room with three other women who had their babies with them. It was difficult for Mum to be the only woman without her baby, especially as she knew little about my condition. She saw me for the first time when I was five days old, in the arms of a nurse who stood in the doorway of the room. I was one week old when Mum first held me.

I’ve always enjoyed hearing the story of my birth because it was life threatening and I survived. However, many years later the critical nature of the delivery was made clear to me one evening at the dinner table. I had come home from school with blue ink on my hands from writing with a fountain pen. My father’s face turned pale when he saw my hands. They were the same blue colour I had been when I was born.

My brother, Simon, arrived when I was four. We grew up as normal Australian kids in a normal Australian suburb; we went to the local school, played with the other kids in the street and fought together.

When we weren’t fighting, Simon and I loved to play tiddlywinks with Mum’s colourful buttons. Flipping a button each, we would race each other across the lounge room floor on our hands and knees, trying to be the first one to flip our button into a cup at the far end of the room. The pink buttons were best because they had a groove around them that made them easy to flip.

Our backyard was a great place to be. We had a portable swimming pool and a swing that my father made when I was three. Sometimes, we pitched a tent on the lawn. However, my greatest pleasure as a child was playing with my dog, Bruno. He was a black border collie; I loved him dearly. We would spend hours together running around the yard, chasing each other.

When I was five, my parents gave Bruno away. They told me he was too big: he dug up the plants when he tore around the backyard. We drove him out to a large property in the country. When we arrived, we let him loose. I started to run: I wanted to show the new owners how Bruno would chase me, but when I turned to see whether he was running too, I ran into a metal clothesline and almost knocked myself out. Saying goodbye broke my heart. Dad bought me a cat instead, but I didn’t want the cat: I wanted Bruno. Tears still come to my eyes when I think of him.

As we grew older, Simon and I would look forward to Saturday evenings as we were allowed to buy a bag of lollies, a bottle of lemonade and a magazine each. We would settle down in front of the television with our sweets and lemonade and watch our favourite drama series, Perry Mason. We also enjoyed the long summer months sucking on homemade iceblocks wrapped in brown paper, playing in the pool or under the garden hose. When the evenings were hot, we would drive to Seaford, on Port Phillip Bay, and go swimming.

The happiest times of my youth were the holidays we had at Lorne, a small town on the southern coast of Victoria. Each summer, we packed the car and drove down to Lorne, where we rented a house for two weeks. These two weeks were always carefully planned to coincide with the holidays of four other families we knew who also stayed at Lorne. We’d meet on the beach early in the morning and spend all day there, one big, happy family: lying in