** Fred and Mien Blom's Place **PO
Box 4072 Alice Springs |
Father Forgive Us...
Coming to terms with my tearsOn this page:
Chapter 14 | Author's Comment | Book Review
‘Father Forgive Us…’ is about three generations of family life in Holland. From her grandparents' struggles in 1880, through the traumatic experiences of her childhood, it deals with the reality of common folk’s less-than-ordinary lives.
ISBN: 0646-41301-5
National Library of Australian CatalogueingPublished September 2002
“Father forgive them, they don’t know what they do...” my stepfather always said, no matter whether he was talking about a salesman who was dishonest or Hitler killing the Jews.
I in turn, needed to forgive, not only my stepfather for sexually and verbally abusing me, but also my mother for turning a blind eye to what was happening, and the local priest for destroying my belief in a loving God.
Manuscript Assessment by the National Book Council Inc:
I read this manuscript with a great deal of interest and also with great admiration for an author who could master a second language later in life and write so lucidly in it. This is a well-described family history/autobiography, composed in simple language with clarity, honesty and compassion. The Dutch farming family, which figures in it, with all their faults, idiosyncrasies and foibles, come very much alive as people.
The material presented here is written in a clear, well-crafted expository style and it is factual and well organised; one receives a vivid impression of the toughness of life as it is lived, conveyed little affectation, self-pity or complaint. It is also refreshingly unjudgmental.
ForewordThrough researching and piecing together the story of what happened in the lives of my grandmother, my mother and myself, I became strongly aware of how little we know why we say and do things, which hurt others.
I had always loved my mother. It wasn’t until after her death that I became angry with her for the harsh way she had treated me when I was a child.In November 1987, I went to Holland with my husband, as Mum was very ill. I had worked with elderly people in Alice Springs as a nursing-aide for five years and looked forward to nursing my own mother. I expected to have a happy time with her, getting closer as we were talking about her life. But that was not to be. Instead of having a loving time, my mother seemed to take all the frustration of her difficult life out on me. Some of the things she hurled at me were too painful to be repeated for a long time, even to myself.
Because I could not get through to her, I wrote a letter to her, in which I told her that we all loved her, despite the bad way she was behaving, not only towards me, but to visitors and most of her other children as well. When she read those lines, she put the letter aside angrily, scoffing at me for lying, as she regarded herself unlovable.
A few days later, when I came downstairs to wash and dress her early in the morning, I found Mum reading my letter again. She looked up to me with great pain in her eyes.
“Honestly Mien, I don’t know why I’m so nasty to you…” she said.
We had hugged each other and cried. I expected our relationship to improve but it didn’t; it got worse instead.
One night, after a particularly bad incident, I cried bitterly. Thinking that my mother’s mind had gone, she had died for me at that point in time. But the following morning she let me know that she was not crazy; she was only being honest with me, she said. Hearing her say calmly that she meant every word of the nasty things she had said the previous evening, was much harder to bear than anything she had said to me, ever before.
Unable to be with her any longer, I had gone to stay with a friend in the far south of Holland, where I bawled my eyes out for a couple of days. My friends saying that people usually hurt the child or person they loved most only made me more angry and frustrated.
When I returned a week later, the situation had not improved much. Our goodbye, before I returned to Australia after those six awful weeks, was very cold and dry-eyed. I had ordered flowers with a message of love to be delivered immediately after my husband and I had gone, and I cried uncontrollably in the car, all the way to the airport.
As soon as we came back in Australia in the second week of January 1988, I rang Mum. My sister-in-law, who was looking after her, passed on her message saying that she was too tired to talk to me. I felt terribly hurt, as she clearly did not want to talk to me. But then, the next day, Mum rang me herself, and we talked as if I had not been there at all.
That was the last time I heard her voice. During the following three weeks she was too tired to get out of bed to answer the phone. She died in her sleep on the eight of February 1988.
The months following her death became a nightmare for me and I was heading for a nervous breakdown a year later. Although my children say that I never talked about my mother, she controlled every thought I had, day and night. In the end I was convinced that she had taken possession of me, and that I was going crazy.
By writing her life story, I now know that Mum’s selfishness was a way of self-preservation. Not only the way she had been treated as a child by her own mother, but her four years of unquestioning obedience as a nun in the convent, and above all, her nine-month stay in a mental institution, after giving birth to me, had made her the way she was.
Mum never talked about what had happened in the institution, ‘that awful place’ and, without her written permission I was not permitted to see her records after her death. A person had to be dead for seventy-five years before authorities could give out any information from their archives, even to the patient’s closest relatives. But, from the history of the institution, which is now a museum, I know that they were experimenting with shock and deep sleep therapy at the time, which often had disastrous consequences, such as loss of memory and a zombie-like existence.Until I reconstructed the happenings before my wedding, I had no idea how Mum had struggled with her feelings of jealousy towards me. It slowly became clear to me that people handled others according to the ways they have been taught and treated, especially as a child. Our characters are obviously formed by our particular circumstances, the times we live in and, above all, our inherited emotions as well as the influences of every person we encounter. Therefore, we can not judge anybody and we are all responsible for each other.
Writing this book has not only made me feel more compassionate towards my mother and my grandmother, but it freed me from the burden of my recurring childhood problems. After my mother’s death, I only saw the negative things that happened to me whilst I grew up; now I can see the good times we had and the many positive things that came out of it. I am grateful for the many times Mum stood up for me while she struggled with her jealousy. I also realised that my stepfather, who made life miserable for all of us, could hardly have acted in any other way because of his own background and upbringing. It made me able to forgive them as well as myself for the many mistakes I made and still make myself. As it me aware that we know nothing about people, even of those we meet on a daily basis, I am now giving everybody the benefit of the doubt. Writing this book has also rekindled my marriage, which suffered because of the abuse of my stepfather, even though mine was insignificant, compared to what still happens to millions of children today.
Until I had counselling at the age of fifty, I did not really know what was meant by ‘being sexually abused’. I thought that that was ‘going the whole way’, which was not what happened to me at all. I didn’t know what was meant by ‘coming to terms’, and how to go about it either. That is why I wrote in such an explicit way. I have since learned that I was not the only ignorant person; many; even well-educated people don’t really know what ‘being abused’ entails, when a depression is a ‘nervous breakdown’ and how to go about ‘coming to terms’ with it.
Children are now a lot more protected; some of them barely dare to say ‘hello’ to us because we are ‘strangers’. But they are exposed to far more violence, via the media as well as the careless conversations of adults around them.
To ‘dig deep’ is heavy going at times, but the result, being able to forgive through understanding, was well worth the effort as it made me ‘come to terms’ with it all, and my cheerful inner strength, which has undoubtedly helped me through the difficult times, returned.
However, it wasn’t until I came to the fine tuning of the last chapters of this book, which sums up the last forty years of my life, that I realised that my inability to accept my tears, has caused me the most hardship throughout my life.
I now hope that my story will make us all more aware of the far-reaching effects our words and actions have, especially on children.
Mien Blom
Alice Springs, March 2001
DEDICATIONTo children and adults of all ages;
to find the peace of forgiving and forgiveness
and enjoy the freedom of coming to terms with their tears.Spring 1951
After Tante Annie had gone to Canada, Marie, Tante Cor’s sister-in-law from Nijkerk, came occasionally to sew for a day and Tante Jans, Mum’s great-aunt, came every couple of weeks to help Mum with her endless piles of mending. Tante Jans was a gentle, softly spoken lady, well into her sixties whom I liked very much. I always hurried home from school when she was there, as I loved helping her. She had run a busy chauffeurs-cafe called "De Tweede Steeg" (‘the second lane’) on the main road to Amersfoort, first with her late husband, and later, during the war, with her eldest son.One day Tante Jans told Mum that she wasn’t coming for a while as she was having a visitor at Easter, a man called Gerrit, who would stay for a week. He was one of many people who had stayed at the cafe during the war, she said. She went on to tell Mum that he was forty-eight and he had never married, he lived in Huissen, a fruit and vegetable growing community across the river Rhine from Arnhem, with his sister Marie who had three children. Tante Jans had visited them there the previous summer and of course, Mum invited her to bring this Gerrit for a visit.
Easter was early that year and the weather was beautiful. When we saw Tante Jans and her visitor cycling into our driveway, shortly after two o’clock on Easter Monday, Mum was very excited. With Jopie and my younger brothers, I followed her outside to meet them. As soon as he had set his pushbike against the wall at the back of the house Gerrit took his hat off and shook hands with Mum saying: "So you are Aaltje! Moeke told me a lot about you and I’ve been wanting to meet you ever since."
His manner of speech made us laugh, what a funny accent! We had never heard anyone talk like that before. Gerrit was a short, solidly built man. He wore a dark, pinstriped three-piece suit and shiny black shoes. With his shortcut thick, slightly greying hair, combed neatly to one side with a high wave, his heavy eyebrows closely knit above his dark eyes, and with his clean shaven, double chinned face, he was a good looking man in his Sunday suit. He smoked a thick cigar and smiled continually.
Gerrit looked a nice man, but when he laughed loudly, showing his dirty yellow teeth, he frightened me. They stood talking outside for quite a while. Then Gerrit took his big silver watch, which was tied to the button of his vest by a heavy chain, out of his pocket and checked the time; a sign for Mum to take her visitors inside. After a cup of tea Mum showed Gerrit the animals and the garden while I kept ‘Moeke’ company. Well in her seventies Tante Jans loved being called Moeke.
"That’s what people in Huissen call their mother," she laughed.
When they came back into the heert Mum asked Gerrit if he would like a borreltje and she looked very happy when he accepted.
By the time Moeke and her visitor were leaving it was nearly dark. Mum’s face was bright red and her eyes were shining. Anton and Wout, who had already finished feeding and milking the cows, came into the heert for their evening meal. Wout was furious that the sandwiches weren’t ready.
"And what about feeding the chickens instead of wasting your time talking all afternoon," he yelled at Mum.
"Mind oew words!" Gerrit barked at Wout. "That’s no way to speak to oew mowder."
Mum looked shocked. She had completely forgotten about the chickens as well as the evening meal. When Moeke and Gerrit rode away on their bikes, she told me to help Wout load the cart with chicken feed while she made sandwiches for every one.
There was no need for Wout to scold me the way he did while we loaded the cart; I already felt terribly ashamed. Of course I should have reminded Mum about the chickens. Gerrit said that he could see what a great help I was to mum; what was he going to think of me now?
While I helped Mum feed the hundreds of hungry chickens and collect eggs by the light of a torch, Mum said that it looked as if God had finally answered her prayers and He had sent her a good husband, a farmer as well as a market gardener. She was forty-two and Gerrit was forty-eight. He had never been married but because he was living with his sister, he was used to children.
"Wasn’t it wonderful the way Gerrit put Wout in his place when he yelled at me?" she asked.
Mum kept on talking about Gerrit. During the battle at the bridge over the River Rhine in September 1944 Arnhem and Huissen had been evacuated. With his father and his youngest sister Marie her husband Knid and two small children Gerrit, had been accommodated at Moeke’s cafe for six weeks. When they had gone home again they had found their boerderij and all their glass-houses destroyed and their animals had all disappeared. Six years had passed since then. They were still living in the draughty shack they had built from the ruins of the bombed house, but work on a grand new farmhouse was ready to start after Easter.
Gerrit’s mother had been a marvellous woman. She died before the war and his father, a great man by the sounds of it, had passed on the previous year, aged eighty-two. His sister Marie now had three little boys, aged between five and eleven. Apart from the market garden, they milked a dozen cows, a substantial number for a mixed farm. They also owned two horses and a lot of pigs and calves, and Gerrit sounded a very good salesman. He loved buying and selling cows and horses and he knew how to get the highest price for his fruit and vegetables at the markets, he had said.
Wearing a new set of black manchester (rip-cord) work clothes, with a tie, a black cap and brand new yellow clogs, again smoking a thick cigar, Gerrit came back the following morning on the pushbike he had borrowed from Moeke’s son. He wanted to see how Mum was selling her eggs at the market, but she had already left on her bike an hour earlier. Nijkerk was about seven kilometres away via narrow paths through the paddocks. Wout was quite happy to take Gerrit there.
They had only been away half an hour when they came back. Wout was soaking wet, shivering and cold to the bone; his curly hair was full of kikkerdril (frog-rit or spawn). The foot pedal of his bike got caught on a post as he crossed a narrow bridge over the ‘Laak’, a fast running creek. He had tumbled with bike and all into the icy-cold water. Gerrit roared with laughter, but Wout never felt so humiliated in all his life.
While Wout stuck his head under the pump at the back of the deel and changed into dry clothes, I made a cup of coffee for Gerrit. As soon as Wout was ready they left for the market again. A few hours later Wout came home fuming; Gerrit had told everybody at the market about the ‘funny way Wout had tried to catch frogs’. Even though Wout was just about in tears with embarrassment, Gerrit kept making fun of him in the afternoon, baring his awful teeth when he laughed.
Later that same afternoon, I found Mum and Gerrit in one of the chook-houses, holding hands. Although I was very happy at the thought of having a father again, I felt terribly shy when Gerrit spoke to me in his strange accent when he noticed the watch I had drawn on my arm with a ball-point pen.
"If oew mowder marries me, I’ll give oe a real watch," he promised. He went on to say that life would be wonderful. Each of my brothers would get a brand-new watch too and in a few years’ time, he would build a new house for us so that we were no longer cramped in the old krot (hovel).
Wout was beside himself when he heard that Mum was seriously thinking of marrying Gerrit.
"What for?" he demanded with tears in his eyes. He was nearly fourteen; in another year he would have left school. She did not need a stranger to tell us what to do. He had already shown her that he could throw a thirty-litre milk-can on the cart, hadn’t he? By the time Anton got a girlfriend and wanted to get married he, Wout, would be old enough to do everything our father had done. Because he was the eldest son, the farm was going to be his anyway, and he was prepared to work hard. Yes, Mum knew all of that, but she wasn’t listening any more and continued to praise Gerrit’s virtues.
The next day Gerrit was there again, in his new working suit, complete with cap, tie, clogs and his inseparable cigar. Because the nice weather held on, Anton had taken the cows outside before he had gone on the milk-run and, as we wanted to make the most of our school holidays, we had started the spring cleaning that morning. Wout, Siem and Henk had taken the dirty straw and the manure out of the stable at the back of the old house and Mum and I were busy scraping and rinsing the rest of the muck off the walls. Gerrit praised us for doing a good job, telling Mum that there was no need for her to give us a hand. She happily put clean clothes on and went away with Gerrit, introducing him to our neighbours. As she didn’t come home to cook the usual hot meal at midday, I made a heap of sandwiches for everybody. Mum was nowhere to be seen all afternoon either.
When they finally came back, Mum told me to make sandwiches for the evening meal too while she and Gerrit would feed the chickens. Coffee, tea and sandwiches were ready when they came back inside. But, without saying a word to us, Mum went into the bedroom looking as if she were in a trance, followed by Gerrit. They stayed for what seemed to be a very long time.
Wout’s fury at them disappearing like that was fuelled by Anton’s suggestion that Gerrit would be mad to ‘buy a cat in a bag’. I had no idea what they were talking about, but from Wout’s cursing and yelling abuse, I guessed that they were doing dirty things. Anton’s laughing at me begging Wout to stop shouting infuriated Wout even more. He grabbed one of his clogs from the deel and threw it against the bedroom door, shouting more abuse. As nothing happened, he went back to the deel and grabbed a shovel. The door flew open when he smashed a hole in it. For a moment all was still and silent. Then I heard Gerrit say something about Mum letting Wout go wild followed by Mum crying that she had no hope of controlling him.
"He’s been too long without a father," she sobbed.
When Mum came out of the bedroom, followed by Gerrit who comforted her, saying that things would change drastically when he came back to marry her, Wout and Anton had long disappeared. They were sitting with Sam and Henk in the hay, on the platform above the cows, when Gerrit went to the deel to go back to Moeke’s place. Gerrit looked at them with disgust.
"Your eyes should fall out of your heads with shame," he said in his colourful accent, which suddenly did not sound funny any more. "Yeah, you can laugh now," he sneered; "I’ll show you who’s boss when I get back!"
A few days later Gerrit had a heated argument with Anton about milking. Anton, who was sick to death of hearing him telling everybody what to do as well as seeing his future ruined and his home taken away from him, came home at ten that Sunday evening. Gerrit had been waiting for him. He told him that a newly calved cow had to be milked three times a day, as the cow would give more milk that way. In his usual quiet manner Anton said that that was nonsense. There was nobody in the whole of our district doing that. When Gerrit ordered him to milk the cow at that late hour, Anton exploded. He told him to mind his own business, to go back to Huissen and leave us in peace. He (Gerrit) would have milked the bloody cow himself if he had been a man!
Well, we soon knew that nobody would ever be allowed to question Gerrit’s manhood! The next minute they pulled and pushed at each other, shouting nasty remarks like a couple of overgrown schoolboys. I had never seen grown men fight and if Mum had not pulled them apart and calmed them down, there would have been an even uglier scene.
Peace returned to our household when Gerrit went back to Huissen the following day. Before he left Mum promised him that she would go to Huissen in two weeks time, wanting to see where he came from and meet his sister and her family. Mum left on her pushbike that Sunday morning in the middle of April. She would attend the early Mass in Amersfoort, then take the train to Arnhem. From there she would take a bus to Huissen. Although it was no more then seventy kilometres, the trip took more than three hours, each way. She came home close to midnight. I was still up, eagerly waiting for her return. She was exhausted but happy, full of praise for Gerrit’s youngest sister Marie; such a jolly woman, and her three boys adored their uncle Gerrit. One of his other two sisters, Mieneke the middle one had come to meet Mum too. She was just as nice as Marie but she had not met Anna the eldest. She was a real sourpuss Gerrit and his other sisters had said. Mieneke has a son and a daughter about my age and Anna had two older sons and a daughter Riet, who was twelve, a little older then I was. I would be meeting all my new aunts, uncles and cousins in a few weeks time, Mum said as the wedding day had been set for the ninth of May, only three weeks away.
Anton was devastated when he heard the news later that same evening, just before I went to bed. He begged Mum to reconsider her decision saying that she was far too hasty, she did not even know the man, he argued. Mum, who was still angry with him for setting Wout up against Gerrit, said that she had seen how well Gerrit was liked at home.
"Wout needs a strong hand. Now!" she said determinedly, "he needs a father before he is completely ruined." She could not let this chance go by she added, her mouth twisting, as if she were going to cry.
I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of days later. I still slept in the double bed with Mum and Jopie, my little sister who would turn seven two days before the planned wedding day. I pretended to be asleep as Mum whispered:
"Anton! What on earth is the matter?"
I opened my eyes just wide enough to see Anton standing against the stark white wall of the bedroom. He was drunk. I had heard him singing in the night and spew up a couple of times but I had never seen him drunk before. Mum was sitting upright in bed when Anton started to cry. He said that Mum was making a big mistake. He said that life for all of us would become a hell if she married Gerrit. Mum told him not to make a fool of himself, but Anton said he did not care. He got on his knees beside the bed and, with his head on Mum’s lap, he said that he loved her and the kids, begging her to cancel the wedding while she still had a chance, and to marry him, Anton, instead.
"Jong toch! Jong toch!" Mum repeated, while she caressed Anton’s head. She reminded him of the big age difference (Mum was forty-two and Anton was twenty-five). He needed a girl of his own age, she said.
"When you wake up tomorrow, this will all be a bad dream; you will be sorry you ever asked me," she said softly.
Anton had been dead serious and he had never regretted asking Mum, he told me when I visited him in 1991. Before proposing to her Anton had gone to his father and asked his advice.
"Father was strongly against it," he said. "He thought that I only wanted to secure my own future. But it was more than that. I loved your mother and I wanted to prevent her from the obvious disaster she was getting herself, and all of you, into. When I left my father, I had already made up my mind." After a short silence, Anton added: "I’m still sure that we would have been happy. It was awful for me to leave your mother like that."
When it became obvious to him that Mum was not going to change her mind, it became impossible for Anton to stay with us until the wedding. Ome Wim, Mum’s youngest brother, took care of the milk-run again, as he had done when my father was sick. And Anton left.
Life for him became very difficult. It had broken his heart to leave our place where he had been so happy, knowing in his heart that Mum’s marriage to Gerrit ‘could only be a disaster’. He found live-in work on a large pig farm where he had to clean out pens and spread manure over the land day in, day out a heavy and filthy job. After a year or two, he gave farm work away and became a bricklayer, travelling by train to a ‘day-school’ for mature people in Utrecht. He married our neighbour’s daughter Tiny when they were both well into their thirties, and they had three children.
Years later, Mum played cards often with him and his wife Tiny. Anton had developed serious asthma; he looked an old man at a very early age. Whenever I saw Mum and Anton together, I felt sure that they would have had a good life together. The big gap in their ages had completely fallen away. But then, as Mum said, life seems to have to take its course..."You would never have met Fre (my husband), if I had not married Gerrit", she would say. Neither would I have had my brother, who now lives only a few streets away from me in the centre of Australia. Jopie, my only sister, would not have married her husband, (which would have saved her a lot of heartache) and I might never have emigrated to Australia, etcetera, etc, etc...
I could have lived happily without some of the following experiences though. But then, I wonder if I would ever have felt the urge to write this book...
Please feel free to