The Groen Family

1.  Fenna Groen-Bogert

April 25, 1915-May 23, 2003

Reflections by Allan Groen

Mom’s Genealogy.

Mom’s maternal grandparents were Klaas Tolsma and Betje Boonstra. Their children were: Jan, Betje, Dirk, Harry, Hendrik, Dina and Romkje. Romkje Tolsma married Piet Bogert, and they had five children, Adriaan, Kees, Piet, Beppie and Gerries. These are mom’s half-brothers and sisters. Mom was born to Romkje out of wedlock.

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Now that mom’s life is over, and she is with her Lord and Saviour, it seems to me worthwhile to write about her, and to share with you what I know, and what I think I saw. Her life was complicated, lived in the midst of much difficulty, and she lived it under adverse circumstances. When you read the outline of her story and my personal reflections, I trust you will understand that she made much

of her life, considering especially all the difficulties she faced.

I’m sure there will be gaps in the story. After all, I was part of her long life for only about 20 or so years. By the time I was 19, I moved to Grand Rapids and from then on saw her too rarely. However, I am grateful that we were able to move to Ontario in 1994, so that during the last decade of mom’s life Barbara and I were able to visit quite frequently. There are, nevertheless, whole stretches of time of which I don’t know anymore than the rough outline.

Here, to start, is a summary of what I think of when I remember our mother. Mom was devout, she was loving, she worked very hard, and she made a difference in the lives of many people, as a believer, as a housewife and mother, and as a teacher.  Especially given some unusual circumstances in  her life, that’s quite something. It’s only the last number of years that I began to appreciate the adversities mom often faced, and how she struggled to overcome them.

I will tell the story more or less chronologically, but from time to time themes arise that I will pursue a bit here and there.

As I try to summarize my sense of who Mom Groen was, I am reminded of a question she once asked me. Many years ago, she said: “Allan, when I get to heaven, I am going to ask God to explain to me that he needed my John in heaven more than I needed him on earth here, with my children.”

For me, as a preacher, this question seems like a great way to get at what mom’s life was all about. It gets at all the major themes of her life. One of the major concerns that lived in mom’s heart continually is that of abandonment.  I hope you don’t find it surprising or shocking that I put it like this,  but it seems accurate to me, and explains a lot about this, loving, bright and sensitive woman who was our mother.

Surely, there are many other themes in her life. It would do an injustice to mom to talk only of this theme, but somehow, abandonment stands out for me as a major theme. This theme helps me to understand a lot about mom, things like her energy, her dedication to us her family, and her serving in the community. It also helps me to understand why mom could be so very needy, too. Mom would go far beyond the call of duty to make sure that she would not let anyone down, because she didn’t want anyone to feel her to be the cause of being abandoned.  Therefore, she worked long and hard, sometimes to the point of exhaustion and beyond. Behind her need for compliments and affirmation always lurked this question: will you be there for me, or will you also be someone who will eventually let me down?

All of this makes mom look like a complex person, and surely that is what she was! She was a leader without realizing it. She had a deep spirituality which made people esteem her. She had a gullible side to her, which made her vulnerable to manipulators. She loved to laugh, and she loved deeply.

Mom Groen was born in Amsterdam, to a single mom, Romkje Tolsma. Later, Romkje was married to Peter Theunis Bogert, with whom Romkje had six more children, four boys and two girls. Her birth mother could not deal with having a child, so she abandoned mom. All of mom’s life she continued to have some contact with her birth mother, but the relationship was difficult. Mom would often say that her mom, our maternal grandmother, was a difficult woman. She passed away in 1943.

I don’t know all the details of mom’s earliest years. But in October, 1915, she was adopted by Hette and Wietske Laagland who had no children of their own. These were people of substantial means. At first, they lived in the Apeldoorn area, but later(1918), for financial reasons apparently, they moved to a small home in Leeuwarden, Steins Straat 39. (Many Dutch people had made significant investments in Russia. After the Russian Revolution, these lost most of their value. Nevertheless, there was a substantial estate, enough to pay mom’s room and board for many years, and to purchase the bakery in Heeg.) Both the man and the woman died while mom was still only a child. The man died from hard living; mom used to say he drank himself to death. The woman died from tuberculosis.

From this time on, mom lived in a number of homes, and her memory of them was that she was often mistreated. Since mom had inherited a substantial estate, people took her in for the money, but often these people did not give her even the basic necessities of life. She often lived like a pauper. She did her homework in unheated sheds. She had to do a lot of the housework, and received only the plainest of foods.

All the different last names mom adopted during these years may relate to the variety of homes she lived in. It is not hard to imagine what it must have done to the emotional and psychological state of a child to have to go from house to house, from family to family. It would be easy to understand that at this time she developed a deep sense of unworthiness. Why else would people keep moving her around?

Relief came from this when mom was in her early teens. The accountant who was in charge of mom’s money began to be alarmed by what was going on in mom’s life, and made it his own business to find a better home for her. That’s how mom ended up in the home of Laurens and Anna Smit. Here mom had a good home. She had a heated room of her own. She was treated like a member of the family, and most importantly to the rest of mom’s life, this family taught mom to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, and so started a journey of faith that continued passionately for the rest of her life. At about age 16 or 17, mom was baptized in one of the churches of Leeuwarden. She became deeply involved in young people’s groups. For the rest of her life, she was involved in many things. She went to the ladies’ Bible study groups. She loved to sing in the choir. For most of her time at Holland Christian Homes, mom remained involved. She was the editor of “The Tie that Binds” for many years. She went to many of the residents to read with them, and served on a number of committees. Also, almost to the end of her life she led in the dining room devotions.

Mom was not afraid to speak up for herself.  At one time she even did that in church in Heeg. The preacher made a point she thought was quite wrong, and she stood up and said so then and there!

Mom did well at school, and her gift of singing was recognized. About the same time that she became a christian, she also had the option of going to teacher’s college, or to go to a singing school to become an opera singer. Somehow, singing in opera didn’t seem to go along with her christian convictions, so she entered teacher’s college in Leeuwarden. She graduated at age 18. With some pride, she mentioned that she was the only person in her class to get a job. Remember, this was depression time. It hit the Netherlands just as hard as anywhere else. Many people were without work. Dad and mom Groen both were very much shaped by the fact that they lived through the poverty of depression, and also through the distress and poverty of war. The years after the war were not much better. True, they were now free, but they were still poor, too.

It was a great blessing for mom to get a job as a teacher, therefore. So, probably in the fall of 1933, mom began her teaching career at the Christian School in Huizum, now a suburb of Leeuwarden. Here she’s 18 years old, and her first class is a grade one class with 48 children in it. Mom once remarked that when she saw all those faces looking up at her, she now these children didn’t have to like her, but they had to obey her from the first second, or she’d be lost for the year. She also said that it took about six weeks for the children to figure out that she was the boss. By then she was able to ease up a bit, and let the kids start to like her.  From there on, classroom discipline never seemed to be a problem for mom. She was the kind of teacher kids just knew they had to obey. There were times, though, when she administered the board of education to the seat of learning, to move the process along a little faster for some.

During this time she met a young man who was a baker working for bakker Heins. They were married in 1939, in Sneek, Friesland, dad’s home town.

Dad and mom bought a bakeshop in Heeg, a little Frisian village. This was probably the most modern property on main street of Heeg at that time. The previous property, also a bakery, had burned in the early 1920’s, and a new place put up in its place. If you visit Heeg, you can find it by looking for Pizo’s store.

At the end of April, 1940, I was born; a week later, war broke out in Holland, with the invasion of Hitler’s army. This meant that dad was conscripted into the army. War time, lack of fuel, and dad’s absence because of the war, dealt a terrible blow to the family and to their new business. Only by dint of hard work, were they able to keep the business going. During the war years, Rose, Peter and Keith were born.

During the war years, many Jewish refugees found a home with mom and dad Groen. Most of them stayed only a few days, until other places could be found for them, but several stayed with us for quite a while, among them Karel Leviet, who later renamed himself Karel Vervliet. However, while he lived with us in Heeg, he was Karel Ferbeek, a name mom gave him to hide his Jewish-sounding name. Mom gave him a little Hymn Book, inscribed to Karel Ferbeek, so he could “prove” that this was indeed his name. Fortunately, Heeg was an out-of-the-way village, and Germans seldom came there. But one can hardly begin to imagine the fear in our parents’ hearts on those occasions when they did come.

There were times when dad would leave home at dark, and take his bike with him. As children, we were told that he was going off somewhere far away. In reality, he really only went into some farmer’s field somewhere to sleep, because it was not safe to be at home.

At one time, there was a stack of cheese in our house, meant to be distributed in the community. There was a knock on the door, and dad went to answer. Germans! “Do you have any food in the house that you are not supposed to have?” “Of course not, sir,” said dad, with a big pile of cheese right behind the door.

During this time, everything was scarce. Food staples, food, clothing – all were impossibly difficult to find. One time dad came home with a new comb for mom. What a treasure that was. On another occasion, they had a bottle of oil for the oil-burning cook stoves. I picked it up and dropped it. What a disaster!

One war winter, dad and a friend fattened two pigs on the back of our property. They kept them in a shed, hoping no one would hear them. Early one morning, I heard noise in the backyard. Here there were two slaughtered pigs hanging in the tree, with dad and his friend butchering them. Dad was terrified that I might tell what I had seen. So he threatened to kill me if I said a word about the pigs hanging in the tree. I guess he had to do be as severe as all that, because it would be a terrible thing if the Germans or traitors heard of this.

One spring day, I was playing in the street in front of our house, when I heard a man yelling: “It’s over! It’s over! Tell your dad it’s over.” I didn’t realize what was over, but I told dad and mom. Of course it was the war that was over. The people of the village organized a great celebration.

After the war years, there followed Jim and Anne Jan. In Canada, they had three more children, a still-born boy born while they lived in Pontypool, and Richard Edward and Yvonne Theodora  while they lived in Orono.

Mom and dad ran the bakeshop in Heeg as a joint venture. Dad was the baker, and he also peddled their wares from house to house. Mom worked in the store, serving the customers. They usually had young girls working as ‘nannies’ to take care of the growing brood of children.  

Already as a relatively young woman, mom struggled with some major health problems. She had tuberculosis. This was under control most of the time. However, when she was on the boat to Canada, the tuberculosis began to act up. So she went to the ship’s doctor, who was very alarmed. He asked her how in the world she ever got onto the boat with a disease like that. He gave her medicine, and I believe that this was the last time she had problems with tuberculosis.

Also, by the time mom was around thirty years of age, her arthritis reared up. For the rest of her life she had a lot of pain, especially, it seems, in her knees. But at times her hands were very painful, too.

Also in Canada, mom worked frequently. While in Pontypool she sometimes went to work on the tobacco farms. She also did house cleaning for some of the Jewish community that used to come to Pontypool during summer time. Later she taught at Rehoboth School for more than 10 years. For mom and dad it was tough to reach the decision for mom to work full-time as a teacher. But the Christian schools needed trained persons. And if mom and dad were ever to get ahead financially, they needed more than just dad’s income. Also, the Christian School and Church were tremendously important to both of them.

The family immigrated to Canada because Dad Groen soon came to believe that there was no future for his growing family in the Netherlands.  Where would all these boys find work? Did he have a bit of an adventurous spirit motivating him too? By the late 1940’s there was a lot of talk of immigration. This struck dad’s fancy, but not so much mom’s. However, mom had promised to stick with her husband. Her understanding and commitment to her marriage meant: “whither thou goest, I will go.” So, they sold their bakery, and immigrated to Canada.

This was no joke, either. Dad left early in 1951, to get to Canada as quickly as possible, because there was supposed to be a job available for him as a baker with Canada Bread in Toronto. When he arrived, there was no job. They had never heard of any Johannes Groen, nor knew anything of any job promise. So dad had to find other work, and for the first while did menial jobs. He was very disappointed and discouraged.

Mom and the children came to Canada a few months later. We crossed by boat to England, across England by train, then by an old boat, the Georgic, we crossed the Atlantic, arriving at Pier 21 in Halifax, in June, 1951. We got on a dirty old train, and after a long journey arrived in Oshawa, where dad and Jetse Reyinga picked us up, late at night, and drove us to our new home, about six miles from Burketon, Ontario. From there, we moved some months later just up the country lane, then to Pontypool, where we shared an old united church manse with a series of other families, including another family from Heeg, the Martin and Betsy Van Dijk family. In Pontypool, a still born child was born to the family. This little boy is buried in the Pontypool cemetery, just east of Pontypool.

From there we moved once again, first to Orono, where dad worked for the Orono bakery for a few years, and then to Bowmanville. Here they bought the house at 12 Prospect Street. Mom taught at Rehoboth Christian School, and dad worked for a bakery in Oshawa.

It seems to me likely that our parents must have felt, on arriving in their own home in Bowmanville, that now life was at last going to become ‘normal.’ They had their own house, they both had jobs. Finally, the immigrant family was going to become a settled family, with things looking up from here on in. The depression time was behind them, so was war time, and so were the difficult early years of immigration.

But this was not to be. The first warning signals had already occurred in Orono. On one of dad’s nights of work in the bakery, he called me. It was around 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday. “Boy,” dad said, “You’ve got to come and help me. I am sick. I can’t do my work.” So I hurried over to the bakeshop, and found dad on the floor, rolling around, and shouting: “I’m dying, I’m dying. Call Alfie (the other baker) and tell him to bake.” The next day, dad did go to the doctor, who told him that he probably had a nervous attack, or an anxiety attack of some sort, and he should go back to work. Looking back on this episode, I’m sure this must have been a heart attack.

Soon, this was behind them, so it seemed. However, tragedy struck twice in 1958. Early in January, Richard Edward had a fall while playing the basement of our house on Prospect Street. He died the next day, in the Oshawa General Hospital.

Worse was to come for mom and the family. On December 22, 1958, dad died very suddenly, after a long day of work. He had just come home, and told mom that he was very tired. Shortly thereafter, he died while sitting at the kitchen table. So now mom is once again left to face life on her own. A widow lady. A mother with a large family. An immigrant with “heimwee,” -- a deep longing for back home.

If you look back over this skeletal outline of the story, clearly mom must have asked often: “what is going on in my life?” She must have been asking identity questions continually. “God accepts me, why then is my life the story of so much hardship, so many losses, and being left alone so often?”

After dad passed away, mom continued her career as a school teacher, teaching in Bowmanville at the Knox Christian School until the early seventies, when she had to take retirement for health reasons. During this time, she continued to take care of her family. It is hard to imagine how difficult that must have been. Certainly, as kids we probably didn’t realize the struggles she went through. Now that we have children and grandchildren of our own, we see that much better.

Gradually, the little chicks left the nest during this decade, too. I went off to Calvin College in 1959. This was certainly something dad and mom both encouraged. About the same time, Rose got married, and gradually, so did the rest of us. Being a single parent to seven teenagers must have been a handful. We were not always easy to manage.

Not long after mom retired, she became housekeeper for Rev. George Hoytema. She moved to London, Ontario, to try it out. After a while, it became clear that this was a good arrangement, and in due time mom felt that she would never move back into the house on Prospect Street, and so she sold it.

These were good years for mom and George alike. In some ways, mom was really in her element here. They traveled together, visited people together, and even went to Florida together.  It took a while for mom to get used to the idea of living with a “dominee,” because she had a pretty high view of what that meant. But gradually she learned to assert herself enough to really feel at home. One time when she and George went shopping, she put some items in the shopping cart. When George took it out of the basket with the comment that he didn’t like it, mom put it back and told him that she did like it. That was fine with George, and put it back in the cart.  Together, they moved through the congregation almost like a couple. They discussed whether the relationship of them living together in the same apartment might not appear to be unseemly. “What would people say?” They wisely decided that the Lord knows what they did and didn’t do, so they said “let the people talk.”

Barbara and I were living far away from mom most of this time, but we did visit her and Rev. Hoytema several times in London, and we experienced for ourselves that during this time life was very good for mom. True, he was a person of very strict routines. But he also accepted us and our family very well. Our kids enjoyed grandpa George.

One summer, we were camped near London. Rev. Hoytema had to see what that was like. While visiting, it began to thunder and rain, so we had to go inside our tent trailer. When it was all over, we went outside again, but George thought it was pretty neat inside the trailer, and stayed there for a while longer. It was probably better than swatting flies and mosquitoes.

When Rev. Hoytema passed away, mom moved to a little apartment in Holland Christian Homes of Brampton. This was probably the ideal place for mom. I’ve already described a bit of the various activities she engaged in there. She had all the opportunity in the world to socialize there. For years, she knew pretty well every person in the home by name. When we’d come, she would want to introduce us to everyone.  For me, it was often uncomfortable for her to keep introducing me as her son, the minister who is so well appreciated by his congregation, etc. I didn’t really want to be anything else than mom’s son, but that was not to be.

The last number of years of mom’s life, she began to suffer from mental confusion, and on top of this she also became quite deaf. It was not always so clear to me whether her confusion was mental, or simple failure to hear what was being said. But certainly visits became more difficult. However, installing her hearing aid with a fresh battery was definitely a help. It is also true, that mom was excellent at covering up her misunderstandings. It was important to her, not to feel that she had made a mistake.

Clearly, during the last few years, she was having an increasingly difficult time with basic issues like taking care of herself. Her judgement was sometimes off, too. She did things like buying a container of buttermilk, and then when it was half empty, she’d fill it with water to make it last as long as possible. She’d keep food in her refrigerator far past its ‘best before’ date. The last number of years, when we visited, we’d take a peek in the kitchen, especially the refrigerator, to make sure the stuff was reasonably fresh.

In my work as pastor, I often saw people gradually losing their ability to function independently, because of physical and mental disabilities. But it is harder to see it happening to your own parent. Mom had such an excellent mind, but it went by bits and pieces. She couldn’t remember names as quickly as she used to. Soon, there were names she could not remember at all.

Mom remained a person of faith and prayer to the end. Religious exercises were such a natural part of her life that she never forgot to say her prayers, or read the Bible, or listen to a church service on television when she could no longer attend in person. One time Barbara and I had the opportunity to be with her at church time. She didn’t really feel up to going downstairs to attend church, so she put on the TV. It was so loud that it made us feel panicky inside. But she remembered that it was Sunday. And Sunday is the Lord’s Day. That’s what you do on Sunday. You listen to a sermon. Even if the TV is on loud enough to shake the neighbour out of her bed.

So we thank God for mom. She loved all of us, her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. If anyone ever did her best to be a good and loving mother, she did. That she had energy left over, even as an old woman to be so helpful to many others, is nothing short of a miracle.

Thanks, mom. We love you still.