|
Back to "about us"Mayke's story
Live and work
I am Mayke Bloem, born as Mayke Paul in 1971 in Laag Soeren, a little place between Eerbeek and Dieren, in the triangle Zutphen-Arnhem-Apeldoorn. My parents are Ymkje Verdenius and Jacques Paul. I have an older sister, Robertine Walhout. We lived in Laag Soeren until our parents got divorced when we were 5 and 6, when we moved to Arnhem to stay with our grandparents until our mother bought a house in Huissen, south of Arnhem, next to her best friends Ans en Peter Hage. She acquired a boyfriend, a colleague, who often came to our house, and as he was an Englishman, my mother forbade him to talk Dutch to me! It is to him I owe the fact that I can now speak English well. We lived there until I was 16. Then we moved to Apeldoorn, because our neighbour friends had split up and both moved, and our mother worked in Apeldoorn and really hated driving a car. So we moved, she sold the car and we all got a train pass to move around The Netherlands by train as much as we pleased! We lived close to the station, so I went to explore the rest of the country. When I was 20 I got my driver's licence, and my mother bought a car again. When I was 22 I got involved with Jerry, who went to rent a room in my mother's boyfriend's house (1 kilometer away from us). I spend so much time there, that I moved in and rented the other room. The boyfriend was working and living in London for a couple of years (if I would be so kind as to drive his Triumph Spitfire every once in a while! No problem... I went to school with it!) I left school when I was 23 and went looking for a job. I planned to be a bookkeeper. My boyfriend Jerry and I bought our own house and moved into it in August 1997, 1 kilometer further from my mother's house. After a few interim jobs, in February 1999 I started in the credit department of a factory that makes cardboard boxes. My father got remarried, lived in Apeldoorn as well and had two more children, Irian and Iona Paul. In December 2000 he divorced their mother, and came living almost 1 kilometer away from me, together with my half-brother Irian who was then 21 years old.
In 2000 Jerry and I separated, and I remained alone in the house. Then in the autumn of 2001 I met Stefan van den Oetelaar on the internet. In February 2003 he moved from Eindhoven to Apeldoorn and moved in with me, and we got married in September of the same year. He was working for Philips in Eindhoven, but he found a job with Philips in Nijmegen. So he had to drive there and back every day. After three years we started looking for another house together, but could not agree on where it should be or how big it had to be. Stefan finally found his dream house in Nijmegen and we decided that he should go and live there by himself. So we have been divorced since November 2006 and Stefan now lives in Nijmegen.
In December 2007 I met a driver at Pluim Transport, Marco Bloem, in the warehouse at work. We ‘clicked’ immediately and from February 2008 on we were inseparable. He also had a house in De Maten in Apeldoorn, but he did not want to sell it at that stage as our relationship was still fresh and at that time the housing market was not very favourable. So we then lived one week at his place and the next week at mine. In his house many things still needed to be done, while quite a lot of work was also done at my own place. Then someone crossed our path, who was urgently looking for somewhere to live, and she lived for six months in Marco’s house. After that we were lucky enough to find official renters very quickly. They have been renting the house since July 2009, and that is very handy as around that time I stopped working because I was expecting a baby. Augustus 13 2009 was my last day working at SHC, after working there in a permanent job for almost (minus two weeks) 10 years. So from then on we had to make do with one salary.
On July 9 2009 Marco and I were married and on November 5 that year the couple became a young family. Joeri Bloem means many sleepless nights for me, but during the day he is a darling! And so now I am an old-fashioned non-working mother and can fully enjoy my (our!) cosy home and our marvellous little boy!