Failure as a Wife, Woman and Mother

By Olsie Ekleberry

Growing up the ninth of eleven children in a loving family, as the daughter of a Plymouth brethren minister, Olsie Ekleberry feels she’s on display and cannot live up to anyone’s expectations.
She goes off to college and because she was too protected, she is vulnerable. She marries the first man that shows an interest, has four children, and realizes her husband is abusive and mentally unstable as he dubbed her, “A failure as a Wife, Woman and Mother.” Finally she leaves him, but has no child support or financial backing of any kind.
How does she go from living in a garage, worrying about feeding four children, to buying two accounting firms, investing money and lending more than $1 million to people who don’t qualify otherwise.
How does a woman who divorces one husband and buries two find her faith, her path and friendships?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728318004

Olsie Ekleberry

Starting out a protected minister’s daughter was very difficult. It felt like living in a glass cage. The expectations of perfection I had set for myself, was unattainable. As a result, I tried to please fellow Christians instead of the Lord. Of course, this was impossible. By the time I entered college, I had lost my love of attending church. Marrying the first man who showed an interest against the Lord’s will and advice of my father, was the biggest mistake of my life. I obtained an accounting degree by attending night school, worked long hours, paid off my home, credit cards and eventually owned two accounting firms. The following years were a story of the Lord’s faithfulness throughout, including the great struggle to support my children, though I wasn’t faithful to Him, He was faithful to me. I had enjoyed the Lord’s blessing and it was time to give some back. I now had more than I needed to retire.

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Prologue

You’re a failure as a wife, a woman, and a mother.

For many years I would hear that taunt in my head. For far too many of those years, I believed it.

Today, though, all I want, with three babies in diapers, thirteen months apart, and only a wringer washer in this garage Ron and I call home, is to get rid of the diaper water the fastest way I can. Sure, he’s told me I need to go outside and pour it on the yard, but I’m exhausted, and it’s a stupid idea anyway, probably just another way for him to control me.

The bathroom, in our garage home that we were supposed to build into a real house one day, is narrow. The sink to the bathroom and kitchen are back-to-back separated by a thin wall. Earlier, I did dishes in the kitchen. Now, I wash diapers in the bathroom.

Constantly taking sick leave from General Motors, with one back surgery after another, Ron uses his time off from work to go hunting and fishing. Right now, early on this summer morning, he watches television from the davenport in our makeshift living room. But I’m not thinking about Ron or what it has cost me to go against my dad, my family, and my faith to marry him. I just go through my routine and pour the diaper water into the toilet bowl. This is my life, one chore after another, one more day when hopefully, my kids and I won’t be subjected to my husband’s anger.

Suddenly, I can feel Ron watching me from the other room, and I know he realizes that I’m not following his directive.

I don’t want to ever see you do that again, he calls out.

As I pick up the next pail, I know he is still watching. At that moment, I feel a surge of defiance, and I do what he has told me not to do. The dirty water flows from my bucket into the toilet, and I flush.

Ron flies off the davenport, rushes toward me, glancing to his right he sees the butcher knife in the sink and grabs it.

I hadn’t expected such an extreme reaction. When I see him with the knife, I back up against the shower, but he moves closer.

You hate me, don’t you? He shoves the handle of the knife toward me. Come on. Not woman enough to do it, though, are you?

He’s six-foot-three. I’m five-foot-six, slender, and terrified. If I take that knife and try to fight back, it will get ugly. Ron knows it too. That’s what he wants, for me to touch that knife, then he will have an excuse for whatever act of violence he can claim as self-defense.

I always avoid speaking when he’s like this, but this time, he’s pressing harder, pushing me even more.

Come on, he shouts again. You do hate me, don’t you?

I feel dead inside, terrified, yet I turn away from the knife.

You’re a coward. You’re giving in. The words burned through my mind. I know I’m too weak, unable to do anything right. I never do anything right.

A failure as a wife, a woman, and a mother, he shouts again.

And the voice in my head says: You’re always afraid to stand up to him. If only you had the courage to divorce him before now.

It’s as if each time we argue, he is pushed farther over the edge, and I am pushed farther into silence. Today, I just pray he won’t harm me. I know now that he is capable of that, or worse.

For at least fifteen minutes, I stand there with my hands to my side so that Ron won’t think I’m reaching for a weapon. How long is this going to go on? I wonder. I am cornered. I have no place to go for help. Finally, he backs up, drops the knife into the sink, and flops back down on the davenport as if nothing has happened.

This isn’t where my story started, but it’s where it could have ended. The journey that delivered me to this man and this moment was years in the making.

This is the story of faith—about the early lessons of faith I learned from my father and about the faith I both turned away from and tried to cling to when my life was at its worst. Ultimately, it’s the story of the Lord’s unwavering faith in me, even when I doubted myself. I tell it to honor that journey and to inspire you, wherever you may be on your own life’s path.

Chapter   One

T he ninth of eleven kids, I felt from an early age that I couldn’t please anyone. It started long before one of the counselors at camp complained that I was not being a good example because I had gotten my hair messed up. It started before the exclusion in school, the kids who didn’t want anything to do with me because I had no way to relate to them. It started with an early childhood illness I blamed on myself.

If only I had obeyed my dad, I wouldn’t have gone under the porch in my overshoes to play in the melted snow. I wouldn’t have frozen my feet and got an infection so bad that one side of my face was so swollen that I could see my own ear. Instead, I almost died, and my hospital bills cost my father the loss of our home.

Once they found me under the porch, my mother had me sit in front of the wood burner to try to thaw out my feet. Back in those days, the first and only effective antibiotic was sulfonamide, commonly called sulfa. It was no match for my infection, and I was so ill I couldn’t even keep the medication down. I was admitted to the hospital and was there for one month. The doctors were afraid to do surgery, and they resorted to shots of penicillin, which was a new drug at the time. My recovery was long and uncertain.

On April 19, I spent my sixth birthday in the hospital with an ear infection that had spread through my body. After two weeks it became necessary to do surgery in an attempt to remove some of the infection that had built up in my system. My father had to wait in a second operating room in case I needed a blood transfusion. All I remember is being so weak that nurses and family had to lift me up in the bed. My mother never left my side, and Dad ran the farm and took care of the other kids. After one month, I was released but still very frail. So risky were my chances, that Henry, my oldest brother, who was in the navy fighting in World War II, was sent home.

I missed about six weeks of school in all, and that was too many absences for me to advance to the next grade. Still, I went back in time to pass the exams for second grade with a score of 100 percent. The superintendent, a kind woman who cared more about children than the rigidity of rules, came up with a plan. Hey, she said. Instead of recording her absent for those days, we’ll treat it as if she moved away and just got back.

Already, other students picked on me because I was different.

The following year, tonsillitis put me in the hospital again for one week. The doctors were still afraid to take my tonsils out because I continued to be so weak from ear surgery the prior year. I felt extreme guilt for causing my father to spend so much money on me again.

In that summer of 1946, after coming home from the hospital, I sat in an upstairs bedroom as an auctioneer sold our farm piece by piece, animal by animal. I couldn’t bear to be down there with my family, so instead, wearing a one-piece dress, with the bed pushed up against the wall; I sat cross-legged and watched the scene. I looked out at our yard and circular driveway, with the outhouse and granary to the left, and the barn beyond them. About fifty people gathered in the yard.

Dad, please don’t sell Tiny, my brothers and sisters cried.

Dad assured them that he wouldn’t sell our pet cow. As always, he tried to keep things calm.

Please, Dad.

They didn’t believe him. Their lives had been turned upside down, and I was the reason. Never had I felt this much guilt. I had let everyone down, and I had a lot to make up for.

Our lives changed. My dad, a minister, started having more meetings, and we traveled to evangelistic meetings in different towns on Tuesdays and Thursdays to visit and pray with the poor.

Later I learned that my dad took my illness and the loss of our home as a sign that the Lord wanted him to go into fulltime ministry. At the time, he didn’t realize that he needed to talk about this with his six-year old daughter, so I was left with my own conclusions, my own guilt.

We moved to Hustler, a village of approximately 440 in Juneau County outside New Lisbon, in the middle of Wisconsin. True to his word, Dad let us keep Tiny, who was our supplier of milk, and we also had a couple of horses and some chickens. Some of my earliest memories are of sleeping in church, my head on Mom’s lap. At times, Dad took me with him when he went to visit the sick. We’d sing Jesus Loves Me and other songs to them, and that seemed to cheer up the people we visited.

At six feet, three inches, Dad was tall and slim with broad shoulders and dark hair combed back. He was never one to belabor a point. I don’t think I ever heard him raise his voice.

I used to love to sit on his lap. When I was eight or nine, I asked him, Daddy, will I ever get too big to sit on your lap?

I hope not, he replied.

My first hazy memories are of Pup, our large dog. My older brothers and sisters told me that I learned to walk by putting my fist in Pup’s mouth and letting him lead me. We had no water or electricity, and my dad plowed the old-fashioned way with our horse, Dick, I tromped along behind him until my legs got tired, and Pup let me use him as a pillow.

If I wandered off, Pup would bark to let my parents know where I was. Once when they called and got no answer, they found me, in a field of hay, sleeping on his stomach. He hadn’t wanted to wake me.

At five feet, Mom could almost walk under Dad’s arm when he put it out straight. Meek and soft spoken, she wore her once-auburn, now dark brown-with-auburn-highlights hair rolled up. She sewed our clothes from feed sacks made of colorful fabric. Many times I would see her bent over our old sewing machine, making a patchwork quilt for each of our beds. Years later, when I was living in the middle of a nightmare, and my house burned down, she came to see me bringing the old worn quilt that used to be on my bed. I thought you might need this, she said.

The insightful gesture touched my heart. Nothing Goodwill provided felt like mine because it wasn’t, and, after losing everything, I desperately needed something of my own. It was a wonderful gift.

Mom never drove, and when I got my driver’s license, Dad bought me a black ’49 Chevy to take her around. He was a Chevy man all the way, and because he drove 40,000 to 50,000 miles annually around the United States and Canada as an evangelist, he bought a new one every two to three years.

My dad’s mother had passed away right before I was born, and I was named in memory of her. We were a large, loving family. Genevieve was the firstborn in 1924. Henry Louis, named after Dad, was born about sixteen months later, and Vivian arrived the following January. In November of the following year, Robert Theodore was born. The twins, Virgil and Vergie, were born in March of 1931. After seven years of marriage, my parents already had five children. After the twins, came Alvin in November of 1933 and Arlene in 1936. I was four years younger than Arlene. Paul was two years younger than I, and Gloria was eight years younger than I. She was an aunt to two nephews, who were four years old and a six-month-old niece before she was born in 1948.

Other than teasing, we didn’t go against Mom’s and Dad’s teachings, and, in later years, Gloria would tease mom about being an accident. Mom would say, in all honesty, Oh, no. You weren’t an accident. We wanted another baby. Dad was traveling, and I decided I wanted another baby. We discussed it, and I think you were conceived that night. She and Dad truly loved kids.

My brothers and sisters liked to play school with me as the student, and I could read by the age of five. They let me visit their school with them, and the teacher asked me to help two first-grade boys get up to speed. Our superintendent observed my ability to read and instead of sending me home, she let me stay, and I started school a year early.

While I was in grade school, we moved to Dorset Ridge. We lived halfway up the ridge, and the wind blew snowdrifts six feet or higher on the left side of the house. We kids would dig out the tunnels and play. Yet I was never far away from the memory of the illness that had caused my dad’s money to go to my medical care and not to maintaining our farm. He firmly believed that the Lord would provide. Because of his faith, he did not believe in insurance, and that’s why my illnesses were so financially devastating.

As soon as he went into full-time ministry, I started realizing that we were different from others in our little town. "If the world hates you, [a]you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. John 15:18, 19

At school, I started to feel it in the second or third grade. That’s when all of my worrying and guilt caught up with me. One night, as I lay in bed, I felt as if my chest were closing in, and I couldn’t breathe. I was terrified, and so were my parents. The attacks continued about twice a week, and the medical diagnosis was always the same. Bad nerves. My older sisters and brothers teased me.

You’re pretending so that you’ll get attention from Mom and Dad, one of them would say. Of course, that upset me even more, and each time as I gasped for breath and felt my chest threaten to explode, I thought I was going to die. It would be years before anyone explained to me about panic attacks. Back then, it was just, bad nerves, and of course, it felt like my fault.

I couldn’t hide at school, and my teachers treated me as if I might break if they raised their voice. Finally, my parents drove me to a psychologist in Madison. He had Mom and Dad take me to the zoo to get me to relax. When I came back after an afternoon with no bullying, the psychologist could see the difference in me. This child has been picked on, he told them and recommended taking me out of school for one year. I could not handle that humiliation. School, study, learning, books. They were what kept me alive, the only areas where I felt as strong or stronger than every other kid. Even slowed down by what we thought of as a nervous condition, I thrived academically, I think my parents sensed that removing me from school would destroy me.

Still, my teachers were wary. My fifth-grade teacher was a large barrel-shaped man who loved to eat. He had dark hair, a round face, and although strict in the classroom, he played with us at recess. To me, he was almost like two different people. Some of the older kids, who had probably been held back, could get unruly. This teacher had no problem going over and rapping their knuckles with his ruler. When your nerves are bad, you do the opposite of what you want. So, I laughed instead of cried because I was really scared, and I think he understood that.

He actually jumped rope with us, his belly flopping up and down. He rewarded anyone who did well in their class work by sending them to the ice cream store to get two cones—one for the student, and one for him. As October approached, he took me aside and said, I’m having a Halloween party in the school basement. Would you like to help me, Olsie?

Without saying he knew I couldn’t handle the stress of being scared, he made me feel special. So, when the big day arrived, he led the kids, one at a time, blindfolded, as they got to touch innards, which was really spaghetti, and shake hands with a corpse. That was really me standing behind a sheet, sticking out a rubber glove with ice cubes in it, and listening to the other kids scream. How kind this man and many of my teachers were in that time when few understood emotional disturbances in young people.

During recreation time at school, I usually read a book. Books couldn’t hurt me. They couldn’t call me names or laugh at me. When I was reading, I was not only absorbed. I was safe. Books have been my friends and an escape for all my life.

Even when he traveled, Dad stayed connected to our family by way of the old wall phone in our dining room. He called Mom every day. We were on an eight-party line, and we could tell which call was for us by the type of ring. Not that it stopped curious types from listening in. One of our neighbor girls told me, I wish my dad would talk to my mom the way your dad talks to your mom. I knew everybody rubbernecked, but I was surprised by the fact that she wasn’t ashamed of listening in to the conversation.

That’s the way he always talks to her, I said.

He never failed to tell Mom that he loved and missed her. I just assumed that was how all men treated their wives, but I was very young, and I had a lot to learn.

My hospital stays were numerous. After tonsillitis at age seven, I returned to the hospital the following year for a tonsillectomy. At ten, I had my appendix out. Upon graduation from eighth grade, my class took a school trip to see the Madison State Capitol, and something I ate made me ill. The teachers had had me lie down in the back of the bus, which was cold. With low resistance combined to the freezing air coming