We didn't have a washing machine.  Much less a dryer.  I did the wash in the bathtub.  When there was a lot of it,  I stomped everything with my feet.  Like Lucy and Ethel stomping grapes.  It worked.  I would rinse the clothes and hang them on a line out back.  Half the time, the dirty Camp Pendleton wind blew the clothes dry, but they had to be washed again from the dust.  We didn't have wash and wear back then. Everything had to be starched and ironed.  I burned a few things before I got the hang of it.  My mom had done all the ironing.  One more thing I didn't know how to do.

Progress in the homemaking department was slow.  But just as I thought I was getting the hang of it, I found out I was pregnant.  (One more thing to learn how to do.)  The only baby I had ever held was my brother and I was five when he was born.

But the most wonderful thing happened.  I made a friend.  My very first friend since we got married.  Mary Lib.  Her husband was the air officer for another regiment as I recall.  She was ten years older than me and had just had her first child.  She took me under her wing.  It was heaven to have a friend.  I got to go through the first months of her little boy's life with her, and by the time I had Pat six months later, I had graduated from "Babies 101."  I didn't make a very good grade, but I learned enough to get by.

It is amazing to look back and see where God has interjected into your life and provided you with what you needed right when you needed it.  At the time, I never saw His hand in anything.  But in retrospect, He was with me all along.

I had never felt so alone in my entire life. But God was there.  And He provided what I needed to get through all the steps of becoming a new person.  A wife.  A mother.  Not a kid anymore.  I don't think anyone I ever knew was more ill prepared for the job than I was.