Ha!! Consider this particular Calendar of Events:
April 17 1954 - birth of son, Steve, at the Naval Hospital in Port Royal, SC.
Husband (Navy hospital corpsman there) was due to receive sea duty orders any day, and sent baby and me to Florida to my parents in May to see Steve for the first time.
In June, orders for an LST out of Norfolk arrived, and he came down to Florida and announced that he was going to take me up to Rochester, NY - his home town - because it would be easier to hitchhike there on weekends from Norfolk!
Okay - so I could stay with my parents rent free and not have to work - but away to NY we drove. I was plunked down in the upper half of a house apartment in the suburbs with the edict I had to go to work to pay for it, during a national depression...luckily, I had won the Bausch-Lomb Science Award in high school and the interviewer at Bausch-Lomb loved a person with a military work ethic - Ed's sister took care of baby, but I had to take two buses to be at work by 0730..ancient car sat in drive, uninsured and not registered.
All right, Ed was home several weekends before he sailed off to the Mediterranean, and 3 months later I was pregnant again - in an area where I could NOT get military medical care! (No CHAMPUS then)
A friend from the Marine Corps was home with her parents in Ohio, and offered for me to go there to stay. She and George (deployed Marine) had been our neighbors in SC, so Ed came home and deposited us there. She had a brother and grandmother in her parents' house, and decided she and I (she worked) would get an inexpensive apartment nearby, and moved into one.
With this communicated to Ed, he hit the roof - very possessive and jealous, he although back from the Mediterranean was about to go on a 6-week deployment to the Caribbean from Norfolk, and DEMANDED I get on a plane to Norfolk *NOW.*
Right - with a baby 10 months old and 4 months pregnant, I was surely going to flirt or worse with men??
Landing in Norfolk, he had arranged for me to stay the 6 weeks with a shipmate's wife who had just had her first baby - Steve and me in the other bedroom, sharing expenses. It was The Arrangement from Hades, her baby crying all night every night, and she very difficult and noncommunicative..:(
When the husbands returned, we looked for a place to rent in Norfolk, including - so help me - sharing a converted chicken coop with another couple!
I saw with my own eyes signs in yards that read "Dogs and Sailors Keep Off the Grass"
The Lord took mercy on me, though, and gave him immediate orders in March for shore duty at Chincoteague Naval Air Station, Virginia - -
In those action-packed ELEVEN months, I literally moved my baby and me SEVEN TIMES, among five states - and had Kevin in Virginia!!
I was all of 21 years old.....
Out of the Navy in 1956 and back in Rochester, his stepfather gave us a tree Christmas Eve for the little guys, then 1 and 2 - and for Other Reasons, I went home for good in June of 1957.