[greekmom2]

^^^Yeah, well that part added a bit more of a twist.



She started at UTD in the fall. One evening she and a teammate (we call her Amy) decided to tag along with Amy’s boyfriend to a fraternity party. Amy introduced her to a guy from her high school. They talked a bit and he asked if she was going to go through rush. She said that yes she was, but she was pretty nervous about it. He told her he was sure she would get into any sorority she wanted. She thought he was cute, sweet, and completely clueless (not in general – just about how sororities work). Still, she was impressed that he didn’t say one negative thing about any of the sororities (at least not then).

This time around she had a much improved GPA but not stellar (her grades from the previous year were great, but they were averaged with her freshman GPA). She didn’t have any preconceived notions about the sororities. The year off had given her time to seriously consider what she had to offer a sorority and what she wanted from it as well. Her viewpoints changed; while I don’t think she was flat out rude to the two last sororities on her list at Party State, she knew her attitude there wasn’t good, and she was embarrassed about it. She still didn’t think they would have been good fits, but she understood she was lucky to have been asked back at all.


She was actually more embarrassed about her behavior at Apple Pie. As she put it, “Mom those girls were never anything but good to me and I should have been thrilled to go back, but instead I cried most of the way through the house tour.”

She was facing one serious difficulty. Recruitment started at 5 pm on one side of campus and her team practice ended at 5 pm at the athletic center off campus and on the other side. To make matters worse, UTD apparently felt cars were the work of the devil or at least greedy, corporate industrialists out to destroy the environment and life as we knew it, so they made parking as limited as possible. Her coach, whom she normally liked, wasn’t budging an inch. Fortunately, Greek life was, and they told her that while it officially started at 5, the groups wouldn’t actually get to the first house until 6, so they let her know which chapter her group would be visiting first and were willing to let her meet the group there.


This still made things tight by the time she got ready, drove over, and found parking. She wanted the sorority thing to work so badly that I worried she would quit the team, and I imagined all of those future scholarship dollars floating away. I also worried she would quit, recruitment wouldn’t work out and then she had given up a team for nothing. At any rate, I became a helicopter mom and offered to drive down the first two days, help her get ready, drive her over near Greek row, and drop her off so she wouldn’t have to worry about the parking which would make her the only PNM that year getting dropped off by her mom. Surprisingly she agreed to this.