Rush

Brittany spent the first two weeks of this semester living out of her suitcase. Western Carolina has Rush right after Christmas break and she was a one of the girls who removed themselves from their sororities to work with the girls going through Rush.

They couldn’t have anything on their person or car that showed which sorority they belonged to and couldn’t live in their sorority house or have contact with their sisters during that time so they wouldn’t sway the voting for or against the Rushees.

So Brittany spent a couple nights with a friend in an apartment, another with a friend in a dorm, a few with some friends who have a house and even one night with a couple of the other helpers on sofas in the Commons building.

I didn’t like it much. And I thought the timing, at the beginning of a semester when they should have been focusing on really getting in to new classes, was a poor choice. But, no one really asked me what I thought about it. My job as mom was to listen to Brittany vent day after day: share how one place didn’t have wireless so she was at the library at 7:30 a.m. checking her emails, how another only had 1 key so she could only be there when the other girl was and she had to “hang out” on campus most of the time. Even the struggle it was to get a shower! And of course all the rush activities.

I looked forward to the final night of Rush as much as she did! Would Saturday night ever come? But then she called to tell me how excited the Rushees were when they found out which sorority they got and how excited she was when she pulled off her t-shirt at what they call the “revealing” and she had her Alpha Gam t-shirt on for the first time since before Christmas. And how her sorority sisters were so glad to have her back they painted her car with “Alpha Gamma Delta” and messages and hearts.

And I remembered the week before my Freshman year at Iowa State, going through rush. On the last day when I found out I got my first choice, Kappa Delta, they put me in a group to walk over to the KD house. As we came around the corner toward sorority circle, there were all the KD’s standing on the porch singing and when they saw their new pledges they started jumping up and down and screaming before running over to surround us.

And I knew that the two uncomfortable weeks Brittany had been through didn’t really matter. This was worth it. And decades later it would be times like this she remembers about college. Not sitting in class.