Love it or hate it, house mothers are just like our real mothers. We love our house mothers, we complain about our house mothers, we sneak around behind our house mothers’ backs. Most people go to college to get away from their parents, while we have willingly decided to join an organization that gives us another mother during the rowdiest and craziest time of our young adult lives to breathe down our necks and give us lectures about not doing trash duty on our respective night because you decided to get drunk on a Wednesday instead.
Looking back on my experience in college, I took my house mother for granted. I always thought she hated me because I complained about her cooking. Which to be fair, it was disgusting on most days or she would only let me have four chicken nuggets, which is a happy meal for 7-year-olds, not a meal for a 21-year-old, but now that I have to cook my own meals every single day, I crave her Philly cheese steaks and taco bar on Tuesdays.
My house mother was very blunt, which sometimes came off as rude. As a very non-confrontational person, I tried so hard to please my house mother or avoid her completely. I never wanted to be the person that peed on the stairs or didn’t clean up the puke in the bathroom (and I never was). I sought the approval of my house mother just as I did the approval of my real mother. But the more I look back on her actions and attitudes towards us, if I was her I would have lost my damn mind. She was a saint in comparison to what I would have acted like if I had to make sure 30 girls didn’t simultaneously die every single Thursday through Saturday.
Can you imagine the pressure that comes with being a house mother? Having to cook for 25+ girls for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the whole time they complain about it not being “healthy enough” or “gross.” Also having to listen to our idiotic drunk stories every single Friday morning as the whole entire sorority sat at one table in the kitchen to recall what happened the night before.
Can you IMAGINE having to deal with the girls who sometimes lose control on the weekends? I can’t judge because we’ve all been there. But just imagine if YOU were the one who had to clean someone’s mattress when they decided to throw up on it, or clean the kitchen when you come back from the bar and wake her up at 4 a.m. because you sound like a herd of elephants.
And in the midst of all of the terrible things we do to our house mother, she is there for us when we need her the most. I can’t tell you how many nights I spent crying in my house mothers room, and she never turned her back on me. Or that one time I forgot all of my dance team uniforms in my sorority house over Christmas break and she drove an hour to come unlock the house for me so I would have them before we went to Florida for our football conference championship game.
So next time you have those similar “Oh my God, Mom” moments with your house mother, take a second to think about all the things your house mother does for you, and all the bullshit she has to put up with just so you can live in a sorority house. If it wasn’t for my house mother, I wouldn’t have made it through college. I probably wouldn’t have gained the sophomore-junior-senior fifteen either, but there are bigger problems in life..
Nice Move116
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