I were wrong agan

The title of this missive will come as no great shock for those who’ve known me well or long and especially both well and long.

I just returned from a teaching trip which was a peak experience but quite draining and I was looking forward to some non-brain-challenging semi-face time with friends and family via social media. I was not disappointed for the most part, that is, until Mary led me to a video that required some reflection.

Daughter Two’s sorority sisters had scripted, recorded, edited and posted a video as a sort of sendoff tribute to her and it forced me to face up to one of the more glaring instances of me having chimed in as a Dad and then turning out to be, you know, full of caca.

You see, when Two went off to college, one of the decisions on which I took a fatherly stand was the whole idea of her joining a sorority. I didn’t have the university experience, as many of you know. So I can’t say I really knew much about what it’s like to live and learn and grow in that intellectual and cultural setting. But one of the things I thought I knew was that Greek life was pretty uniformly evil.

While I didn’t exactly take Animal House as a documentary, I have to admit that the stereotypes it parodied were pretty much consistent with my image of frats and sororities - spoiled rich kids with more focus on the social than the academic aspects of college life, Biffs and Buffies into partying, wearing sheets and drinking til dawn. Snottiness and debauchery in equal measure and a view of life completely devoid of any connection to the rest of us. Exclusiveness and meanness to anyone not deemed ‘worthy’ of the Greek mantel.

Turns out, I was right. That is, if you only consider such bastions of backwardness as Sigma Alpha Epsilon in your evaluation.

I was wrong – completely, massively, unfathomably wrong – when it comes to the ladies of Kappa Alpha Theta at MIT.

I fought Two on this, to the extent that a Dad of a daughter who is of age and going off to college has any standing to fight. And being Two, I believe she truly listened, considered, and then overrode my arguments. And in my opinion today, her decision to go her own way on this may be the primary reason why a stressful experience like undergraduate studies at MIT proved survivable for her.

It has become a cliché for writers and commencement speakers to refer to college students as the hope for our common futures. But in the case of the women of Kappa Alpha Theta, the cliché rings true. To the extent that Two’s Theta sisters actually do represent the leaders of tomorrow, Tomorrow is in the best of hands.

I’ve seldom been gladder to be proven wrong.

Other instances of this phenomenon have included:

-          My insistence that Disney was not the right place for One – yeah, blew that one

-          My reticence to get a sleep study done

-          My attempt to take Odin back to the pound after he’d done a certain amount of exuberant property damage in his first couple of weeks with us

-          My argument that we should reno the bathrooms before the downstairs

 I could go on. Suffice to say, any success I’ve had as a parent and husband has as often been related to my willingness to cave in as my ability to prevail. And regarding Two’s membership in Theta and her residence in their house, this was a wonderful example of me being concerned and thoughtful and insistent. And wrong as hell.

Yup! I were wrong.

Again.