Iowa pride, passed on to daddy’s girl.

Here is the thing about college towns.  People are completely crazy.  An old man walked up to my husband in the Hawk Shop in Iowa City and asked if he could buy John's sweatshirt. “I like that sweatshirt.  Can I buy it from you?”  Really?  We are IN a shop with 100 sweatshirts and you want the one my husband is wearing? Wow!  Iowa.  I’m all Minnesota – all the time - so you have to appreciate how difficult it is for me to "get" the complete chaos that surrounds Iowa Hawkeye Pride.

We are at the University of Iowa for an admissions tour which of coarse forces me to first admit I am OLD enough to HAVE a 17 year old daughter and then makes me realize my fabulous daughter will not live with us next fall.  This PRIDE thing has possessed my husband for life.  This contagious disease has now rubbed off on – actually implanted itself – upon my first child and only daughter.  I held it together most of the admissions tour but then we stepped into a dorm room.  COED dorms? Really?  Visitor “in and out” books monitored by none, over-night visitor are any one.  Are you kidding?  “You gotta let go sometime mom. You might as well start now,” our white hatted tour guide coached us as we stood there dumbfounded.  All I could see was two college freshman having sex on a loft bed and one of them looked like my daughter.  NOT OK!  As we exited the dorms, a screaming, drunken boy hanging out his car window hollered “Come to school here man it’s &*^*% the shits, man.” The females in our admissions tour group rolled their eyes.  Are THOSE the kinds of boys that will be sleeping above and below us…I mean sleeping a floor above and below us in the dorms?  Oh, wait. Maybe it was just us MOMS of these 17 year olds deep in a horror-filled trance.

Whatever the case, Krista’s in. Hook line and sinker. As I watched her walk a few paces ahead of me next to her dad I could not help thinking…I should have seen this coming the day I married this man.  Iowa pride, passed on to daddy’s girl. In that instant I looked up and she was 9 again, walking hand in hand by his side.  What’s a Minnesota girl gonna do but buy an “Iowa mom” shirt and step aside?