Thursday, September 6, 2007
What do you call a college woman who’s single, doesn’t keep a permanent home and gets paid to live with dudes? Mom.
Or at least housemother, the job title of Marilyn McElhany, the new female-in-residence at the Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji) fraternity house.
“It’s much more fun than raising your own kids,” McElhany says. “All the fun, none of the legal responsibility.”
McElhany moved in with the 66-or-so brothers three weeks ago after a four-year hiatus from Greek life. Before then she lived at the Alpha Tau Omega house, currently the Pi Kappa Phi residence, for 12 years.
“The ATO house was well-known as one of the great party houses of all time,” she says.
But McElhany, a birth-mother of four and grandmother of six, says the animal-house stereotype that fraternities have just isn’t true. On any given night, McElhany says you’ll see freshman Fijis completing their four hours of mandatory study time, not running around all drunk and naked.
The Fiji’s Web site says that last spring the house earned a cumulative 3.0 grade point average, and McElhany says that the house is pretty quiet most of the time. She’s simply there to organize the occasional chaos of multi-male living and make sure her fraternal stepchildren are content.
“As long as they’re happy, I’m happy. But there ain’t a boy in the world that won’t tell you ‘if mommy ain’t happy, nobody’s happy,’” she says.
McElhany says that being a housemother is more a lifestyle than a job. Her sleep schedule is often more like a student’s than an adult’s and she lives with relatives, takes vacations or goes to her summer home in Colorado when the house closes for academic breaks.
But she freely admits that being a housemother is especially suited for the strange.
“It’s a wonderful way of life, it’s just a little odd,” she says. “It’s bizarre, I mean, who would want to live with a bunch of men?”
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