#52 Stories--Story #39

When you left your parents' home was it to attend college, pursue a job, or embark on a military or humanitarian service? What was it like to be out on your own for the first time?

I left home to go away to college. My parents took me (and another friend who was also going away to college) and we drove from our hometown in California to Provo Utah to BYU where I attended college. The drive across Nevada is SO boring.  My dad had me driving with my friend riding shotgun while he took a nap in the back of the old Dodge van. At one point my dad woke up and asked how fast I was going. Apparently he could tell from the sound the motor was making that I was driving too fast. I was way over the speed limit, but his comment was "Don't get a ticket."

We got to Provo and dropped off the friend, then my parents pulled up to my dorm (U Hall of the Deseret Towers). I was on the top floor in the corner most north east in the building.  We looked out right into the side of a ginormous mountain, it seemed. We moved in my stuff and then my parents went with me to the book store where I found the books I needed for the classes I was registered for that first semester. I'm sure my books were a couple hundred dollars. Bu tI remember my dad overhearing the total for another customer in another line nearby.  It was many hundreds of dollars--for far fewer books.  My dad made some comment about he was glad I wasn't taking those classes!

Then they left.  I was left in my dorm room. My parents drove home, just like that. I was on my own and was both excited and scared. I didn't know much about BYU other than it was the church's school and that it was WAY cheaper than UCLA--where I dreamed to go, once upon a time. But mom and dad had just opened their shop only a little more than a year before I left home. They made too much for me to qualify for a PELL grant and my mom was adamant that I NOT take out student loans--one of the MANY brilliant things she has told met o do over the years! So I decided the best bang for the buck (since my parents were footing the bucks) was to choose to attend BYU.

The first year I was there, I didn't have a car. I didn't know my roommate yet. I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. And my friends--many from our hometown attended school at BYU--didn't live in the same dorm as me.  So, I had to go out of my way to make friends, to find my way, to get around, and figure out my life.

It was a daring adventure--made all the more daring by having a sort-of-boyfriend follow me to Provo for a couple of visits. He tried several times to convince me to quit school and go home to marry him--he knew I'd find a great job, and that we'd be living large before I knew it. He was a moron. But I didn't know that then. He actually came to Provo to convince me to quit school a few times--twice that first year, but a few more in subsequent years--even though I thought I was VERY clear that I was going to stay in school and was way too young to be married and had other plans for my life anyway.

Soon, I came to really enjoy my roommate, LeeAnn--she was from the Sacramento area of California.  We ran around with a couple of girls from the floor below us who were both from Littleton, Colorado, Jana and Lisa were good friends. And Jana was always coming up with things to do and places to go and people we needed to meet. Jana got us to do things that we otherwise would never have done.

I made friends on our floor, in our ward, in our FHE group. Just a few at first, but I felt like I had good friends and I could add them to the other friends I knew from home that were all over campus eventually. Between our ward,the dorm, the classes and the people I met through all those people, I had the feeling that I was pretty comfortable there.

Until, I wasn't.

This was before cell phones or free voice over internet calls. If I wanted to talk to my mom or dad--let's face it, it was usually mom--I had to wait until after rates went down after dark and on the weekends. I couldn't afford to call very often or talk for very long.  But sometimes that was ll I wanted was to hear their voices and have them tell me I was doing the right thing and I could do it.

Luckily my mom would writ to me each week--a snail mail letter to the mailbox downstairs. Those letters meant the world to me. I knew she was thinking of me, and I knew what was going on at home. That first year wasn't easy, but it was worth it.