“He can still work with his reading tutor,” she said. “But he’ll have more time now. He can meet with her more often.”
“This still means a lot more work for you.” He gestured toward her with the empty box. “The boys will be homeall the time. Are you sure you want this?”
She forced herself to really think about what he was asking.
Returning to a quiet, empty house every morning after she dropped the kids at school felt like a reward after those long, hard years when she couldn’t have five minutes alone in the bathroom, when little toddler bodies sat outside the shower door, pressing their noses to the glass, as though she were a wax figure in a museum exhibit calledMommy Washes Her Hair.
Did she really want to be home with her kids twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?
An image of her own mother flashed through her mind, pulling bread from the oven while darkness tinted the windows of their old farmhouse at 5:00 a.m. on a cold Minnesota morning.
Her mother rose before dawn each day to make pancakes, bacon, and eggs for five kids, her husband, and the hired man who helped with spring’s work and harvest. After breakfast, she weeded her massive garden, pickled and canned the produce she grew there, cleanedthe house, baked pies and cookies, and did laundry for seven people, moving around the house like a domestic spirit long after everyone else was asleep.
Her mother could butcher a deer, pluck a pheasant, clean a walleye. Kiersten’s family never had anything extra, but her mother always made sure they had enough.
Are you sure you want this?
Garrett was asking the wrong question. Motherhood wasn’t about what you wanted. Motherhood was about what your kids needed most.
Her kids needed this. She needed it too.
“I want my kids to have what we had growing up ... I want them to have space and time ... time to play ... time to read ... time to be bored.”
He hesitated for a moment; then he said, “Do youreallyhave to take away the electronics? They’ll mutiny.”
“When it comes to electronics, our kids are like alcoholics trying to drink socially. One drink is too many, and a thousand aren’t enough.”
“You think you can hold the line?” he asked, clearly skeptical.
“I can try,” she said. “And if it’s impossible, we can return to our current arrangement where we all live in the minivan subsisting on Happy Meals while I literally drive myself and everyone else crazy and then when we come home, I shout at everyone to stop playingFortnitelong enough to do their homework.”
“People will think we’ve joined a weird cult.” He handed her another box. “They’ll think we’ve become crazy religious right-wingers.”
“Or crazy environmental left-wingers,” she said.
“Or ... maybe we’re going sane while everyone else is staying crazy?”
She grinned. “It feels dangerous almost, to go against the flow, to do something no one else is doing. But at this point, I’m beyond caring what other people think. I just want the boys to have at least one or two childhood memories from a place other than the back of our minivan.”
“Okay.” His hands went still, and he looked her in the eye. “I trust your judgment, Kiersten. If you think this is the best thing for the boys right now, then I’m on board. When do we start?”
“We.” She took a step closer and smiled up at him. “I like that.”
“From now on, I’ll take the boys every Sunday afternoon to give you a break,” he said. “We’ll go to a Capitals or a Nationals game or go hiking or visit a battlefield. I might still have to do a few work calls on Sunday nights, but I’ll tell them weekend travel is a hard no. I’m sorry I didn’t do it sooner.”
“That would be huge.”
“I have a degree in animal husbandry, you know. I can teach them about the miracle of the many cow stomachs.”
She clinked her box cutter against his. “To cow stomachs.”
He leaned over and kissed her softly on the mouth. “To cow stomachs.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Piper
Piper had expected the pushback to come from her kids. But when she and her husband pitched the idea, the girls were surprisingly open to the Experiment, especially Caitlin, who quietly said school made her stomach hurt and she’d be happy to stay home for a while.
