Chapter Twenty-Three Kiersten #2
She sat down on a plastic lawn chair and buried her face in her hands.
“This isn’t a life . . . it’s an endless series of appointments and auditions for some kind of terrifying future where our kids will only succeed if they’re professional athletes or tech geniuses who graduate from Harvard.
I can’t live this way anymore. And neither can the boys. ”
It felt good to say it out loud. To surrender. To admit defeat. To speak the fears that drove her to drive her kids, literally and figuratively, every single day.
He pulled up another lawn chair and sat beside her.
“Do you want to take the boys and move back home? I could get an apartment and commute back and forth between DC and Minnesota. I could probably be home one weekend a month, but my parents and your parents would be there, plus all the aunts and uncles, to help with the boys. You wouldn’t be alone. ”
A shiver of fear passed through her. His proposal felt like a prelude to something far worse.
“But they’d never see you,” she said. “I’d never see you.”
His shoulders slumped. “You never see me now.”
“But then we’d see you even less. We’re a family. Not a collection of people who happen to live in the same house. And the boys need you even more than I do. Especially now, as they get older.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and went silent for a long moment. Finally he spoke. “Tell me how this . . . experiment would work.”
A faint smile tugged at her mouth. She wanted his opinion because she valued his judgment, and if he truly thought the Experiment was crazy, then it probably was.
But she also wanted him to give the idea a fair hearing. For the first time since they’d started talking, she felt like he was willing to discuss it with an open mind.
She explained the basic outlines of the plan. “So we do school here at home,” she concluded. “But we also do so much more because we live in this incredible place filled with some of the finest museums and historical sites in America.”
“Sounds like more driving,” he said with a wry smile. “And what about sports?”
“We quit sports for one year, and they play baseball in the backyard and basketball in the driveway. Like we did.”
He looked into the distance. “Matthew is an exceptional athlete . . .” His voice trailed off.
She finished the sentence for him. “But not exceptional enough.”
“Like father, like son,” he said with a faint trace of bitterness. “Even without the injury, I wouldn’t have made the jump from Division I college hockey to the NHL.”
She looked at him in surprise. He’d hinted at this before but never said it out loud.
“I wanted the boys to do what I wasn’t able to do. But deep down I know it’s not going to happen for them either.”
“When did you realize this?” she asked softly.
“When Matt started playing on this travel team. He’s every bit as good as the best kid on that team. But to go pro, he’d need to be better than the best kid. Way better. And he’s not. He’s very good. And that’s not good enough.”
She wrapped her arms around him. Maybe this was how the Mensa parents of academically gifted kids felt when they realized their child did not have the SAT scores to get into Princeton.
“But he’s still so good that I think he can afford to take a year off in seventh grade and play in high school, and that’s all I want for him, to have the camaraderie of a team when he gets older. Plus his shoulder needs to heal, and that will never happen if he keeps pitching.”
“I agree,” she said. “I was never going to play in the WNBA, but I loved the Lady Spartans.”
Her husband smiled. “And you led them to a state championship.”
“I’m so old that I come from an era when girls’ sports teams had the word lady added to the name.”
He removed his work gloves and took her hand. “I’d rather be old with you than young with someone else.”
“I appreciate that.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “And I’d rather be married to you than Wayne Gretzky.”
“You’d have walk-in closets if you were married to Wayne Gretzky.”
“I’d rather have you.”
He kissed her temple. “Thank you.”
“And now we need to talk about Luke.”
He sighed. “I know.”
“Luke is the one who needs this most,” she said.
“Do you think . . .” He paused. “Do you think he got his dyslexia from me?”
She lifted her head and turned to face him. “Honey, it’s dyslexia, not Covid.”
“I know, but I’ve been reading about it, and some researchers think there’s a genetic component. Now I’m starting to wonder if I have dyslexia. In school I always felt like I had to work twice as hard to get half as much as my siblings.”
Her husband’s grades were the stuff of family legend. Mr. D Minus, his mother had called him.
“Which is why sports were so important?” Kiersten asked.
“Exactly.” He stood and extended his hand, pulling her up from the lawn chair. “But on the ice I could work half as hard for twice as much.”
She picked up her box cutter. “The poor kid is working hard. And that’s why his grades are so frustrating . . . and heartbreaking.”
“I see how he’s struggling . . . I see him feeling like he’s stupid.
” Garrett reached for another box. “I don’t want him to go through what I went through.
If there’s a way to help him catch up . .
. help him learn without hating every minute of learning.
If we can give him that, then I think we should do it. ”
“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 home all 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 called Mommy 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, cleaned the 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 you really have 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 playing Fortnite long 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.”