Chapter Twenty-Four Piper
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.
Her heart crumpled when Caitlin spoke these words. Her daughter had been more impacted by Alex Orlov than she had realized.
However, a screaming, tear-filled, door-slamming fight accompanied the pronouncement about dramatically limiting screen time. She felt like they’d taken one step forward and two steps back.
And then her mother-in-law weighed in.
“Perhaps this isn’t a completely rational idea,” Brendan’s mother said over lunch at Le Petite, an adorable French restaurant in Old Town, on a chilly Monday at a few minutes after noon. Piper had always wanted to try this place, and the food was fantastic, but Sylvia was giving her indigestion.
Piper swallowed her sole and tried to formulate an answer.
Her father-in-law was a college administrator, and her mother-in-law taught English at a prestigious all-boys prep school in Connecticut.
Brendan and Piper had intended to speak with Sylvia, to get her advice and thoughts, but the girls beat them to it. They’d called Grandma right away to share the news about the Experiment.
Sylvia had immediately taken two days off and made a special trip down from Connecticut to speak with Piper and Brendan about this decision. And, of course, as fate would have it, Brendan was called out of town at the last minute, leaving Piper to face her mother-in-law alone.
Piper knew it had almost given her mother-in-law a heart attack when her son joined the Marine Corps after college instead of pursuing a PhD or attending law school.
And then when Brendan went on to join the diplomatic corps, not as a diplomat, but as the gun-toting person who protected the diplomats, it almost caused an irreconcilable rift in their relationship.
And now this, her own grandchildren removed from their excellent blue-ribbon public school to be homeschooled by their hapless mother.
It was clearly too much for this well-dressed, highly educated woman with a PhD in elementary education from Columbia.
Piper could read all this in the way her mother-in-law clenched her fork.
“I just don’t understand what you’re hoping to accomplish here,” Sylvia said.
“We’re hoping to accomplish sanity.” Piper patted her mouth with her napkin. “And peace. Balance. Togetherness.”
“Yes, and that’s all very nice, but what about their education?”
Piper toyed with her delicious sole meunière. Part of her wanted to confess the truth, to admit that she knew teaching was the hardest job on the planet and that deep down she was terrified she and other mothers didn’t have what it took to educate their own kids.
But Sylvia was not the kind of person to whom one admitted deep-seated insecurities.
Instead, Piper kept her answer vague. She felt like a politician answering a question without answering the question. “We are working hard to prepare, and I’m confident we can handle it.”
Her mother-in-law raised an eyebrow and lifted her wineglass to her lips, taking a small judicious sip.
“These elementary and middle school years are vitally important. Did you know that a recent study has shown a disparity in pay between adults who had an experienced kindergarten teacher and adults who had a first-year kindergarten teacher?”
Piper clenched her napkin. “Really.”
Sylvia leaned across the table. “Look, Piper, I know you mean well, but I’m not sure you see the big picture here.”
“And what’s that?” Piper asked, her voice tight.
“I routinely see boys with a 1580 or 1590 on the SAT with a million extracurriculars get wait-listed at second-tier schools. The college-application process gets more competitive every year, and to pull these girls out of a perfectly good public school during these critical elementary and middle school years, well, it’s just irresponsible. ”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Piper said stiffly.
“Let’s talk about what’s really going on here, Piper.” Her mother-in-law leaned back in her chair.
Piper blinked. “Something else is going on here?”
“It’s your job.” Sylvia put her fork down with a sharp clink.
“Your lack of direction. Have you considered going back to school, getting your master’s?
They have an excellent program for working adults at Georgetown.
It would fill this void you have in your life right now that you seem to be filling with trad wife nonsense like homeschooling. ”
“Trad wife nonsense?” Piper almost snorted. And how did her mother-in-law even know about trad wives? They must have done a story on NPR.
“That’s what this seems to be about.” Sylvia waved her wineglass in the air. “Some sort of back-to-the-land movement.”
Piper sighed. “All we want is to keep the girls safe and happy. So we’re going to keep them home, just for the rest of the year, and then we’ll reevaluate.”
Sylvia leaned across the table and hissed in a low voice. “You young women today have no idea how good you have it.”
Piper’s shoulders rose a few inches as she braced for a lecture. “What do you mean?”
“The women of my generation fought hard so that women like you could work outside the home, have a career. We fought for girls to get a college education, just like their brothers. And now you want to throw it all away.” She made a wild gesture with her napkin.
“You’re retreating back into the kitchen, like these advances mean nothing. ”
Piper frowned, slightly alarmed. Her mother-in-law wasn’t usually so strident.
“I’m not tossing anything away. I’m just saying we need to slow down a little bit and smell the .
. .” Well, not roses. She’d somehow killed all the Knock Out roses she’d planted in her front yard. “And smell the daisies.”
“What if the girls grow up to be Soft Girls?”
Piper gave her a blank stare. “What’s a ‘Soft Girl’?”
Her mother-in-law huffed an impatient sigh. “Don’t you ever listen to NPR?”
“Well I—” Piper began.
“It’s a new trend,” her mother-in-law explained, rolling her eyes.
“Instead of working and building a career, young women are becoming stay-at-home girlfriends. They spend their days cooking and cleaning for their boyfriends and focusing on their complicated skin-care regimes and making TikTok videos. In Sweden they call them Soft Girls.”
“Well, that’s not very smart.”
“Of course it isn’t smart!” Sylvia raised her voice, and the other diners cast a concerned glance in their direction. “No economic security. No career. Utterly dependent on a man for support. And when he gets tired of her, she’s both homeless and jobless until the next man comes along.”
“Look.” Piper felt a surge of anger and worked hard to keep it from her voice.
Of course she didn’t want her girls to become some kind of cautionary tale on All Things Considered.
“That’s not what this is about. My girls are strong and independent.
But they’re also stressed out and exhausted. That’s why we’re doing this.”
And because Caitlin was being harassed at school. But she didn’t want to burden her mother-in-law with those worries on top of everything else.
“But who will teach them the things they need to learn?” Sylvia asked.
“Each mom has expertise in a certain area,” Piper said, drawing on the emergency supply of patience she normally reserved for trips to the DMV or the fifth consecutive showing of a children’s musical. “For example, one of the moms is a writer. She’ll teach English.”
Her mother-in-law narrowed her eyes. “What kind of a writer?”
“Well, she writes novels,” Piper said uneasily.
“What kinds of novels?”
“Well.” Piper wiped her clammy palms on her napkin. “She writes historical fiction.”
The color drained from her mother-in-law’s face. “What kind of historical fiction?”
“Well . . .” Piper stammered. “She writes . . . historical romance novels, but they’re very good historical romance novels. So good they made them into a series on Netflix.”
Her mother-in-law’s mouth dropped open. “You’re allowing a woman who writes genre fiction to teach my granddaughters English literature?”
“Look, it will be like . . . Little Women,” Piper said before taking a big swig from her wineglass.
“How could this possibly be like Little Women?” her mother-in-law asked icily.
“Well.” Piper swallowed and wiped her mouth with her napkin as she tried to construct an answer. “Remember when Amy brought the limes to school and her teacher confiscated them and then the teacher beat Amy’s hands with a stick as punishment and Marmee found out and she said . . .”
Piper paused, trying to remember what Marmee could possibly have said. “And Marmee said, ‘Enough is enough. I will educate my girls at home.’” She thrust her fork in the air to emphasize these words. “If it was good enough for the March family, it’s good enough for us.”
Sylvia raised a skeptical brow. “This is not 1863, and you are not Marmee.”
“Perhaps not,” Piper said stiffly. “But I’m a mom in 2025 who feels like the way we’re doing things isn’t working.
I’ve talked to my husband and my daughters, and we all want to try something different.
And maybe it will be great and maybe it will be a disaster, but we need to try because it is my responsibility as a parent to keep my daughters safe and happy. And right now, they are neither.”
Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Don’t cry to me when the girls end up at some college no one’s ever heard of because of what you’ve done.”
Piper sighed. Her mother-in-law had forgotten, or perhaps she hadn’t, that Piper had actually attended a college no one had ever heard of.
She’d had the time of her life, met the people who were still some of her closest friends to this day, and also managed to get an excellent education at the same time.
“We appreciate your support,” Piper said with the biggest, falsest smile she could muster. “Do you want to order dessert?”