Clippings

When she brought home the new lawnmower my mom glowed with an excitement matched only, perhaps, by the thrill she felt purchasing her first weed whacker. As a single, female homeowner, the machines empowered her; her mowing could be as good as any husband's. She whirred about the yard, surrounding our tiny house with a satisfying expanse of trimmed lawn.

Her breast cancer diagnosis meant I trudged around the yard, heaving the mower, while she recovered from chemotherapy then a double mastectomy. As I reached into the lawnmower's underbelly, trying, without success, to remove the grass caught in the exit chute, I could not grasp the joy my mom found with this machine. Luckily, her cancer responded to the treatments; she healed and resumed mowing duties.

This past summer, the mower and I got reacquainted. A neat lawn brought happiness and pride, which were in short supply for my mom, battling a recurrence of breast cancer, metastasized in her bones. Cancer that is strong enough to return and travel like this can no longer be purged with chemotherapy. It must be coaxed into remission using hormonal treatments and radiation, with me hoping beyond hope that the inevitably fatal cells wait as long as possible before becoming overly aggressive.

Mowing more than ever before, I devise patterns that provide maximum efficiency, so I always challenge myself to scrape a few minutes off my time. Every record I smash sends me, panting, into my mom's bedroom, reporting this small victory: "I've got it down to one hour and twenty-one minutes!"

My childlike antics cheer my mother and help mask the inherent truth that my role as a daughter is shifting. I'm now the hand-holder during I.V. insertions and the note-taker at appointments too stressful for my mom to remember afterwards exactly what the doctor says. I drag home the groceries, making sure that everything meets the standards of the breast cancer prevention diet to which we now adhere. Trying to avoid the temptation to parentally nag, I casually remind my mother, as she reaches for a cookie, "We have bananas in the kitchen, which we need to eat before they turn mushy..."

Although both my mom's emotions and the maintenance and cleanliness of our house benefit from my mature presence, my mother also needs me to just be a kid. As lawn mowing did, the responsibility of parenting fills her with self-worth, a sense of being strong and being needed. She enjoys waiting by the curb to drive me home from a play rehearsal and listening patiently as I outline the course of the mid-nineteenth century French political turnover, maternally aware that I learn best by explaining the confusing material to others. She calmly bears with my blunders as I try to keep Louis Blanc and Louis Napoleon straight.

My trouble remembering French leaders aside, the mower and I are bonding with this new round of cancer-induced lawn missions. Unlike before, when I was a substitute for my recovering mother, our current relationship is probably permanent. The mower suits me, the type who always needs to be doing something, because, with it, the only option is to push up the next rise, clipping grass. I'm starting to recognize the charm my mom sees in it.