Bedrest and Pushmowing:                                                 Lawns and Babies Wait For No Woman 

by Erin Quinn    

I have a friend who once had to de-string his guitar and tape it to the back of his closet so that he could concentrate on studying for his upcoming Regents exam. Having discovered the joys of the instrument only months earlier, he just wanted to practice the chords he heard on Simon and Garfunkel's Central Park concert recording every moment he could.

That's how I feel about our new red manual pushmower.

When we bought our house in the village late last August, the lawn was practically manicured by the previous owner. At some point in September, it finally dawned on me that it was now our responsibility to cut it. "We need a machine," I said to my husband, who did not feel the same urgency as I did to cut the grass. He was preoccupied with other home improvement projects like pouring a new foundation, laying wood floors, building a deck and painting the walls with some fresco-like technique he had imported from his decoration business in France. Our overgrown lawn wasn't high on his list of priorities.

A friend suggested that we pay someone to cut the lawn every few weeks and then invest in a lawnmower the following year. Although that seemed so bourgeois, the idea of buying one of those noisy power mowers didn't thrill me either. We decided to pay someone just to keep the tall grass and deer ticks at bay until we could come up with a mowing strategy the following year.

But as spring came around with its prolific crop of dandelions and rangy weeds, once again, our lawn grew past the point of neighborly courtesy. Until one day, when I couldn't face the shame of looking at our lawn anymore, I asked our next-door neighbors if we could borrow their mower.

I had seen them peacefully walking back-and-forth with an old-fashioned pushmower, and they made cutting the grass seem like a walk in the park. Their low-tech mower appealed to me, as did their lawn, which was lush, weedless and an almost unearthly shade of green.

"I'm not sure it is going to work on your lawn," our neighbor Chris said, as gently as he could, noting our foot-high, practically dreadlocked grass. "You may have to go over the same weeds 100 times, but give it a try if you want. It can't hurt."

Seven months pregnant, I put on one of those sack dresses I bought off the Ames clearance rack and began to push the mower. Although it took me upwards of four hours and our lawn ended up looking more like a bad haircut than a golf green, I felt sated and proud.

I continued to borrow their mower on a regular basis, sometimes three and four times a week. Although I normally would ban garish plastic toys from the house, one of my friends bought our son Seamus a faux lawnmower for his second birthday so that he could join me in my new horticultural crusade. We spent many afternoons adorned in straw sun hats, promenading with our respective mowers while singing a poor French rendition of "Heigh, Ho, Heigh, Ho, It's Off to Work We Go." Even our wayward dog Phelan got into the act, pacing back and forth with us as we chewed up the weeds that our pushmowers manage to cut. The lawn didn't have that perfect, manicured look, but at least there was no noise, fumes,  sore muscles, flying rocks or fingers getting caught in motors. The job was stress-free.

My newfound mania for lawn-cutting started to seep into other pastimes as the maniacal nesting stage of pregnancy took root. Suddenly, I had an insatiable desire to plant a perennial garden, something I knew little about. I began going to the local farm market daily, torturing Sandy Ferrante with my endlessly remedial gardening questions, towing Seamus over the gravel paths in one of those big flower carts.

It was then that I decided that before I had this baby my husband and I needed to put in a stone walkway. As I entered my third trimester, there was so much to do and so little time. First came the pickaxe, then the peat moss and the gathering of fieldstones from the thorn-laden thicket in back of our house. It also dawned on me that a small vegetable garden was not only a good idea, but a pre-partum necessity. And throughout these projects, I had to maintain an ever-vigilant watch on the ever-growing weeds and grass.

I became so enthusiastic about the virtues of manual push-mowing that my husband went to True Value and ordered one, although it would take several weeks to arrive. I became so self-conscious about asking our neighbors to borrow their mower every other day that I found myself waiting until they went off to work to go and get the coveted tool. In fact, I started to daydream about the time when our own mower would arrive, and I could have access to it day and night, whenever the mood struck me.

The bigger I became, the more apparent my lawn-mowing obsession became to the outside world. When I hit my eighth month, complete strangers stopped their cars and asked me if I wanted to borrow their gas-powered mowers. I tried to explain that I actually enjoyed the task and preferred the low-tech mower, but to no avail. One nice man who lived down the street wouldn't hear of it; he actually rolled his mower down to my house and offered to cut our lawn.

Although I think my husband was secretly relieved that mowing was one less job he had to deal with, he began to get itchy when well-meaning neighbors offered to cut our lawn or let him borrow their mower. He tried to ban me from my newfound love with little success.

Then, just when our mower arrived at True Value with its shiny metal frame, chrome wheels and handle grips from heaven, my obstetrician ordered me to stay in bed. I was devastated. She had wanted to send me to the hospital, fearing I might go into premature labor. I begged not to be sent there, claiming I would limit all unnecessary activity voluntarily.

Although I had no real intention of spending any more than nighttime in bed, I liked talking about my mandatory bedrest with friends and family. It all sounded so dramatic, so Victorian...I pictured myself laying weakly on an iron bed, staring at the gardens longingly, watching children frolic while my family and friends spoke passionately about the day's politics or whispered nervously about my uncertain condition.

But the image of bedrest was all that I got. I quickly determined that confinement to one's bed should be reserved only for those women that had nannies, no children or no employment. For the rest of us working plebeians, compulsory bedrest is simply not a viable option.

Although I wasn't waving feebly to my son and husband in the gardens below, I did have to lay off the yard work. I made my husband put the pushmower in an unnavigable corner of our garage so that I wouldn't be tempted. But in my dreams, I heard the blades turning and felt the soft touch of grass beneath my barefeet as the weeds were whittled down.

Sometimes the urge to mow was so potent, it harkened back to nicotine withdrawal. I would find myself taking the mower out of the garage when I was alone, only to stop in mid-lawn, haunted by images of babies born prematurely with tiny, undeveloped lungs. It was the nesting instinct gone awry.

I had to look the other way when the weeds took over, and turn the other cheek when I realized that the vegetable garden I planted during a dry spell was really perched atop an underground spring. During a good rain, it looked more fish pond than flower bed. The only way to salvage the plot was to plant rice.

I sat on the pile of rocks I had amassed to build my walkway and watched Seamus and Phelan chasing butterflies. The weeks passed slowly. I was forced to sit still while my son ran around me in circles.

When my pregnancy hit the 36-week mark, my doctor gave me the okay to end my metaphorical bedrest. But by that time, I had gotten so big and the baby's head was so low that I couldn't mow for more than a few feet without having to stop and rearrange my internal organs. I took to sitting on the lawn, pulling weeds out by hand, an actvity Seamus and Phelan thoroughly enjoyed, although neither one of them seemed to understand the difference between good grass and weeds. Even I began to suspect there was little difference after all.

In the end, I realized that the pushmower liberated me from a lifelong fear of a suburban marriage -- a union in which husbands spent their weekends spraying Turf Builder on their private Ponderosas and saddling up their $4,000 ride-on mowers, one hand on the steering wheel, the other wrapped around a cold can of Budweiser. 

And my experience with virtual bedrest and pushmower prohibition liberated me from my unattainable prebirth plan to create the Gardens of Versailles with overly wet soil and underdeveloped botanical knowledge.

I can't say that I've completely given up on my mowing obsession or my dream of a rice paddy on Prospect Street, but the mania has subsided.

As these days get hotter and my stomach balloons, I would actually welcome a doctor's note ordering complete bedrest. Then I could wave to my husband and son from our bedroom window, while I daydream of our new baby's face and the real harvest yet to come.

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