I guess it started when my son went all Mr. Miyagi on a bee.

I pointed out the stinger-happy insect buzzing around one of the many overgrown, unkempt rosebushes that now covered the majority of our pathway. My 20-month-old looked where I was pointing and snatched the flying bee between his thumb and index finger. He held it up to me as an offering of his love; I, in turn, screeched my head off.

My son let go of the bee, tears streaming down his face. I checked his fingers for the stinger, but by the look on his face, I knew he was only crying because of me. He was scared because I was scared. And I was scared. I looked at the lawn through yellow- and black-striped glasses. My yard was a death trap.

Perhaps it is time to admit I am one of "those people" — the kind of people who rile up homeowners associations enough to pick up their pitchforks and attack, if only they could find our home behind the thicket we call a lawn. Dead in the summer, fall and winter, my yard is covered in rogue rosebushes and spiny grasses in the spring.

It didn't start out this way. There was a time when my husband would freak out if you left a ball on the lawn, because "it will kill the grass underneath." But then there was a drought. Then our sprinklers broke. One thing led to another, and here we are. The ugly-lawn house. On the plus side, I get reprimanded less for leaving sports equipment around.

I began enjoying being one of "those people." I liked imagining the stories neighbors concocted about us — the kind I used to think of when I was a kid. If the weeds just grow a little higher, I thought, I may even get to possible-witch status. That would be cool.

But my lofty Wiccan aspirations were cut short. After the bee incident, I knew I had to do something about my overgrown vortex of death. Someone had to cut down the risk of the lawn reaper, so I grabbed my shovel and hedge clippers.

It started innocently enough. I snipped a few stray branches off the bushes. Then I cut the bushes back until they were covering only half the walkway. Snip. Snip. Then I cut the branches so they were not covering the walkway at all. By the time the path was clear, I was hooked.

Never one to garden before, I took to it like a teenager getting revenge on an ex. I was vengeful. Wrathful. And gleeful to be so. After the bushes were mere skeletons of their once wild, albeit beautiful, selves, I moved on to the rest of the lawn. Instead of bringing out the mower, I began cutting down the spiny weeds in my lawn one by one with the clippers, imagining them as an army out to attack my child. I actually began speaking to the plants as I cut them down to size.

"You think you can come here, to my lawn, and hurt my child? Is that what you think? Not in my backyard, buddy!" Snip!

I ripped up weeds, removed dead plants, broke off brittle branches from plants long dead. I saw everything as either waiting to impale my child or attracting something ominous so he would end up like Macaulay Culkin in "My Girl." My son will not lose his glasses looking for your mood ring, Vada Sultenfuss.

With each plant I pulled, I felt both more empowered and more embarrassed by how negligent I had been. There was a tree growing in my backyard covered in spines, each more than an inch long. What kind of parent allows that to grow in her lawn? Even the Lorax would grab a chain saw before getting all tree-hugger on that spiny sapling! It took me more than an hour of thrusting the shovel into the roots before I was able to dig up the killer tree and dispose of it.

When my husband came home, I ran over to tell him what a hedge-clipping rock star I was. To show him my actual green thumbs. (Who knew that was a real thing?) To gloat about how I had singlehandedly dug up a tree! A whole tree! But before I could, my husband said, "Hey, baby, happy Earth Day."

I hung my head in shame.

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