Two days a week when I get home I am greeted by the profound warmth of my mother’s arms. Two days a week as I fling my bag onto the hardwood floor I take in the smells of a home-cooked meal and a clean house. For those two days my mother does not dig her knuckles into a client’s back, pinch pesky pimples, or push back cuticles on nails covered with “Paint My Moji-toes Red.” Instead, for two days, she dips her pinkie into a well-seasoned sauce and massages pepper and salt onto a slab of beef. Two days a week my mother is free from her job, and she spends them doing the work of home.

I love these two days. Because although the floors must be mopped and the meals cooked, Mom is home. Because when I am finished with homework and tests and swimming and reading, and my mom is finished cleaning and cooking, we can enjoy time together.

In the summer, when I am not as burdened with my studies, my mother and I take mini-vacations on these two days. Breakfast at the Brownstone is followed by therapeutic shopping, then a relaxing stroll by the Hudson River. On the drive home, loyal to tradition, we scream out the car windows, then keel over laughing.

But today, there are crisp leaves scattered on lawns and therefore no pancakes, no strolls, and no screaming. Feeling tired of schoolwork, I go into my bedroom and jump onto the bed, interrupting my mother’s cleaning. As she battles the debris, she recalls memories from her glory days traveling the world as a stewardess, sporting designer bags and mink coats, and strolling the streets of Seoul, my fist tightly grasping her manicured pinkie. Seeing my mother speak so wistfully of her past, I promise her, as I always do, that when I become successful we will go back to Seoul (and Hawaii and Paris and Italy), and she will see Grandma again (for the first time in 11 years), and I will buy her designer bags and mink coats galore. I promise her all the wonders of the world, and even if I cannot keep these promises it doesn’t matter, because hearing them transforms her wistfulness into contentment. And then we go back to spontaneous giggles or a query of some sort, as my untiring (or rather, tired and simply not acknowledging it) mother scrubs and cleans.

The scattered papers and books heaped on my desk foretell a late night of cramming, yet I turn my head away. I’d much rather get a couple hours less of sleep than disturb these rare hours of gossiping and laughing with my mom.

In the kitchen, I find myself washing lettuce and handing it to my mother, who skillfully slices it and piles it in a pot. Our steady stream of conversation never loses momentum, but gradually shifts from the topic of school to fatty American food to a new TV series, then the health benefits of coconut oil. Every so often, my mother complains about her aching back or her unsettled stomach. Still, she doesn’t stop seasoning meat and slicing avocados. I give her back a rub, sorry that that is the extent of what I can do for her. I hate my uselessness, hate that I can’t do anything, hate that I can’t just say, “Mom, let’s go see a doctor.”

Instead, I tell my mother about a book I’ve recently picked up. “It’s about an abused child who runs away from his cruel parents and builds a life of his own.”

My mother gasps. “What? Don’t lie. No mother would do that to her child.” Call it naivety or innocence, but to my idealistic mother, there are no such things as sadistic parents.

Dinner (where I force my dad to eat my diligently cleaned lettuce) and 30 algebra problems later, I stand in the bathroom, nonchalantly brushing my teeth. In front of her vanity, my mother sports a seaweed face mask and squeezes out a dollop of her beloved shea butter, smoothing it over her cracked hands.

I jump onto my bed, narrowly missing my mother. I have always slept with her (and will continue to), unlike the “young adults” at school who wouldn’t be caught dead in the same bed as their mom. Sliding under the sheet, I nudge my mother and she puts her hand in mine, a long-held tradition of ours. I hold her hand close to my heart. I can feel her soft skin and the bumpy veins woven around her knuckles. My fingers trace the work-scuffed nails that once boasted expensive polish and the care of a manicurist. My fingers are laced with hers, our palms firmly bound together with a tenderness only known to mothers and daughters. Had I not known my mother’s palms so well, I might mistake them for a farmer’s, so clearly do they tell the story of her labors. Her palms are coarse to the touch, the calluses so cracked, so thick, they cannot be consoled by any amount of lotion.

I hold onto this hand tightly as if it were a hand reaching over the edge of a cliff, the only thing keeping me from falling into a bottomless ocean. I hold this hand that has seen youth and has seen age. I hold it until sleep washes over my eyes.