On Our Own Terms
It hasn't happened to me yet. God willing, it never will. But I imagine that few things make a parent feel like a failure quite like learning that one of your children smokes.
I know that both of my parents were incredibly dismayed when I took up the habit during college. Of course, we'll conveniently ignore the fact that both of my parents smoked more than a pack a day themselves. Parents see their culpability acutely enough, without having it pointed out to them.
So perhaps it was unfair of me to suggest to my mother that maybe I was born addicted to nicotine, seeing as she probably smoked while I was in utero.
She didn't appreciate that at all. Even if there may have been a kernel of truth in there.
You have to give them credit though. Once they got over the initial shock of my habit, they managed to walk the delicate line between understanding and wishing I would quit without becoming annoying or cloying.
Heck, for a while, my mom and I smoked the same brand and would regularly bum smokes off each other.
But they always made it clear that they wished I would quit.
I don't remember what started it, but at one point, my father decided that he was ready to quit. And since he wanted me to quit too, he came up with a plan: we would make a bet. We would quit together, and whichever of us smoked first would have to pay the other a decent chunk of money. I would have to pay him $150, and he would have to pay me $500. (I was a college student -- he was a businessman, hence the disparity.)
It was the easiest $500 I ever made, because he didn't last a week. He had a business trip, was alone in a hotel room, and caved. To his credit, he called to tell me almost immediately.
I confess, at the time, I had a bit of an antagonistic relationship with him, and I took this as one more sign that this bet - that I - wasn't all that important to him. I was wrong. I know that now, but at 19, I was riddled with anger and frustration and weltschmertz and was all too happy to have a convenient direction to point it in.
I used that self-righteous anger as justification to start smoking again. Especially when months went by and my dad didn't pay up, further proof that he wasn't serious about it.
Until Thanksgiving day, when he dropped a check in my lap - a well-timed check, as I was on the hook for a $200 pair of glasses.
Of course, I was smoking again by that point. Talk about feeling low.
He knew I was smoking, but he also knew that he caved first. He never heaped excess guilt on me, and in future conversations when I expressed regret, he always told me that he didn't feel like I did anything to feel guilty about, that I had won fair and square.
Still, there are times when I still, to this day, feel like I should give that money back.
Post Script: I stopped smoking about four years later when my wife told me she wouldn't raise kids in a house with a smoker. My father quit smoking around a year ago when his health got to a point where he could see smoking shortening his life in concrete ways.
So, in the end, the spirit of the bet has been upheld by both of us, on our own terms.
4 splash(es):
And I love you both for those very reasons!
Interesting post. I'm not a regular smoker nor have I ever been. I do smoke once in a while when I drink or "party" or whatever. My mom is a smoker. My husband is a smoker. My sister is a smoker. It's weird because I grew up in a pretty strict house where if I smoked I'd face some pretty severe consequences (My mom wasn't a smoker when I was growing up). Now my mom is so different and she smokes and uses certain drugs. It's weird for me to smoke with my mom and do drugs with her now. It's like a whole different relationship.
I'm actually about to write a blog about smoking because my daughter talks about doing it when she grows up to be "like daddy" and will pretend and whatnot that's she doing so. It's kind of disturbing actually.
I'm really glad you quit smoking. I know from talking to my family just how difficult that is to do.
As usual, really great life story. Doesn't it all make perfect sense when you look back on it??
I, too, am glad you dropped the smoking. I remember when we first met you and you had to run out the house to go get your smoke on. I'm glad you stopped it for your sake, Molly's sake and, even though you didn't know it at the time, your kids' sake. I know it couldn't have been easy.
DH stopped cold turkey about 8 years ago. I didn't realize it for about a month. Boy was I happy when I did finally figure it out. Our children have been able to grow up "smoke free."
The interesting thing about smoking in our family, mom and step dad smoked like freaking freight trains the entire time we were growing up. They smoked filterless Pall Malls and Camels. I mean - - the real good stuff!! They both stopped cold turkey when William first got sick.
At the time, the majority of us were teenagers. Kerri and Peyton were only toddlers. The teenagers remembered the hacking and wheezing and coughing and the spitting up of crud and the stink and the cost.... AND, William nearly dying from pneumonia likely made more dangerous because he smoked. The little ones didn't witness any of that.
Lo and behold, all these years later, none of the "teenagers" smoke. In general, we all find it pretty repulsive and gross. But, the little kids both smoke like freight trains.
I always felt it turned out this way b/c we saw what he could do and didn't like it. The little ones never saw it....until now.
My father developed precancerous lesions in his mouth when I was a kid. He smoked a pipe and cigars--and not often, either. No cigarettes.
Anyway, this made quite an impression on me. I've never smoked.
I do remember rather liking the smell of pipe tobacco, though. (Not cigars--ugh.)
(PS: He's 84 and generally in good health.)
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