the habit of a lifetime

Like most kids who grew up in the 50s and 60s, my parents smoked though my dad quit about the time I was 8 or 9 I think, when all the research was coming out about how bad it was. I was pretty young because I don't actually remember him smoking but I know we had moved into the new house. He used sour lemon candies, the kind that are sweet until you bite into them and get the sour powder in the middle, to help him break the habit.

I can still see the dish of candies on the side table next to his recliner. We weren't really allowed to eat them as they were his candies but we did sneak one now and then. Whenever he felt the urge to smoke, he would eat a candy or two instead. I think that for awhile he just shifted his addition to those candies.

The other thing I remember about my father smoking is that he used a human skull cap for an ashtray. Once he quit smoking it became just another ornament in the house. I don't know what happened to it after he died. I know it was still on his desk. Perhaps my brother has it or maybe my sister.

My mother, though, never quit. Not even when she started having TIAs (transient ischemic attack or mini-stroke). She only quit once she was in the family home because she needed 24 hour care and they didn't allow smoking. She was very sneaky about getting cigarettes though. She would talk people into bringing some to her. Of course it only aggravated her condition and when we found out we would roundly chastise whoever had given them to her. Eventually she ran out of people she could call.

I remember when the first anti-smoking campaign came out. Us kids jumped on it trying to get our mother to quit. We were tired of the smoke filled house and going anywhere in the car was even worse. It's a wonder we're not all dead from second hand smoke.

Dad brought home some posters one day. My siblings and I took one of them and pinned it on our parent's bedroom door while our mother was out.

She was not amused.

Eventually I grew up and went off to college and picked it up myself. Even then more people smoked than not. Didn't really care for it though so I quit after a couple of years. I was more into smoking pot.

My first husband was a smoker too. He was also a lazy no good bum who couldn't be bothered to get out of bed every morning and look for a job, much less go to work. I would come home from my job and he would still be in bed, watching TV (the Sony Trinitron his mother gave him for his birthday), the house a mess and forget any meal waiting. That was the woman's job.

I think the day I came home and found the ashtray mounded up so full of cigarette butts that they were spilling out and onto the floor was the day I began my exit from that relationship.

Several years later I married again to another smoker but when the kids were still small in the early 80s, he quit. It only lasted a few years before he started up again but I took the opportunity to ban smoking in the house. When friends and family came over, they had to step outside to have a smoke.

Once again, my mother was not amused.

It was a very radical move at the time, to expect your friends and family, your guests, to step outside no matter what the weather to have a smoke. My mother thought that she should be the exception. It took another 20 years or so for smoking to be banned indoors in public places.

Mother eventually died from the cumulative effect of her TIAs. My brother-in-law, who smoked for 50 years, died from stage 4 metastatic lung cancer two or three years after he quit. My husband finally quit smoking again about 2 ½ years ago.

The jury is still out on him.