Solo Mother

Join the Great American Smoke Out tomorrow!

by christina on November 14th, 2007

Tracee over at b5media’s Blogfabulous quit smoking this past spring. I hope she’ll do it for good… someone told her five year old daughter that her mother would die if she smoked. This, understandably, had her daughter in tears.

If you are a parent and you smoke, please take advantage of tomorrow’s Great American Smoke Out and try to quit. If you are a single mother who still smokes, PLEASE. Who will take care of your child if you get sick or die because of your cigarette habit? The American Cancer Society has some great support systems and advice to help you get through this. Please do everything you can to drop this addiction.

When I quit smoking over ten years ago, I was spending $6 a day on cigarettes. That’s nearly $2200 a year! That’s a week’s vacation in a nice spot on the beach somewhere. If you quit, take the money you were spending on cigarettes and stash it in a savings account for a year. You’ll be amazed at what you have wasted on an addiction.

And let me tell you a little something about dying from complications due to smoking: it’s hell. It’s hell on the person suffering through the ravishes of lung cancer, radiation, chemo, chemicals, injections and drugs to try to help abate whatever is inside eating you up. It’s hell on your family, who have to watch you waste away while clinging to life. It can rip the fabric of the strongest families apart, and the grief, the anger, and the exhaustion… the aftermath of watching someone die of cancer due to smoking causes deep, deep harm to the survivors. Those of us who are left behind are different people than the ones before cancer. And what a senseless death.

My son watched my aunt struggle with lung and brain cancer, still smoking her pack a day up until the very end. I can’t even count how many times his father has tried to quit — and failed. I can remember a vacation, back before the King of Everything, when the man I married was so nasty that we all begged him not to quit smoking til after the vacation was over, or he was going to ruin it for all of us. He has tried gum, the patch, Welbutrin… who knows? Perhaps this Chantrix thing will do the trick for him and the thousands like him who just can’t quit.

When I quit smoking, I locked myself into my room for four days and did the hardest jigsaw puzzle I could find. I cursed. I raved. I was a nasty, foul, bitter woman. And then I was alright. I knew I’d never smoke again, for the simple reason that I could not stand the idea of ever having to try to quit again. It was too hard.

If you do quit smoking, the one piece of advice I can give you is this: do not ever smoke another cigarette, cigar, pipe, shisha, etc. again. Don’t even play with candy cigarettes. You might think you can handle the occasional puff, but you can’t. Don’t even tempt the Fates. Once you stub out your last cigarette, don’t ever light up again.

If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your kids. They need you.

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POSTED IN: PSA