Confessions of a Smoker

I used to be a smoker.  When I was 10.  At least once a week, my bestie Suzanne and I would climb on our bikes and take the mile-long ride across busy streets, sans helmet and without adult supervision down to Ernie’s liquors (that’s right…a LIQUOR store) to buy a pack.  We could hardly wait to get our fix and we would’ve smoked ‘em right then and there if we weren’t so excited to scurry back home to choreograph our latest music video in my front yard.  We had things to do, and that sweet feeling of the sleek stick between our lips helped us power through our creative challenges and really freaked out the neighbors as we exhaled the smoke.

The CANDY smoke, of course.  They weren’t real.  They were the product of a misguided marketing scheme that somehow determined that giving faux cigarettes to small children was acceptable.  You could never find such a bad idea on the shelves today.  But we loved them then.  We got a real kick out of them.  And it wasn’t a secret.  We were open and notorious with our habit.  Mom saw us prancing around holding them daintily between our middle and forefingers and pressing them to our lips like a saucy, but irresistibly attractive protagonist in an edgy Hitchcock film.  She watched as we brazenly relaxed on the front steps with our smokes and puffed the afternoon away (before we would turn around and fully consume them).

And looking back on that, I can appreciate my mom's LIFE LESSON #11

LETTING YOUR KIDS HAVE CANDY CIGARETTES DOES NOT MEAN THEY WILL GROW UP TO BE SMOKERS.  (also known as Choose Your Battles Wisely)

I shudder to think how I might overreact should my kids saunter home with candy cigarettes.  I would probably swipe them from their little misguided mouths and launch into a tirade about the dangers of nicotine, the gateway effects of smoking, and next thing we know, they will be cooking meth in our basement should they keep marching down this perilous path to perdition (you see where I’m going with this). 

But I remember how mom would just laugh at us (though I am quite certain that had those been actual Marlboros, there would’ve been nothing to laugh at for a very long time).  She was secure in her righteous example.  Sure that the lessons she lived everyday would act as my guiding principles. 

And so I have never been a smoker.  Never has actual nicotine passed my virgin lips.  I’ve never ventured down a dark alley looking for a fix or headed to anybody’s mobile meth-lab to help mix up a batch.  I turned out pretty all right despite my brief foray into candy-fueled rebellion.  {I should add here that Suzanne could say the same…she turned out pretty stellar herself}.  

Most things are not worth freaking out over.  You have to pick the important stuff.  I try to keep that in the back of my head when I am convinced that my lack of parental oversight is ruining my children.  I think of my mother laughing at our poor, albeit fake, smoking decisions when I let my four year-old stay up way past midnight to play the Wii with her crazy cousins.  I try to envision how she might have even encouraged the fact that my sister and I trek to the convenience store at 10PM for fountain sodas in order fuel our kids for their late-night ‘Just Dance’ parties.  See evidence of sugar crash HERE: 

Caris & Chloe at 2 AM-ish.

We must choose our battles wisely (Mom said this to me more times than I can remember).  With our kids.  With our friends.  With ourselves.  We must pick the big things to really lose our minds over.  How is anyone to discern what matters to us most if we can’t help them out with a little restraint and a little laughter in lieu of loud voices? 

I must work on this. I must strive to follow her example today, just like I did back then when I chose health over cigs.  So I try to let the little things go.  Freak out less.  See the humor more.  That's what Mom would do.

But so help me if my daughter comes home pretending to smoke a cigarette…