Smoke 'em if You Got 'em

 

Well, it is raining and storming and it just seems like a good day to continue on with the story. Also, thank you to those who read the first installment and commented. Writers and bloggers are a greedy sort who get their self-worth from their readers and the opinions of their writing from said readers. Not really....but sometimes. So onto our story. 

In order to understand me and my story, first, you must understand my mother and her story. I never realized it so much growing up as I do now. My mom and I were so much alike, that at times it tore us apart. To this day though, even all these years after her passing, sometimes I open my mouth and her words fall out or I do something, and it's as if she was the driving force behind it. I guess many mothers and daughters are like that. So when I say, she created me and formed many of my ideas about life, living, and even dying, I am really not kidding. 

Today I am going to talk not so much about genetics but more about societal norms, what we are taught, what we believe, and what can seem good and turn out very bad. None of us are immune to this and all of us have likely experienced some form of getting caught up in craziness served up as societal norms. So imagine it being 1954. My mom had just graduated from a small Oklahoma high school in a town that barely held a thousand people. Mom had played basketball all through junior high and high school and was pretty darn good at it. (Let me just interject here that I got NONE of her athleticism). She was an amazing dancer too. That gene also bypassed me. 

Along with her prowess on the basketball court, she was also homecoming queen, and to quote her own words, she thought she was a pretty big deal in her town, not because of her athletic skills, but because she was Ray Dougherty's daughter. This translated into, my mother idolizing her dad and thus assuming the rest of the world did too (to be fair, many that knew him did), so this somehow elevated her status in not only her school and town but also the world as far as she was concerned. 

Being the youngest of eleven, Mom was of course spoiled (by attention, not material things. They had no money for material things) and she was a bit of a rebel, which often did not bode well for her. So when she graduated in 1954, she was not going to be the girl who got married and immediately settled down and had kids. No, her aspirations were loftier than that. This may have been spurred on by the fact that as poor as they were, all of her older siblings (including the girls) either went onto college, nursing, the military, or some kind of certified training. Mom had no desire to go to college but nursing interested her, so fall of 1955, she was enrolled in St. Anthony's two-year RN nurses training. 

Now Mom's impetuousness to be an adult and to do adult things was probably not her best feature at this point in her life. However, she was not alone in her desire to grow up and be a woman of the world. As Mom told it, nursing school back then was much different than it is now. There was some classroom work, but much of the training was on the job. In fact, at this point in time, they didn't even call it nursing school. It was called "nurses training" and a great deal had to be covered in that two years of training. Not only was classwork expected and in-hospital training, but they also were required to work shifts during all of this. Apparently falling asleep on your feet was not an uncommon activity among these overworked and underpaid young women. 

Part of the training was that each nurse in training had to work in every department for a month to six weeks. This was everything from obstetrics to cardiac to ER and psych. It is here where I am going to let you know why at times I question the intelligence of the medical community. My mom was in a class of about 25 girls. When they began their psych rotation, not one of those girls had ever touched a cigarette. Six weeks later, all but two were smokers, and most became lifelong smokers. At one time before my mother died, she told me that she had already outlived most of her nursing class. It is just unfathomable.

So why were all these smokers created in a hospital of all places?  Well, if you know anything about past history, smoking was considered a social norm well into the 1970s. The cool factor and "health benefits" were touted by models, actors, the media, and even the medical community. In fact, there was no place where you couldn't smoke, including in hospitals. So along with the social acceptance of it all, apparently psychologists and psychotherapists were of the mind that it was somehow therapeutic for patients in the psych ward to smoke on a regular basis as part of their therapy. It didn't stop there though. The therapy points were somehow really upped if the nurses smoked with the patients, so every time a patient smoked, the nurses would hear "smoke 'em if you got 'em," and they were expected to smoke right along with the patients. 

These poor girls were pack-a-day smokers before they even graduated. Along with what seems today like the sheer insanity of all of this, these girls were under extreme stress with their schedules and they learned that smoking was the cure for hunger, sleep deprivation, coping with their busy lives, and all the stress that accompanied all of their lives. Yes, these girls were not just physical smokers, in six weeks they had become emotional smokers too, completely dependent on menthol, tar, and nicotine to get them through their days, their stress, and in many cases, the rest of their lives. 

Jump ahead to the 1960s. Yes, if you are wondering, she did smoke when she was pregnant with me. No one thought it was dangerous or destructive to do so. In fact, she was allowed to smoke while in labor. Let's not kid ourselves though, with the stress of being an unwed mother, trying to hide her indiscretion from her family, having all those that did know her situation begging her to give me up for adoption, and still having to work full time to keep food on the table, even if society had believed at the time that smoking was dangerous, she was so emotionally and physically attached to cigarettes that I doubt she could have taken nine months off of smoking, even if she tried. 

From my first memories, I don't ever remember my mom not smoking. She smoked socially and at home. She smoked at the store, when she came to open house at my school, working in the yard, and sometimes even in her sleep. The fact that she never burned down our house was nothing short of a miracle. In fact, for most of my childhood, she was at least a two-three pack-a-day smoker. 

Now here is another reason I question the medical field so often. Remember me telling you that my brother and I were both asthmatics? Well, Mom, as most smokers did back then, smoked in the house and in the car. I would be in the throes of an asthma attack and Mom would put me in the car, and run me to the doctor. On that car ride though, I would be wheezing and gasping for air and she would have the car windows up and be smoking the whole way. Once we got to the doctor, they would rush me into a room where both the doctor and my mother would be smoking and discussing what might have instigated this attack. What were they thinking? Today, I have scars on my lungs from all the asthma-related pneumonia I have had in my life and I struggle at times to remember that if a doctor thought it okay to smoke while I was having an asthma attack, why would my mom have thought she was doing anything wrong by doing the same? Sometimes it is hard to forgive the unforgivable. 

By the time I hit junior high school, my mom had set a pretty firm example without even realizing it, that stress required self-medication, whether that was food or cigarettes. Cigarettes though were starting to get a pretty bad wrap among non-smokers and funny thing, the medical community was starting to change their tune on the "health benefits" of these little cancer sticks. No more were there commercials or ads promoting cigarettes and the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association were creating big campaigns, warning us all of the long-term dangers of cigarettes. Even at school, we were starting to be educated on the health risks of smoking, albeit there were a lot of mixed messages for my generation as we were told in health class not to smoke and then the students went to the bathroom to have a cigarette and the teachers went to the teachers' lounge to do the same. Re-educating the world was a long and tedious process, mostly because of people like my mom. 

When I would come home parroting what I was told at school about the dangers of smoking, it truly irritated my mom. If I brought literature home and ask her to read it, she would immediately file it in the kitchen trash without a single glance. She was invested in her smoking. It was a part of her and she was not about to listen to the medical community tell her cigarettes were dangerous and she shouldn't do it when that very same community was who introduced her to smoking in the first place. 

As I got older and realized how much I hated her smoking, I would beg her to quit. I knew how much my mom loved me and my brother and I figured if I asked her to do it for us, she would not refuse me. What I didn't realize or understand at all, was that my mom was an addict. She was addicted to smoking and she couldn't stop at that point, although I do know that at times she tried. She and I would have terrible fights over her smoking and yet it always resulted in me giving up and her continuing to do as she had always done.....smoke! 

Eventually, I became a young adult, and try as the medical community might, they still had not totally erased the "cool factor" of smoking. My friends and I hung out at bars and when you drank you smoked. Because of my asthma though, I was never truly married to smoking and I did it exclusively with my friends. During this period though, I did try to blackmail my mom with my newfound skill and told her if she didn't stop smoking that I would start (she at the time didn't know I already had.) My mother, not one to be blackmailed and in no mood to stop when I was trying to strong-arm her, did a classic mom move and handed me a cigarette. I was stunned but not as stunned as she was when I lit it and smoked the entire thing in front of her. That little game though got us nowhere and didn't get either of us to change our views or our actions for quite some time to come. 

My last cigarette happened the minute someone told me my breath smelled like an ashtray. My vanity was far greater than my desire to smoke. For Mom though, her lightbulb moment didn't come until she was diagnosed with her first cancer and after her surgery, her lung collapsed. At that point, she was smoking over four packs a day and upon going into the hospital she had every expectation to light up the moment the surgery was over. In fact, she had even snuck cigarettes into the hospital (they were a no-no in hospitals at this time and had been for quite a while). However, her lung collapsing scared her so badly that she left the hospital on the patch and never touched another cigarette again. 

This woman was definitely a conundrum having such a strong addiction for so many years and unwittingly teaching us that life required self-medication with catchphrases like "Cigarettes are the only enjoyment in my life" (guess us kids and grandkids were a little lackluster next to her smokes), and "Mind your own business. It's my life." Suddenly though, she just stopped. I know it wasn't easy but the willpower she showed, even if it was fear-induced, taught me a great deal about commitment, strength, and the desire to do better when she finally knew better. 

So how does this all affect who I am? How does it not? All the life lessons woven into the years of smoking, addiction, and all that went with it, left lasting impressions on me, both positive and negative, as well as physical consequences. My health was impaired because of it and her health was drastically changed for the worse because of it. 

Knowing now what we know about smoking, we know that it likely caused major issues with her Lupus as well as helping her lung cancer along. Her battle with the addiction of smoking also taught me to be obsessive about certain things even if they aren't good for me. I learned to be wickedly stubborn, even if it wasn't to my benefit, but I also learned that my actions can at times affect my children negatively and I have to be careful so as to not give them lasting repercussions and even fatal consequences.  

Please don't get me wrong though. My mom was more than just her smoking and I would not trade her at her worst or our relationship at its worst for anything. While I don't like to ever think of my mother as a victim, the truth is, she was at a very young age. She was a victim of misinformation and her own worst inclinations. She was also brave, fierce, loving, kind, wise, and smoking aside, a truly great mom. For better or worse, my life with her molded me and gave me both the positive and negative which I am still learning to navigate my way through. Perhaps if Mom had realized that she really was a big deal and the head-long rush and rebellion into the world weren't quite as necessary as she once thought, her path and choices might have been different and consequently so might mine have been. But then again, had things been different, I might not even be here today, so maybe everything does happen with a purpose and maybe that is why I am writing this today. 

(The next installment is coming. I don't know when, but I promise not to disappoint. As always I welcome your comments and hope you get as much from reading this as I do from writing it. Until next time......)