God has delivered me, praise His name, from smoking. 
I don't want to take any credit for it myself. HE did it.
What I'd like to do now, and what might be helpful to others, is to analyze the mindset that drove me to smoking in the first place. Changing the mindset would make relapse less likely, it seems to me.
I come from a family full of smokers. I had my first puff at the age of 12; it's even worse for my sister. She was 5!!! My two brothers, who fall between my sister and me in age, began smoking about the same time I did. That would make them around 10 and 11.
And of course, my parents were smokestacks. All dozen or so of them. Yes, that's right. Mother, father, and a number of step-fathers, plus live-in relationships in between the marriages. At no point was my mother ever a single parent for any appreciable length of time. It was a crazy childhood, but the point I'm making is that every blessed one of them smoked.
What made me light up? Was it peer pressure? The desire to be grown up? Pure rebellion? Wanting to be cool? To show myself and the other kids that I wasn't this socially despised goody-two-shoes after all? Yes, to all of those. I saw smoking as something adults did, and children didn't. And oh, how I wanted to be an adult. In our family, adults had all the rights. Children had NONE.
We were raised on hypocrisy and double standard. My father once thundered at the four of us (after each one of us had already started smoking) "YOU WILL NOT SMOKE CIGARETTES!" It is still a family joke to this day that his next words without even skipping a beat were, "Pass me the ashtray." Very effective parenting. And typical in our household. "I get to do it, but don't you dare."
Then there were the kids in our neighborhood. Where I went to school, there were rules on how to be accepted as part of the cool crowd. Not only did you have to smoke, but you had to smoke a certain brand of cigarettes. You had to stand in a specific posture, hold the cigarette just so, and bring it to your lips with the correct motion. Inhaling is mandatory, and Heaven help you if you gag on the smoke. There was even a prescribed method for crushing out the butt. And here I am, joining in so that I can show I'm free from rules!
The biggest possible stumbling block, for me, is still thinking somewhere in my head that smoking is something adults do, and kids don't, that cool people do and nerds don't. Some small piece of me still thinks that by not smoking I'm being Mommy's good little girl, who all the other kids are going to pick on for being so good. Isn't it strange how we get these things in our head?
I don't want to take any credit for it myself. HE did it.What I'd like to do now, and what might be helpful to others, is to analyze the mindset that drove me to smoking in the first place. Changing the mindset would make relapse less likely, it seems to me.
I come from a family full of smokers. I had my first puff at the age of 12; it's even worse for my sister. She was 5!!! My two brothers, who fall between my sister and me in age, began smoking about the same time I did. That would make them around 10 and 11.
And of course, my parents were smokestacks. All dozen or so of them. Yes, that's right. Mother, father, and a number of step-fathers, plus live-in relationships in between the marriages. At no point was my mother ever a single parent for any appreciable length of time. It was a crazy childhood, but the point I'm making is that every blessed one of them smoked.
What made me light up? Was it peer pressure? The desire to be grown up? Pure rebellion? Wanting to be cool? To show myself and the other kids that I wasn't this socially despised goody-two-shoes after all? Yes, to all of those. I saw smoking as something adults did, and children didn't. And oh, how I wanted to be an adult. In our family, adults had all the rights. Children had NONE.
We were raised on hypocrisy and double standard. My father once thundered at the four of us (after each one of us had already started smoking) "YOU WILL NOT SMOKE CIGARETTES!" It is still a family joke to this day that his next words without even skipping a beat were, "Pass me the ashtray." Very effective parenting. And typical in our household. "I get to do it, but don't you dare."
Then there were the kids in our neighborhood. Where I went to school, there were rules on how to be accepted as part of the cool crowd. Not only did you have to smoke, but you had to smoke a certain brand of cigarettes. You had to stand in a specific posture, hold the cigarette just so, and bring it to your lips with the correct motion. Inhaling is mandatory, and Heaven help you if you gag on the smoke. There was even a prescribed method for crushing out the butt. And here I am, joining in so that I can show I'm free from rules!
The biggest possible stumbling block, for me, is still thinking somewhere in my head that smoking is something adults do, and kids don't, that cool people do and nerds don't. Some small piece of me still thinks that by not smoking I'm being Mommy's good little girl, who all the other kids are going to pick on for being so good. Isn't it strange how we get these things in our head?
