Week Two. Who Knew?

Today, I am starting week number two in my still short journey to the land of the ex-smoker. Since Day One, I have kept a spreadsheet tracking my progress that I update every day. That's just the way I do business. I keep tabs on progress like my blood pressure and pulse rate because that's important to my health and I need to know those changes. I also track my daily weight because that's important to my vanity and, like it or not, that's one of the reasons I haven't quit before now. A gozillion other women feel the same as I do. That's the way it is and I'm sticking to that story. The spreadsheet has a timer formula that tells me how many hours, minutes and even seconds that I have not had a cigarette. But one formula that I would like to put in the spreadsheet is the one to remind me how I got to this point. 

My parents were quite a bit older than my friends' folks. My Daddy was 43 and my Mother 35 when I was born. I believed that they, when I was a teenager, were so old they didn't understand what I was going through, what I was feeling and needing. I loved them, but I didn't like them much and when I thought about what I wanted in life, I knew they were exactly who I did not want to be. But how many of us are our parents now and how many of us learned to mimic their habits when we were young?

I was born in the mid '50s. As I grew up, I was there when my parents had parties. My Mother and her friends had a weekly bridge club. Ashtrays were set at every four person table, the cards and cigarettes both close to hands. Some of the women, while pregnant, smoked, some had Thursday afternoon cocktails. Saturday nights brought the really close group together, the golfer men and their wives. The women stood in the kitchen, with their cigarettes in fancy holders, laughing and gossiping; the men, in the den, talking about the last golf score or whatever men talked about then. I never sat in the same room during these get-togethers. It wasn't like I was forbidden, but I stayed close enough to listen to what they talked about, hear how they said it and watched what they did. The paneling in the den was originally an almost white pine. When I moved away from home at eighteen, it was a greenish yellow. Mother and Daddy both smoked, but Daddy quit when I was in the first grade. Mother continued for another 30 years.

Some summers, my Mother would lie on the black, hot trampoline in the backyard to tan, baby oil being the preferred tanning agent at the time and, when I was little, I played on the swing set and watched her. Back then, she was my Elizabeth Taylor, my dark haired Lucy Ricardo.  Daddy was always plowing in the field on the old Farmall tractor with no umbrella or hat. He being a farmer was always gone from sunrise to sunset. But in my little kid mind, he would always return because he was my boyfriend. They both got skin cancer.

In later years, in the summertime, my friends and I hung out by the pool at the local country club, baking in the sun. My first job was lifeguarding there; sitting high on the lifeguard stand, slathered in baby oil, my preferred tanning agent. Sometimes red, I eventually had a great tan. 

Boonesfarm wine was cheap and available. My friends and I knew where the parent-controlled hooch was hidden.  Even at sixteen, we had easy access to booze.  We also knew where the cigarettes were kept. So some of us smoked and some of us drank. There wasn’t much else to do in a small little Texas town. My friends and I learned well. We were young, we would live forever! We didn't play bridge, but we found the ashtrays and we played other games.

I don't know too many people who immediately took pristine care of themselves after their parents relinquished their responsibility of safekeeping. I know I didn't. I started my adult life, or so I thought it was my adult life, married at eighteen, marrying against my own better judgment. But that's another story. When we become adults, at whatever age that is, we are supposed to assume control of our own bodies and actions, like it or not. That means also taking the responsibility when we do unhealthy things.

Who knew? Who knew really what that responsibility was?

Mother knew I smoked, probably from the first puff I took. Daddy pretended not to know until he said. 

My Mother died of a sudden heart attack, four years after she had quit smoking. My Daddy died of lung cancer, forty years after he had quit.

We can't get back the bodies we had in our youth, those bodies that we were starting to destroy but didn't know it.  I have learned, over time, we can only nurture the ones we have now and hopefully learn from those loved ones who have died before us.

This is my journey and I'm sticking to it.

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035610542@N01/60002388/">cszar</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">cc</a>