But All The Cool Kids Were Doing It

My parents divorced the summer I turned eleven years old. It was hard on me, losing my father (he never really came by after the divorce, not really a visitation' kind of guy) and I felt pretty alone in the world for a while. Anyway, my mother acted in much the same way as many recently divorced women. She lost weight, had her hair done, and went out with friends determined to cheer her up. And she left my little brother and I in the care of a local high-school girl. For two dollars an hour Lori would come over, watch television, and basically ignore us. But she was cool. She had long dark hair, a car, and a boyfriend. There was a constant stream of beautiful people coming through my house, especially when Lori started babysitting all day during the summers.

I wanted to be Lori. I wanted to be five nine and thin with a huge 80s perm and a fake-bake tan so dark it could change my race. I wanted the cute jock boyfriend and the prom queen best friend. I wanted to drive and buy my own Debbie Gibson tapes and smoke long menthol cigarettes. But I was only eleven and I couldn't drive yet, or buy much of anything with my tiny allowance. I burnt if I stayed in the sun for more than half an hour and I would never reach five nine in my life. But I could smoke, and I did.

Fast forward almost twenty years and I am now just a cool as I dreamed. Yellowed teeth, a hacking cough, thirty dollars poorer every week. Yep, nothing says "Cool" better than a dirt-poor nicotine-stained walking ball of phlegm. If I keep it up I can accomplish the single sexiest aspect of smoking: excessive aging. I can hardly wait.

So I'm going to quit. I have heard nothing but good about the latest prescription-only quitting aid and I have made an appointment for five days from today to request a prescription. I think I am finally ready to quit. They always say that if you don't really want to quit you won't be able to, and I believe them. I don't know who "they" are, but I believe them on this one. I have been on the patch before which, depending on the strength, made me either nauseous or had absolutely no noticeable effect. I have tried tapering down, an endeavor which took two months just to convince me that I was more willing to endure the possibility of far-away cancer than the reality of right-then misery. And I have tried quitting cold-turkey, which lasted twenty-three full hours, ten of which were spent sleeping. I've even put rubber bands around my wrist and snapped them until I had a welt that looked like a suicide attempt. But all of these attempts to quit had one thing in common; I was doing it for reasons other than truly wanting to quit. I was dating a non-smoker, or I was having trouble affording the cigarettes, or I had a new job that didn't hand out smoke breaks. Even when I was pregnant I was doing it for the baby, not for myself. I wanted to smoke; I just didn't want the baby to smoke. A small distinction, but a very large obstacle. But now I want to quit smoking. I don't want Ryan to grow up believing that cigarettes are like coffee, nasty-tasting but part of adulthood, like I did. I don't want to be a pregnant smoker again. And I would really like to get in shape, but I seem to run out of breath too quickly to accomplish any real exercise. So I am counting down the days to my appointment (four days, nineteen hours, thirty minutes) and I am looking forward to the day when I wake up in the morning and don't feel every cell in my body screaming for a cigarette. Wish me luck.