The Bondage is Gone.
4-4-2020.
It’s a pretty cool number, I think, and makes for an awesome milestone marker. 4-4-2020 is the date I celebrated 20 years without a cigarette.
For some people, this is just a number. Those people have never smoked cigarettes. They’ve never felt the tug of true addiction.
I thought about cigarettes before I opened my eyes in the morning. Smoking was the last thing I did before I went to sleep. And I thought about smoking all day long – when can I smoke? where can I smoke? is it time for another one? – and I smoked between 20 and 60 cigarettes every day for fifteen years.
This isn’t really a parenting issue – but for me, quitting smoking had everything to do with parenting. I’d tried to quit many times, but I never cared enough about my own life to do it.
Then I got pregnant. And suddenly I had to consider my unborn baby. Dylan’s life mattered. So I quit smoking, saving both of us.
Holding my newborn, I didn’t think, Gee, now I can have a cigarette. Instead I thought, I finally have a reason to live.
I quit so that my children would have a mother. They needed me. And they didn’t need to live with secondary smoke. Our health mattered.
But there have been side benefits. I don’t stink anymore. I don’t cough up phlegm. And I don’t have the yellow pallor I’d developed after a decade with a cigarette in my hand.
Most triumphantly, I am not obsessed with cigarettes. I don’t have the insatiable desire that forced me to leave home at all hours of the day and night to buy cigarettes. There’s no more nagging in my brain, screaming for MORE MORE MORE.
The bondage is gone. Instead, there’s a calm, quiet peace in my brain. (The nagging sometimes come back in the form of food cravings – but that’s another story.)
I would never have believed, back then, that two decades later, I’d be in the midst of a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system. Not only are my lungs healthy now, but my immune system – even with an autoimmune disorder – is stronger than it’s ever been in my adult life.
And my newborn, who spent his childhood coughing all night long for six months out of the year – until we figured out that he had Reactive Airways Disease – that boy is also stronger now than he’s ever been. He hasn’t had any issue since 2015, when we discovered that high altitudes are tougher on him than most people.
I worry about my husband. He didn’t quit smoking when I was pregnant. He didn’t quit smoking for many, many years after I did. Eventually, he decided that his life was worthwhile. I think.
Bill did quit smoking; I don’t know exactly when. But he’s older than I am, and he started smoking earlier in his life than I did, so he smoked for twice as long as I did. But he smoked fewer cigarettes a day, which gives me an unsettled sense of hope.
These days, Bill coughs and clears his throat all day, and blames the pollen. He doesn’t smoke. Doctors have scanned his lungs annually and found no issues. Still, I worry.
But for me, it’s been 20 years of freedom, 20 years of peace. And now, in a cruel irony, I have the added benefit of having a healthy respiratory system – at least for today – when I really need one.
It’s amazing to me how little any of that freedom would matter if something happened to my husband or children.