The assignment was to find the kernel of emotional truth in the rough draft and expand upon it. Thanks for all your kind words on the first draft--I look forward to reading what you have to say about the final product.
A Relationship I Never Wanted
I started this journey by seeing how far back I could go in my memory; I ended up verbalizing how much resentment I have for a constant in my life; a constant that behaved almost as a person although it was simply a thing.
In 1969 my mother was tall and slim and had olive skin and cheekbones that reflected the miniscule amount of Cherokee blood that family legend said flowed through her veins. Her eyes were wide and liquid brown and rimmed with impossibly long lashes. Her lustrous hair was worn in long Indian braids on both sides of her head. She dressed in bell-bottom jeans and ethnic tunic tops and turned heads when she walked down the street. Strangers thought she was the Mexican nanny, shepherding her blonde, blue-eyed charges.
She loved us, her daughters, with ferocity and depth. She possessed strength and character and a drive to improve our lives that would take her from being an abandoned wife, a single mother reliant on welfare and food stamps, to a woman who worked in the upper echelons of academia and owned her own home. She was a woman who could overcome everything life threw at her, with one stark and tragic exception.
Back again to the beginning-- to what I remember first about my mother, the center of my world. With my mother there was always one thing you could count on being present. Her cigarettes defined her day, her routine, her life. When the phone rang my mother picked it up and then snapped her fingers for attention. I knew what that meant; my sister knew what that meant. Cigarettes, ashtray, lighter--now.
Besides being beautiful, smart and ambitious, my mom was introverted. Parties were infrequent, but her close female friends were ever present in our lives. They were single mothers too and many a night was spent in one or another’s living rooms, two beautiful women sitting around a low coffee table with wine glasses nestled in wooden coasters and cigarettes in hand as children ran in and out, playing, whining, needing. There was
usually laughter; there might be some venting about absentee fathers, but there was always wine and always, always cigarettes.
It was your responsibility as a child not to get burned by your mom’s cigarette, not to run up and hug her from behind without first knowing where the cigarette was. You had to be alert if you stood too close, vigilant for a conversational gesture that might bring a lit cigarette flying toward your arm or face. Of course if you got burned she was sorry, very sorry, but also there was the undercurrent of, “why wasn’t I watching out?” I felt bad too; I knew I should have been more careful.
I hated the cigarettes, even when I was young, even before I went to school, before I knew about the Surgeon General’s Warning about Tobacco Use. My nose stuffed up; I coughed and complained that I couldn’t breathe. It’s no wonder, a child allergic to smoke in a world where smoking was ubiquitous and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that. I waged a campaign, daily and tirelessly and annoyingly to get my mom to quit smoking. Finally, it worked! She quit. The guilt had become too much for her, the facts finally clear; she loved her daughters too much to risk her own premature death to lung cancer.
My sister and I were jubilant and my mom was happy that we were happy. Her happiness was short-lived and overtaken quickly by her withdrawal symptoms, by irritability on a scale previously unimaginable. She persevered for a time though, buoyed by our positive reinforcements and her own will.
We went to dinner one night in a crowded Mexican restaurant in Santa Monica, a favorite haunt, part family restaurant, part singles bar. My mother, my sister and I met my mother’s best friend and her daughter after work and school. We girls were having a good time, enjoying our hot, crispy tortilla chips, spicy salsa and the luxury of a Coke. Greta and my mother drank margaritas and talked work. My attention was diverted as my mother stood up and I realized what she was about to do. “I can’t help it. I’ve got to have a cigarette.”
Her eyes glittered with something akin to mania as she strode to the bar side of the restaurant, a stringy-haired, crying eight-year old hanging off her arm pleading through tears, “Please, Mommy don’t. Please, please!” Did she actually physically shrug me off before she turned her dazzling smile to a random man and
asked to bum a cigarette? Only after I became a mother could I begin to understand the depth of her addiction that she could choose, in such a brutal and open way, her cigarettes over her child.
Though never again as memorably, this scene was played out again and again over the years as she valiantly fought and lost to her addiction. The Schick Center with its rubber bands around your wrists as part of its aversion therapy. The hypnosis, the acupuncture, The Great-American Smokeout, the cold turkey again and again—over the years giving way to the gum and the patches and the pills. My mother once stopped smoking for seven years. She quit when she was 51. She was raising a granddaughter who had documented allergies and desperately wanted her to stop smoking. This time it was for good.
By then I had children and when she started smoking they were shocked because they’d never in their lives seen anyone smoke. They learned the rules I’d grown up with. You must stop right outside the door of a store when you left so she could light her cigarette. You had to wait outside a restaurant for her to finish her cigarette before you went in. It was different of course; she didn’t even smoke in her own home. She never was an unrepentant smoker, she was an addict. I cried when she started again after seven years of being a non-smoker. But I also believed her when she said that there hadn’t been an entire minute of those seven years that she hadn’t been craving a cigarette.
In the end the seven years of non-smoking were for naught. Lung cancer begins growing ten years before you are symptomatic. She died three years after she’d started smoking again. After her diagnosis, I took care of my mother the way she’d taken care of me as a child and a baby. Those final weeks and days, when the metastases ate away her brain, there was one thing she never forgot how to do, the thing she gave her life for. She smoked. And as I had when I was a child, after countless years of refusing to ever go to the store for cigarettes for her, after a lifetime of making sure she felt my shame and resentment, I brought her cigarettes to her.
