Smoking

Dave Jones
ENGL 101
22 September 2011
Tough Decisions
Today we have so much information about the effects of drugs and alcohol on our bodies that we didn’t have 30 years ago.   Yes, back then people knew smoking cigarettes wasn’t good for your body, but a lot of people thought there were far worse things you could be doing.   My mother was one of those people; she was a smoker for 10 years until she realized she wanted to have kids.   She had to give up one of the most addictive things in her lifestyle, to have a safe future for her child.
I went a full 13 years before knowing my mom even smoked cigarettes.   My aunt would always come over on the weekends and eat dinner with us and abruptly leave right after we finished eating.   Being fairly naïve and young, I was curious to see what she was always doing out there so I asked my mother.   My mom told me she was smoking a cigarette because she wanted too, with already being taught not to smoke in school I immediately talked about how disgusting it was and my mother agreed.   Later that night, after my aunt had left, my mom told me that my aunt was addicted to cigarettes and was trying to quit but it was hard for her to curb her addiction.   Of course, since I was young, I asked “why can’t she just stop?”   My mom explained to me why it isn’t easy to stop all of a sudden and that she had to make that decision before she got pregnant with my sister, who is twenty-two months older than me.   I was pretty shocked when my mom told me she smoked long before she had my sister.   At that point my image of my mom changed.   I’m not saying I was ashamed about her smoking history, but when I realized my mom was a smoker for 10 years, I lost a tiny amount of respect for her just because I hated cigarettes so much.
At this point, my mom pulled out old photos of her to further prove she usually had a cigarette in her hand when she went out with my dad.   I thought it looked funny with a cigarette in her hand because for the 13 years...