“Jen, have you started smoking again?”
This has been a question that she has been asking me repeatedly ever since my aunt started smelling cigarette smoke from my room during my college days in Quezon City and ratted me out to my mom.
“It’s nothing,” I told her back then, to which she preceeded with her tirade of “You know very well what smoking can do to your health, blah, blah, blah… Your dad doesn’t even smoke, blah, blah, blah… That’s where you’re wasting your allowance, blah, blah, blah… You should stop, blah, blah, blah…”
Back in those days, and for the next few years after, I have denied the smoking issue vehemently. When arriving from hospital duty and smelling like nicotine, I told her the doctors smoke at the Intern’s Quarters and the smell sticks to my bags and to my clothes. After smoking in my room, I spray a quarter of my own perfume in every corner of the room. When that doesn’t work, I tell her, it must be coming from the neighbors (which houses are thankfully just a few feet away from my own window). When she caught me with a pack of cigarette in my bag, I told her I was just holding it for a friend. The strength to quit smoking was just as difficult to achieve as the courage to admit to my own mother that I do smoke and this went on for years.
Lately, with a room of my own, I have been able to smoke in my own bedroom at night once my parents have gone to their own rooms. With a relaxed review schedule, I’ve also managed to smoke in the bathroom, before my morning bath, once they’ve all gone to work. The smell of shampoo, conditioner and soap thankfully provides a slight mask to the nicotine odor. But I guess I wasn’t as careful as I thought because the upper bedroom windows permeate the smoke towards the kitchen and my mom, who has a really strong knack for smelling cigarette smoke, has caught me once again.
“Yes, once in a while,” I told her.
I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was because I figured I was old enough to do whatever I wanted, without my mother still continually treating me like a child. Maybe it was because I should know by now if what I was doing was right or wrong and I wanted her to realize that I know it was wrong but she should just let me be because nobody except me can tell me to stop what I’m doing. Or maybe it was because I was just tired of lying.
“What for?” she asked me.
“I don’t know… To stay awake?” Seriously, I could not find a better answer for that question, simply because I really don’t know why the hell I smoke. Previously, during my college days, I smoked because I wanted to lose weight. And then, as I got older, it was to replace that feeling of incompleteness during the verge of depression whenever I was in between relationships. So I smoked when I was single and quit whenever I had a boyfriend. When I started smoking secretly even while I was in a relationship (To my exes, sorry guys, I lied. My love for you guys back then just wasn’t strong enough for me to give that up), it had already started to become a habit and the nicotine had started getting its claws on me, calling for me at the most inopportune of times at the most public of places. Until I just said “What the heck!” and started admitting to guys that I was dating that yes, I do smoke, take it or leave it. Curiously enough, it was the guys who accepted the smoking who are still there for me and those who forbidded it are the ones who are no longer in my phone book. But that’s another story.
My father added his own two cents’ worth. “Maybe her friends also smoke, that’s why, she does it.”
I had to hide a smile. How adorable. My Dad thinks I’m still a teenager succumbing to peer pressure. Unfortunately, none of my classmates smoked, or at least, not as regularly as I did.
My mom then went on a repeat of the tirade that happened years back, “You know very well what smoking can do to your health, blah, blah, blah… Your dad doesn’t even smoke, blah, blah, blah… That’s where you’re wasting your allowance, blah, blah, blah… You should stop, blah, blah, blah…” This time, she had additional ammunition, “Your grandfather died of a smoking-related disease at the age of 63, blah, blah, blah…”
Hmmm… Does this mean, like grandfather, like granddaughter?
I tuned out my mom. I was just too stunned with my own self why I found the need to admit to her that I smoked. What the hell came over me? I could have continued lying to her, it’s not as if I’ve never done that before. But I realized that yes, I was tired of lying. I couldn’t even ask her for kickbacks or permission not to sleep at home to her face, I usually have to text it. I was also tired of being treated like a child just because I was still living under their roof and still jobless at 27. I was also tired of being treated like I don’t know what’s best for me. I knew, I just choose not to.
So, the end result, I got a tongue-lashing from my mother, which was probably a long time coming, considering that I’ve been lying to her about my smoking for the past 5 years. But unlike what I expected, I didn’t get the “If I ever see you smoking, or smell cigarette in your room, I’ll cut off your allowance/ground you/disown you” speech. I think she figured that I had a mind of my own, I’m old enough to know what’s right for me and nothing she can say, unless I myself wanted to, can make me change my ways.
Despite the tongue-lashing and the inconvenience of having to be more careful now about my smoking under my parent’s roof, one good thing did come out of this experience.
I realized my mother still cares about me.
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