DOSE:

repeated

smoked

Tobacco - Cigarettes

(daily)

BODY WEIGHT:

121 lb

I grew up with a single mother, very protective. My father had been an alcoholic so she was more than ready to tell how we (my sister and I) were prone to addiction. After my father left with a younger woman she became fanatically religious and dragged my sister and I to church nearly every day. I’m sure there is a name for our reaction, in psychology books, but I don’t know what it is. My sister, Jessica (not her real name) was two years older than me and started rebelling two years earlier than me. She intentionally got caught smoking cigarettes at the age of fourteen. When my mother grounded her for a month she said, “Well, if I’m grounded, then I guess I’ll keep smoking.”

As religious as my mother was, smoking was something she was used to. She herself had started at the age of thirteen. Actually, she used to tell us stories about her friends and she hiding from the nuns. She didn’t smoke anymore, as she was a Church Leader, but her heritage made it impossible from stopping Jessica from defying her. From the day she first caught her, although disapproving, my mother relented, Jessica began to smoke regularly and openly in the house. Mom would even wait patiently in the car while she finished her cigarette, on occasion. It was all a strange contrast to the young girls we represented as we attended Mass nearly every day. I mention this, because it seems important. It represents the two sides of my mother….the one who sees, and the one who represents.

Of course, I begged Jessica to teach me how to smoke, and she obliged. Within two months, I was smoking so often that I got caught. Prayer meeting had been canceled due to a “Tornado Warning” and Mom came home to find Jessica and I smoking cigarettes on the deck. I was 12 years old, the summer before my eight-grade year and I was smoking at least 10 cigarettes a day.

Looking back on it, she must have watched for a while, and seen how it was clearly not my first time. All she said was, “C’mon girls, come inside…there’s a storm coming.” I stood there, shocked, holding my cigarette….knowing how busted I was. Jessica looked at me and smiled. “Don’t worry. As long as you keep praying your rosary, she’ll let it slide. Strangely, she was right. The only thing my mother has said about smoking since is, “No smoking in the hour before Mass! You’ll break your fast!”

She’d even joke about it from time to time…”Teenagers smoke.” She’d say, “Eventually you get tired of it and quit…I did.”

So, my friend Ellen spent every day after school at my house. My mother was a teacher at a Catholic Elementary and seldom got home before 6. Ellen and I would prepare the dinner recipe she’d left…(something like Hamburger Helper) and share cigarettes off the back porch. When Jessica had her friends over I’d find myself smoking a “pack a’ day” at the age of fifteen. Somehow, I figure, Mom was making a trade for our souls….She figured that going to Mass was far more good than smoking was bad. And we agreed…it was a stalemate….until Jessica turned it up a notch….,but that’s another category.

I’m nineteen now and I smoke a pack a day, easy. Jessica still smokes too…and both of us have gone beyond cigarettes…but mom doesn’t “know” and we still go to Mass with her.

Exp Year: 2003 - 2010	ExpID: 97140
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Nov 21, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Tobacco - Cigarettes (266) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Families (41), Addiction & Habituation (10), Retrospective / Summary (11)