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It is a cold and wet Sunday afternoon, and though we are strangers, we are joined for the moment as we watch people we love play tennis on a soggy court. 

When she says she’s a second grade teacher, I immediately ask, “If you were to tell your second-graders that you are giving them something that will make them:  

--cough

--feel like throwing up

--possibly become unable to live without it

--over time make them very, very sick

--make the people around them sick 

--what would they say?” 

She looks at me with certainty and says, “They’d say I’m crazy.” 

With a high-minded “thought so” running through my mind, I explain why I am asking.  As I say I want to write a great “stop smoking” column, one that will really ring true and help people quit, her face grows sad. Very sad. 

She shares that her dad was a life-long smoker; her mom was collateral damage, caring for her father tirelessly as he slowly succumbed to the lung cancer. Yet even with the lung cancer, an oxygen tank, and a wife who was exhausted by caring for him, he could not, would not quit smoking. 

And then, my new friend says, her mom, the loving caretaker who had waited on her dad hand and foot throughout this cigarette-induced decline, “up and died before he did!” 

“We were all stunned. I got a call from my sister expecting her to tell me dad had died, and I just crumpled when I found out it was mom. She had worn herself out totally. Just went to sleep and didn’t wake up. He had to go into a nursing home where he could not smoke, and died two months later. So cigarettes – his smoking cigarettes – really killed them both,” she says. 

I ask questions about her parents; what her dad did for a living. Secretly I want them to be uneducated and not good people. Why, I am not sure. But guess what? They were highly educated, loving, wonderful humans who spent their lives in service to the diplomatic corps. Her dad became hooked on nicotine as a young soldier, when, during WWII, cigarette companies made sure the soldiers had them. 

“You know,” she says, “I think the nicotine companies knew even then that it was bad for people. I know that years ago, when they had a chance to make cigarettes safer, or to make them more addicting, they looked for ways to make them more addicting.  They are evil,” she says with a sad scowl. 

I tell her I’ve been stewing on this topic for days, that I was grateful that when I smoked in my late teens and 20s, I somehow did not become hooked. 

I tell her about my thoughts during church that morning, thoughts about people who work for cigarette companies. “Do they hold leadership positions in their churches or synagogues? Do they serve on committees that visit ‘the sick, the friendless, and the needy’ and if so, how do they square visiting people who are dying of lung cancer, and then go back to work to sell cigarettes the next day?” I ask. 

My new friend and I talk more about her second graders, and wonder what will happen to them between now and when they hit ninth grade or so, that will make them go from thinking cigarettes are disgusting and horrible, to thinking that they are cool, and that they will be cooler if they smoke. 

We talk about peer pressure, of course, and a little about how the human brain develops, and how lucky the cigarette manufacturers are that the time when kids are trying cigarettes is the time when their brains are most susceptible to becoming addicted to substances, and their ability to make good judgments isn’t formed until they’re in their twenties. We talk about the irony of that: kids are tempted by substances when they’re least able to defend themselves, and then many are hooked before they are able to even get to the point of being capable, physiologically, of making such life-and-death decisions. 

I tell her a little about my book, “The TurnAround Mom.” Her eyes don’t glaze over, so I tell her about dealing with multi-generational addiction and abuse, and stopping the cycles that seem to repeat themselves in some way, no matter how smart or hardworking we are, unless we go back, clean out the sadness, deal with it all, and become conscious of how we are repeating the past.  And then, if we truly want change, how we must work to make our actions match our intentions, so our children SEE a different way of being.   

“Maybe by seeing us live another way, they become more likely to live another way. And the good news is, it’s never too late to start trying,” I say. 

She likes all of that, and takes a bookmark about my book. And then we talk a little about our marriages, and how we were both working to help our families eat healthier, especially our husbands. 

She becomes a little wistful when she says she truly wants to help her husband lose weight, and that he is trying. “But,” she says, “It is just so hard for him to lose weight when he’s not smoking.” 

She knows she’s powerless over his addiction, and I know I may sound like a know-it-all in this piece. And I will tell you that I obviously do not know it all. Because if I did, I would have already come up with the SUCCESFUL message – the message that would always work for myself and everyone else – that says: 

---Treat your precious body with respect. Treat others with respect. Love yourself and love your neighbor as yourself.

---Do not smoke, or drink, or use food/substances/behaviors (spending, sex, gossip, work, toxic relationships, overcommitting, etc.) as comfort, because if you hate what addictive substances and behaviors do to you, you will be all the more devastated by what they do to your children. 

Child see; child do.

Though it begs to be broken, “Child see; child do” is a law of the universe.

We pay it now, or our children – and grandchildren – pay it for us.

Carey Sipp's first book, The TurnAround Mom – How an Abuse and Addiction Survivor Stopped the Toxic Cycle for Her Family, and How You Can, Too, guides fellow “children of chaos” to create the kind of sane and loving home life that helps prevent next-generation addiction and abuse. Her book is available at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/TurnAround-Mom-Addiction-Survivor-Family--/dp/0757305962/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317756315&sr=8-1

Read more articles by Carey Sipp here..

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