My 8 Year Old Just Stole My Crave

[Puff-TM-Draggin]

I am beat.  I just wrapped up the evening with my son and my daughter.  We celebrated my daughter's eighth birthday Halloween style with about 10 of her classmates, all girls with very high pitched voices, especially when they're screaming.  We played games, opened gifts, ate cake and ice cream and then we all went crazy making as much noise in the dark with flashlights and glow sticks as is imaginably possible.  A very good day, all things considered.

But as always happens when my children leave, cravings to smoke sneak in to fill the emptiness they leave behind.  The job-well-done mentality settles in; I am decompressing and re-adjusting from, "Dad? Dad? Dad?" back to dead silence, and quite honestly, if there ever is a good time for a cigarette, this is it.  During transitions like these, thoughts of cigarettes and my children skip and scamper around together in my mind.  Previously, though, while they shared the same playground, they remained on separate sides.  They were always two distinct entities doing their own thing, forced to hang out in each other's proximity purely by the circumstance that they're both simultaneosly in my thoughts.

Perhaps because my daughter turns eight tonight, perhaps because she is growing up, (she looks nothing like the infant I used to carry around in my arms,) or because she questions more now and is so much more observant and independent than she used to be ... for whatever reason ... tonight she didn't stay on her side of the playground like she used to do.  Tonight she went over to where the cigarettes were hanging out.  She picked one up.  She lit it.  And she began smoking it.  My eight year old daughter started smoking right there in front of me, right in my own mind.

In my mind, I was always suave and debonaire when I smoked.  Of course, I never actually saw myself smoking.  I'm not sure why I thought I was such an exceptionally attractive smoker because the truth is, I can't think of anyone I have seen smoking that struck me as looking particularly glamorous doing so.  Smoking actually looks extremely awkward when you stop and pay close attention to it.  Still, no matter how pathetic it looks, there is nothing more disturbing than watching your eight year old daughter smoke.  I can't imagine yet what my daughter will look like when she is twelve, the age at which I began dabbling with cigarettes, or sixteen, when most other kids I knew who smoked jumped on the band wagon, but however she looks when she is older, I don't think my impression of her smoking is going to be any improved.  There is just something heart-sickening to me seeing my daughter smoking, now or ever.

Seeing her smoking reinforced everything I know about smoking that I never want to admit when I'm craving a cigarette.  Smoking is horrible.  There's no reason why it should disturb me to see my daughter follow in my foot steps and take up smoking except for the knowledge that she will become addicted to cigarettes like I am, and then they will slowly rob her of her vitality, her health, her self-esteem, her social standing ... things I want her to have in plenty.  And just like that, my eight year old daughter stole my crave.  Standing there watching her smoke, I couldn't deny how hurtful it would be in return for her to see me smoking, knowing she loves me as I love her.

She doesn't know yet that I used to smoke.  Someday she will.  Someday I will tell her that I finally quit because I wanted to be a part of her life for as long as I could; hers and her brother's.  I'll tell her how it was hard, but not harder than as much as I loved her.  I'll tell her about the time I caught her smoking when she was only eight years old, shortly after she'd left to go back to her mom's house after that big Halloween birthday party we had for her at my house.  I'll tell her that I love her and for that reason I better never ever catch her smoking again, and for that reason too, I promise not to either.