Welcome to TishTrek - More than a JOB BLOG!
Tuesday - September 13th is the 8th Anniversary which marks the day my mother lost her battle with cigarettes. I'm celebrating her life and my love for her with a renewed message to my kids: "Don't Do As We Did; Just Don't Smoke."
Okay - call the Diet Police! I cheated on my diet Monday... It was my first "David Letterman Stouffer's Mac-and-Cheese Moment" since June. In the end, it didn't even taste that good. And - oh my gosh - Scott got home early from work and caught me in the act!! I felt like 'that kid' with her hand caught in the cookie jar!
So I ask you, why did I do that? I'm telling you, it was that familiar desperate reach for comfort food after an exhausting day and a rough week of memories. When I get exhausted, my will power heads straight for the hills. How about all of you?
Do I actually need a big neon sign on my refrigerator with a warning label that reads, "This kind of repeat behavior has a good chance of putting you in Jersey Shore Medical Center where doctors will break open your chest cavity while they put you on the heart-lung machine so your heart can keep a beat with the help of technology while they clear your clogged arteries. Your arteries will be filled with bad cholesterol from this Mac-and-Cheese you have sent through your system for 30 years?!" Gosh - logic tells us one thing; emotions beat to a drum that will take us off that cliff whenever we're not careful!
Sometimes I think about my own Mom's quest to find peaceful quiet moments during stressful times... She never sought comfort in food, but she grew up in a Salutatory Age of Smoking - meaning smoking was welcomed as an acceptable & fashionable habit which was picked up by lots of teenagers & young adults in the 1940's, 1950's and beyond. In those times, this act was greeted as some kind of tribal right-of-passage that everyone went through on their way to adulthood. And okay - let's join the chorus... Big Tobacco's marketing and advertising campaigns were the best Madison Avenue had to offer in those days! Yes - even that hunk - 'The Marlboro Man' - died of cancer.
Some people could stop the habit on a dime; for others - like Mom - they'd engage in a lifetime-of-trying and they still could not quit. My hazel-blue eyes were fixated on her throughout my elementary school years and I mostly saw the strongest and smartest woman I had ever known. By 8th grade, Mom had all of us convinced that we could become President of the United States if we put our minds to it. Eight kids make for a lot of mouths and egos to feed, but she found time to be everyone else's rock too - a special person so many turned to & called on for help - and I mean "everyone" including friend, stranger and foe alike! If you knew the teens who turned to the embrace and warmth of my parents for help between the 1960's and the 1980's or counted how many actaully lived in our home - your definition of "selfless" would be altered forever.
The term "selfless" would stay with Mom until the day she died. In the early years, it never dawned on me that perhaps she never left enough time or energy for herself... How did she do it, I started wondering when my own kids arrived? At times, could it be that exhaustion, bad news and stressful times impacted the quality of her life too?
This month, Dr. Oz informed his viewing audience that people can take up to 15 years off their life if smoking is the habit that follows them, (i.e. instead of dying at age 65, a non-smoker has a shot at living until 80 years of age!). Can you imagine? You can bet no one was announcing such risks in the 1940's, 50's & 60's when teenagers innocently viewed smoking as a kind of 'right-of-passage' to adulthood.
Having said this, what I do know is that my mom waged a 35-year valiant & silent battle that was really no ones business until she died 8 years ago. I remember her wearing the nicotine patches; literally smoking pipes and cigars; attending hypnosis & smoking cessation courses with her friend Jude at Ocean County College; chewing that special gum; and submersing entire cartons of cigarettes in wastebaskets of water to banish the tangible temptation from our house.
In our living room on Lincoln Avenue, she was ahead of her time as she 'exercised-for-endorphins' to the greatest hits of Herb Albert & the Tijuana Brass before there were ever aerobic classes in any neighborhood, (Scott - that's where my love affair with brass instruments started!!). She walked on the beaches in Pt. Pleasant with the best of friends like Barbara Fioretti, Joan Spiegle and her sister, Mary; cleaned our house like a fiend to eliminate the smell of smoke, (I'm talking wall washing & windows open in winter here gang!), etc... I never put these efforts into one paragraph before, but the reality screams that my mother tried very hard so it was no wonder she would warn everyone to simply steer clear of this deadly habit that is so hard for many people to break.
As I anxiously waited for her to survive through multiple vascular surgeries of the leg, neck and beyond, followed by quadruple open heart surgery and abdominal aortic surgery, the painful message regarding nicotine could not be more clear. In an unbelieveable moment, she requested I drive her straight to the 7-11 for cigarettes as the first stop from heart surgery to home. I didn't want to; and I knew others would have made a different decision, but I did it. Mom was sitting in my car with a heart-shaped pillow protecting the giant incision up-and-down her chest and she was suffering. My gosh - It had been hard enough to watch her in this struggle with herself when she was strong, so pushing back when she was physically weak was not an option.
After I purchased those cigarettes, I began to cry because it felt as if the razor-sharp scalpels used to save her life had just etched a message in my gut that I knew one day I would write to honor her and explaining how hard she tried.
The message from Kate and Scott's beloved Grandma was clear: "Don't do as I did; just don't smoke!"
Best regards,
Everybody's Cousin Tish
Quote of the Day: "Where there is a will, there is a way."
- The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms
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