I feel like I need to explain a bit about the cigarette thing. It’s been one of those things, that I’ve sometimes had to explain, but to explain means having to go into something I’m not really entirely ready to go into, but I’ll give it a try. The thing where I casually buy cigarettes for my adult daughter, which seems a little out of character for me, because, well, it is.
Besides my memoir on being the mom of a teen mom (which is written, but unpublished), I know I have another memoir inside of me (unwritten), the story about being the mom of a child with hypothyroid disease, which, sadly, was undiagnosed for nearly 10 years, even though I brought her to specialist after specialist. This story unnerves me still, makes me sad, and angry because it seems impossible to try to tell how hard it was to parent a child with horrible symptoms (the worst, unremitting depression), and not know what was wrong. How I blamed myself, how the doctors thought she had a mental illness, how she struggled in school, how she had no energy and no motivation, not even to live.
So, anyways, the short story is, years ago, she started smoking as a way to cope, to deal with the anxiety, and I actually supported her in this, as it did help. When we were left with a situation in which I had no clue as to how long she would suffer with her depression and her hopelessness, smoking seemed like a really silly thing to worry about. So, she’s 23, she smokes 3-4 times a day, it’s her deal, it’s her life. She is now on medication for her thyroid that has given her her life back, she’s reclaiming it slowly. She sings, she does yoga. Maybe one day she’ll quit smoking, maybe she won’t, I don’t care, she’s doing fine. I have, as they say, bigger fish to fry.
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