Jim Simmons, 37, recalls from his childhood...
My Mom is over 60 now, and her hair has started to lose its colour, but just a little. She smokes, but just a little, and she doesn't have any real smoker's cough or so. Well, she hacks a little in the mornings and clears her throat quite much in the evenings, but that's it. Last month, though, she got a bad cough after a cold and suddenly, a story from my childhood popped up from somewhere in the back of my head, it felt.
My earliest memories of Mom are full of cigarette smoke. She used to be quite a heavy smoker, much more than my father was. Already at five years of age, I'm sure I started to pay attention to Mom's smoking. The way that grey smoke came from her nostrils, like from nowhere I thought since I couldn't really understand how that little white thing she sucked on and that I wasn't even allowed to touch could produce those grey, smelling clouds that suddenly appeared from inside her. Today, I believe that if she would have exhaled through her mouth only, I would have understood that it was something she sucked into her mouth, but her nose exhales confused me. I was too young to understand she breathed the smoke into her lungs, simply. I sometimes wondered why it, for instance, never came out through her ears, but I never asked.
Mom never coughed then, from what I can remember at least. But one day, Dad told me that I was going to have a little sister or brother. Not today (like I first thought he meant), and he said that I had to be really kind and patient, because Mom would be very tired in the beginning. My Mom had a warm temper, in the sense that she could get very angry quickly, but it was always over quickly too, and those flashes from her dark brown eyes were replaced by her usual, kind warmth. Oh, I've forgot to tell what she used to look like. She was, well still is, quite tall and fairly big. Not much of over-weight, just naturally big. Dark brown, long, thick hair, a little curly. Big, red lips and a long, curved nose pointing a little out from her face. And, as I said, dark-brown eyes which were actually beautiful even when she was angry.
Anyway, Dad told me that Mom had decided to give up her smoking now when she knew she was going to have another child, just like she had done when I was on my way. Dad also told that Mom's temper had been fairly explosive the first three or four weeks then, but that he and I would work together this time as he expressed it with a smile.
Well, in a few days, I noticed Mom got easily irritated, but when she
noticed how I deliberately took it a bit easier with her, she appreciated it
and she was even warmer and kinder than normal, in some sort of gratefulness
I guess. I can't remember how many days, or if it was weeks, it took before
she got that cough. I remember sitting there on the kitchen floor, watching
her. Her smile disappeared and her big body started to shake. She cupped
her big, warm hand over her mouth and coughed so I thought she would start
an earthquake. I don't know if it is because she's quite big that her cough
always is so loud. That big body, and that big, brown-skinned chest under
her throat that was so soft and warm just coughed and coughed. Sometimes,
she bent her body forwards so I could see her growing breasts shake, and she
sounded like her stomach was om its way up.
- It's because of my cigarettes, dear, she used so say afterwards when
she saw I was scared. My lungs are missing them so much, that's why they're
doing this to me, as a kind of revenge, she smiled.
- Why do your lungs need them, I asked once but she never found any
answer to it.
I especially remember a day when we went for a walk. Suddenly, she saw I had to tie one of my shoe-strings. Just as she bent down to tie it, she started to cough. She coughed so deeply, so deeply, and I noticed how her nostril wings sort of strained so that they moved a little outwards every time she inhaled. I seriously thought she would cough up her lungs now, because her cough was so intensive. I put my cupped hand over her mouth to catch her lungs in it and she coughed so she produced a whoop sound, right in my hand. Her coughing fit stopped and I put one arm around her big chest, the other hand inside her shirt and massaged her chest intensively. She laughed a little and tried to calm me down but I was sure I would never calm down until she started to smoke again...
Well, her cough was gone after yet another time, I got a little sister and Mom went back to just party smoking after a couple of years. I waited for her to start to cough after such parties, because I thought her lungs would punish her again from taking the cigarettes away from them. I didn't really understand how cigarette smoking worked until my sister was 15 and revealed, in secret, that she had two or three cigarettes per day. I promised to keep it as a secret, as long as she promised to smoke one per day while I was watching her, just the two of us. I studied every detail of her smoking, and soon I asked her why she never coughed. She laughed and asked why she would cough, and said that she maybe would get a smoker's cough sooner or later if she smoked much enough. I wanted to ask her when she would increase her smoking and when "sooner" then would be, but I never did. Still today, she refuses to cough! She's hopeless...