Hello me!
My parents smoked when I was little and I hated it. At age 15 I started smoking and continued until I was 33. No question it was chemical addiction.
I don’t like the smell now, but yes, sometimes it does make me jones for it also.
My mother smoked cigarettes, both she and my dad also smoked weed when I was growing up. I hated both when I was younger but took up smoking in my teens. No real reason why; I was experimenting with everything at that age. I still smoke, as does my mother, but she’s been cigarettes-only the last few years.
Both my parents smoked…in the car with the windows closed. It took me a long time to realize why I was carsick all the time. d’oh! I started smoking when I was 13…weirdly not because the cool kids were, but because they weren’t. And that made me cooler than them. Or something. I quit cold turkey when I was 27and some days I still miss it.
Practically everyone in my extended family was a smoker and everyone has quit except hubby. Thankfully there hasn’t been a single case of lung cancer. Since we’ve had children, hubby has never smoked indoors so at least the house doesn’t reek.
My father was a heavy smoker who constantly told my brother and I to NEVER EVER start. My mother was a very infrequent smoker who gave us the same message.
I started smoking to annoy my father and was immediately hooked. I’m not sure why my brother started but we are both still smoking in our 40’s.
My father wasn’t annoyed just disappointed but it was to late by then.
My parents were both smokers. All their friends were smokers. My uncles all smoked. Family gatherings were a blue haze. Naturally, I started smoking when I was around 16. My parents didn’t mind. My father and I would bum cigarettes off each other when we ran out.
I’m old enough (born in the latter part of the Eisenhower administration) that smoking wasn’t the big deal it is today. When I was in high school, seniors were allowed to smoke (not in class, of course, but in the senior room and commons). Smoking was allowed when I was in college. One could choose between a smoking or non-smoking roommate, but otherwise, no problem.
Eventually, my father quit smoking, and he’s an apparently healthy 75 years old now. My mother died many years ago (of causes unrelated to smoking). Their surviving siblings have all quit.
One of my brothers quit smoking a few years ago. The other hasn’t, yet. My sister, the only one of us not to become a regular smoker, is one of those incredibly annoying people who can smoke a cigarette once in a while, perhaps on a Saturday night while having a drink or two, without ever getting addicted.
I quit a few years ago. I’ve had slips, and periods when I’ve smoked, although not for too long. Seems like it’s going to be a lifelong struggle.
The thing is, I liked smoking. I really enjoyed it. There’s a reason this habit caught on very quickly, around the world. Makes it hard to stop.
My parents both smoked, my dad probably close to two packs a day, my mom one pack. All their friends and relatives smoked. I don’t recall it actually bothering me but by that time(early 70s) the big push by the Surgeon General and the antismoking campaign had begun so I would harass them about it. They both quit cold turkey (I’m not sure what the catalyst was)so it was quite the bummer for them when I started smoking in 6th grade. I don’t remember why really, it was just one of the many bad things I was getting into at the time. I *was *the peer that pressured the other kids and when I went to my 20th reunion a few years ago, I was the only one in my group that still smokes.
Both of my parents smoked and it led to their deaths. Neither my sister nor I, however, has ever had the slightest inclination to try it, which I understand makes us a bit of a statistical anomaly.
My son smokes, and it pisses me off.
One thing that is different from my parents and my brother: I rarely smoke inside the house now, and if I do, all the windows get opened after to air it out. I use a covered ashtry in the car, so it doesn’t sit in the open, stinking, but stays kind of sealed up.
I can’t imagine going back to the blue haze inside, and the yellow-brown coating on the walls, the ceiling, the curtains…
My dad smoked pipes, but quit before my brother was born (10 years before I was born).
I smoke, but it’s because everyone at boarding school smoked.
My parents were both heavy smokers, probably both hit the two-pack-a-day line. My mother quit when she was 51; however, she started when she was 10, and the damage was already done. She died at 61 of lung cancer and congestive heart failure. My dad never managed to quit, even after he was diagnosed with emphysema. 
Six months after his diagnosis, he was dead.
My parents had five kids. My three oldest sisters all smoked regularly when they were in their teens/early 20s (in fact, it was my mother’s sister who gave us our allowance, and the older kids had a choice of $10.00 or a carton of cigarettes! :eek: ). My sister who is two years older than me smoked regularly for some years, as well. They’ve all quit now. I’m the only one of the five of us that never smoked regularly; oh, I’d have an occasional smoke when I was out drinking (in fact, I told my friends “If you see me with a cigarette, take the drink out of my hand, because it means I’m drunk enough!”)
Not only did the smell not bother me when I was a kid, but when I started dating, in my teens, though I wasn’t a smoker, I liked dating boys who smoked because being close to them reminded me of my childhood. Kissing them was like sitting in my mother’s lap, or something.
However. Neither my husband nor I have ever been smokers. Our oldest daughter smokes, much to our chagrin (his parents were both heavy smokers, too, now quit, but his father has had three smoking-related heart attacks). Our middle daughter, 18, seems to have no desire to start. Our 9YO expresses anti-smoking sentiments, but at that age, I’d expect it. I’m hoping she’ll grow up to be a non-smoker.
My dad was a heavy smoker for something like 60 years. Died of lung cancer at 80. He never cracked the windows in the car, claimed the AC “filtered” the air, nor did he use any kind of filter at home. I remember being at home and/or my grandparents house and there was always a layer of smoke in the air, about waist height. The first time I saw the smog layer in LA it reminded me of that. I couldn’t stand the thought of smoking, like my dad, but I do love the nicotine it turns out. In my 20s I started dipping snuff and it was like coming home. Took me a long time to kick that habit.
Looking back, it is unbelievable that we allowed smoking to get so out of control. And I don’t even mean the health risk, people should be able to kill themselves slowly if they want, but the nuisance of public smoking. In my first government office job everyone smoked. Butts on the floor, smoldering fires in the trashcans, nasty yellow film on everything and yet that was normal to everyone and anyone who spoke up was a trouble-maker. When they first started making rules about not smoking around computers the cries of anguish from the smokers were loud and angry.
My dad never smoked. My mom had a two-pack-a-day habit throughout her seven pregnancies and continues said habit to the present day. She’ll be eighty in a month or so. All of her seven children tried smoking at one time or another, but only two developed a habit from it (one brother and I). And yes, we all hated the second-hand smoke, particularly in the car.
But even as a child, I could not wait to smoke and started stealing cigarettes from my mother at about age seven. I liked the taste of the cigarette if not the smoke. I didn’t inhale until I was 15 and that was just something I really wanted to do. I smoked off and on through my adulthood - smoke a year or two, quit for a year or two - until 1998 when I started law school and quit for good. I like being a non-smoker and do not want to smoke. I cannot stand the smell of smoke/nicotine and get nauseated when a smoker is near (the smoker does not need to be smoking; they stink of the stuff).
I quit smoking for my first pregnancy but smoked through my second one. Guess which daughter smokes. Yup, the second one. Poor baby. Both she and her husband smoke. I hope her children don’t take it up. Or the other daughter’s children either, although neither of them smoke! If the posts here are any indication, there does seem to be some genetic predisposition, doesn’t there?
My parents smoked, my brother smoked, and I smoke. Of my four kids, one smokes. I smoked through all four pregnancies (early 60’s to 1970).
I started, as did most of my friends, at about age 14. Of my friends who smoked, maybe half had parents who smoked. With us, it was peer pressure. Smoking was cool and slightly rebellious. If James Dean ever came to town, we were pretty sure he’d want to hang out with us.
I don’t remember being bothered by the smell when I was a kid. It was just the way our house smelled, a signature. The mechanic’s house smelled of gas and oil, the old lady’s house smelled like a dusty attic, my mom’s friend’s house smelled of dog, my grandma’s house smelled of coffee and bacon, and for some reason the preacher’s house always smelled musty.
Oy, I was so lucky. I grew up in the '50s and '60s and smoking was pretty much the norm, and both my parents smoked, my mom especially. I was repulsed by the smell of smoke and the icky dirty ashtrays (I couldn’t bring myself to even touch a dirty ashtray), and also by the look of someone smoking, for some reason. It was just, I dunno, ICK to me. I don’t know why that is - maybe some kind of anti-establishment thing in the back of my mind or something.
So I never started, and that’s most likely a really good thing - I have a strong feeling I would have really enjoyed smoking, gotten addicted right away and would have had a huge struggle to quit. Dodged that bullet for sure.
My dad was a heavy smoker when I was growing up. I always hated the smell of it and as has been mentioned by others car trips were bad. After seeing how he coughed and such I never wanted to smoke and have never smoked anything in my life. Never grew up with peer pressure to smoke either. I am one of eight siblings and none of us has ever smoked as far as I know. My dad quit smoking about 25 years ago after over 40 years of smoking (he’s 88 years old now). I never thought he would live that long and I’d like to think that although a lot of damage was done during his years of smoking that quitting has added years to his life.
Both my parents did. I hated it growing up. I do not smoke, but my sister does.
Dad died from a smoking related disease. We all die from something, but his end years were not pleasant.