T A B L E++T A L K

Does it matter in the long-run whether your child attends public or private school? Join the discussion in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Dear bridal party
A bride from hell's orders on what to wear, how to act and what to think
(06/26/98)

Spoiled rotten
By Sallie Tisdale
The demise of discipline: First of three parts
(06/25/98)

Mothers who think too much
By Anne S. Lewis
Will breathing while pumping gas cause irreparable damage to your unborn child?
(06/24/98)

Ask Dr. Love
By Jenn Shreve
Controversial breast surgeon Susan Love takes on hormones
(06/23/98)

Turning the tables on Terry Gross
By Lori Leibovich
Salon gets personal with NPR's maestro of conversation
(06/22/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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We've come a long way, baby

BY PETER BEBERGAL | There is an apocryphal tale in my family that while my mother was in labor, driving to the hospital during a snowstorm in February, she insisted that my father pull over so she could run into the drugstore to get cigarettes.

There is another, mostly true story that I was born weighing only four pounds, eight ounces, and had to stay in the hospital. When my father called my grandmother to tell her the news, my older sister, who was staying with her, asked why I couldn't come home. My grandmother went into the refrigerator and pulled out a small uncooked chicken and said, "This is how big your baby brother is."

My mother learned to smoke at a time when young ladies did not and continued to smoke when all the ladies did. She was not told during her pregnancy to stop. One can even be reasonably certain that her doctor smoked. And whether or not my small birth weight can be attributed to her smoking, I know that my own love of tobacco and all things smoking is a legacy passed on to me by either the nicotine in my amniotic fluid or by the same chemicals that gave me and my mother similar facial structure.

I don't think I became acutely aware of how much my mother's smoking had affected me until once, while I was eating breakfast with a lover, she asked me to pass the arts section of the paper, and I was suddenly hit with her breath, a creamy bath of coffee and cigarettes, and in a flash my entire childhood of Sunday mornings swept over me like, well, smoke. Suddenly I was awash in images of my mother eating a bagel with whitefish and drinking coffee, of her and my father lightly bickering over the Times puzzle, and of course, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her.

My whole family smokes or has smoked. And even those of us who no longer smoke do not consider ourselves nonsmokers. It's too much in the blood, too much a part of who we are to ever really refer to it in the past tense when referring to ourselves. Even my father, who has not smoked in more than 30 years, still has dreams of them, and sometimes, after a fine meal sipping a VO and soda, would love to have a cigarette. The family smoking habit is sort of like the way we are all Jewish. It is something you are born into. You don't need to practice to refer to yourself as part of the culture. And to deny it would be to deny the very core of who you are. But it is my mother's smoking that makes her the matriarch of the habit, and while we all wish she would quit, we all secretly know that she is bound to her cigarettes by more than mere addiction, that something about it makes her truly who she is and truly our mother. And it is not only a familial spirit that haunts me, but an American one as well.

N E X T+P A G E | No smoking in Dunkin' Donuts? Un-American!