Welcome

Here I am. Again.

I didn't mean to be. It hadn't even been bothering me. I remember sitting one night late last year at a table in an outdoor beer garden, a rare night out with the women in my mother's group. There were six or seven of us there. We were drinking wine, and laughing - hooting really, like the tables of nurses or teachers you sometimes see in restaurants, when you look over from your pasta, wishing they would just shut up.

That was us. I remember sitting at that table, and having it occur to me that I didn't have any desire to smoke. It was completely gone. And being filled with this deep contentedness that I had finally kicked it.

And then I brought it back.

I held off the regular smoking for a while this time. I told myself that one here and there didn't count. I wasn't smoking regularly; I wasn't finding myself filled with that smoker's panic; I didn't even think about it during the day.

But I should have just admitted it right away. It might have helped me to remember how it really is: the chronic headaches, the sore gums/chest/throat, the sheer and crippling lethargy. And that awful feeling of lying, when you sneak away from work and hide behind a wall like a naughty teenager, thinking "My God, woman, you are thirty-one years old. You're an IDIOT."

So here I am again. This coming attempt will be the third "real" time I've quit smoking. I'm not counting the three-weekers, the three-dayers and the three-hourers I have put myself through before each of these times, the quit attempts which failed spectacularly and left me wallowing in bruised confidence.

But this time I'm making a deal of it. And I'm going to try to get through this mess of a brain of mine and try to figure out why I do it. It's going to take time.

But it's better to spend sixty days on it and get it right.