As a child, even being as young as you are, you can tell that some of your parents’ rules are bull. For example, the classic “my home, my rules,” which enthrones your parents to be the supreme rulers of everything in the home.
Well, one Reddit user finally had the chance to get revenge on her parents for this rule. When her mom came to visit her home and wanted to light up a smoke inside, guess what she heard? You bet.
More info: Reddit
If you've ever been inside the house of a chronic cigarette smoker, you know how bad it can get
Image credits: Scott Webb (not the actual image)
The poster of the story remembered how her parents would tell her "my house, my rules" when challenged
Image credits: u/Ambitious-Writer-825
She had the satisfaction of saying the very same thing when her mother attempted to light up a smoke in her home on a visit, making mom fume with anger
As short as I can, the original poster (OP) had put up with her parents’ smoking for many years, even fighting bronchitis brought on by the smoking for as long as she had to until she moved out. She’d also hear “my home my rules” when challenging her parents, which just meant that she could get nowhere with them.
When her parents were visiting, she used the same card with her mom when she wanted to smoke indoors, and the mom wasn’t pleased with it whatsoever. Eventually, she even managed to get her mom to stop smoking, by preventing her from smoking around her grandchild and making her change clothes if she wanted to hold the baby.
For this story, Bored Panda reached out to the poster of this story, Ambitious-Writer-825 - Marni from Nevada.
Asked about whether she ever wanted to smoke herself after living with smoker parents, Marni said that she tried in high school, in the late 80s, to see what the fuss was about. “I wanted to know what this thing was that had a hold on my mom.”
She smoked on and off for less than a year as a social smoker. She wanted to know why smoking was worth all the risks to some people. When she met her current husband in her first year of college, he told her that he didn’t like kissing an ashtray (albeit a beautiful one, according to him), so she threw the smokes out the next day. “I never found what was so incredible that she wouldn't stop.”
After spending so much time with smokers, Marnie details what she tells people to stay away from it. “I just tell people that I watched my mom die.” For her, it was painful, uncomfortable, and “sad as hell.” What is worse is that it was totally preventable. When she mentions that her mom won’t be able to see her grandchild graduate because of totally preventable cancer makes people think.
It’s also no secret that secondhand smoke can cause death, Marnie says. Smoking isn’t a personal thing - it affects everyone surrounding you. “Many people have had or know someone who has had bronchitis, and I tell them to imagine that every year for months at a time.”
Marnie goes on to talk about how smoking parents affected her. As it was the late '70s and early '80s, most people didn’t know how bad secondhand smoke was and believed that you blew the smoke away from people, it was good enough. Marnie’s mom never smoked in her room, but the house would still reek of it, her clothes, books, anything permeable.
“And I would be with her watching TV, and she'd smoke, same with eating. When planes stopped letting people smoke on planes, she just stopped flying.”
Image credits: christian buehner (not the actual image)
Marni’s experience with bronchitis was awful. She would cough so bad she couldn’t talk and had several broken ribs from the force of coughing. There are likely more health issues that she still has, but she never got tested for them. She gets sicker from respiratory illnesses, has had pleurisy, and it seems to her that she doesn’t have very good lung capacity.
The worst thing is that she is allergic to most antibiotics. Taking them, she’d have hives all over her body, a severely upset stomach, jaw locking, and wasn’t able to breathe.
“So all I could get was cough medicine and wait it out. If it was very serious, the doc would put me on antibiotics, and I'd just have to live through the side effects. It was never good.”
She was almost held back in school because she had missed so many classes because of her chronic illness. She was always watched, and on medication a lot of the time. She was very well-known at the clinic because of the frequency of her visits.
“I took soooo many chest X-rays I thought I'd glow.”
The worst part for Marni was the denial. Her mom denied that you could smell the smoke on her outside the house, denying that it was hard to sell the house because the smell had seeped into the walls - mom couldn’t smell, so it didn’t exist. The denial made Marni sick.
“Saddest of all was her belief that as she lay dying from lung cancer, she really thought it wasn't related to smoking.” Her death certificate deliberately didn’t mention lung cancer, rather heart failure due to something else - the doctor was a friend of mom.
It’s no secret that smoking is extremely harmful for people. Smokers themselves will tell you so in the middle of lighting up. Actually, a lot of the time smokers will be the people telling people not to smoke, won’t share cigarettes with others, and will be talking about how they nearly coughed up a lung not so long ago, so, no, you definitely don’t want to start.
Smoking isn’t even as cool as it used to be (if it ever was in the first place), according to a Quora thread on the topic.
People mention that it seemed cool to smoke at the time, and then go on to say: “I’ve had three heart attacks. My wife died of lung cancer. Hundreds of thousands of dollars up in smoke over a lifetime. Pretty cool, eh?”
They also list all of the downsides: it makes you stink, stains fingers and teeth and arguably the worst - gives you cancer.
Image credits: Lindsay Fox (not the actual image)
And even though smoking is still used as a device to make characters look “cool” on TV, Quora user Justin Darling humorously had this to say: “TV depicts 'cool' people doing it but TV also depicts WWE and pro golf as cool. None of that is.”
Marni mentions that it was the '70s and '80s and people did know that smoking was bad, but secondhand smoke wasn’t at all well known. The thing is that smoking around kids may be more dangerous than people may think.
According to the American Lung Association, secondhand smoke is responsible for 150,000 and 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections in infants and children under 18 months of age. “It also causes 430 sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) deaths in the U.S. annually. More than 23 million, or about 35% of children in the U.S. have been exposed to secondhand smoke.”
So living with smokers is pretty bad, especially for kids. What can be done about it?
The Mix has a ton of advice for people in this situation. If you’re living with smokers, you could ask them to limit themselves to smoking in one room, so you’d breathe in less of it. You’d win big if you’d convince them to do it outside.
Moving in with someone who is a smoker, you should discuss house rules with them, explain why you’re uncomfortable with them smoking around you and then attempt to reach a compromise that would satisfy you both.
If the smell lingers in the home, you should open the windows, especially while people are smoking, and make sure ashtrays are emptied and cleaned out daily. Sprinkling bicarbonate soda on the bottom of the ashtray will also help absorb odors.
A lot of people believe that they can smoke as much as they want with friends or at parties, as long as they don’t smoke on their own. This phenomenon is called social smoking and it’s really not great for you. WebMD says that if you only smoke with others or infrequently - you’re still smoking. And even a few cigarettes can have a significant impact on your health.
Smoking doesn’t just harm your lungs, it affects your metabolism and speeds up your heartbeat. It also increases the risk of heart attack or stroke and there’s the secondhand smoke.
If people continue social smoking, they often become full-time smokers or are already simply denying how hooked they are on smoking.
After noticing that smoking may be turning into a habit, you can count how many cigarettes you smoke and when you do so, which will help you understand yourself better. Perhaps you’re already borrowing way too many cigarettes a day? Maybe you smoke when stressed out and need to reduce stress in your life overall?
Marni’s post got almost 19k upvotes and 931 comments in less than a day. People in the comments congratulated her for both turning around a remark parents use frequently and getting her mom to stop smoking. They also shared many happy and sad stories about their own experiences with smoking. If you’ve got a story of your own, share it in the comments
Commenters supported the poster, as their parents had smoked loads when they were young and shared stories of their own
Image credits: Kristaps Solims (not the actual image)
