Moms Who Drink and Swear: True Tales of Loving My Kids While Losing My Mind by Knepper Nicole

Author:Knepper, Nicole [Knepper, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101650943
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

SAY THAT TO A JACKASS AND

HE’LL KICK YOUR BRAINS OUT

Many of my most precious memories include my grandmother Adelaide Twilia Kane, or “Buddy” as everyone called her. Snuggled up on the davenport with her, eating Andes mints out of a Waterford crystal candy dish, watching The Lawrence Welk Show is my absolute favorite one. But make no mistake, she wasn’t a fragile blue hair who sat on the sofa crocheting and telling stories nobody gave a shit about. She was four feet ten inches of polyester-clad, brooch-wearing, cookie-baking, pocketbook-swinging force of fucking nature. Even as a small child, I knew she was a force of nature, a tornado I chased in order to be caught up in the exciting chaos she created. I want to be a grandma like Buddy. I want to be snuggled up on a fluffy sectional with my own grandchildren someday, watching The Justin Bieber Variety Show while eating banana Laffy Taffy. I want it so badly that after twenty years and dozens of failed attempts, I finally quit smoking.

Remember when all the cool kids smoked cigarettes? Me either. I was born in 1970, just around the time the warning on the pack went from “Caution—cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health” to “THIS SHIT WILL FUCKING KILL YOU, MOTHERFUCKER.” Kidding. It actually said, “Warning: the Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking IS dangerous to your health.” But in 1969 when I was in my momma’s belly, it was still only MAY be hazardous, and my mom’s doctor told her to just cut down on the cancer sticks during pregnancy. So, because I bathed in a bath of nicotine from the moment I was conceived, I think it was inevitable that I became a smoker.

Buddy quit the year before I was born. Why, you might ask, did she lay down the smokes after forty years, never to spark up again? I’ll give you a direct quote—and I know this is exactifuckingly the way she said it because she told me a minimum of six hundred times: “I quit when I had the Asian flu and I was too sick to smoke. I was so sick I would have had to get better to DIE! Only a jackass would start up again.”

I swore I would never smoke. I promised her, crossed my heart, hoped to die, stick a needle in my eye that I would never, ever let a cigarette cross my lips and I meant it! I was as committed to not smoking as she was, and a big reason for her commitment was her love for me; she wanted to set a good example and live a long life having fun with me. It pissed me off that my parents continued to smoke, and although my grandma wasn’t happy either, she saw it as an opportunity to reinforce the dangers of addiction to me. “Anyone who would start smoking, knowing what we know now, is just a jackass,” she would say.

I became a pint-sized anti-smoking activist.

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