Quitting smoking while pregnant.

Yes, I have quit smoking, mom. And all you pregnancy know-it-alls out there. But because I know how hard it is to quit, and because I know firsthand the complete and total urgency of those urges, here's the list of things that helped me not only stop--which was easier than I thought it would be-- but to destroy those pesky ohmygodIneedacigarettenow thoughts. On top of that, the vast amount of quitting smoking while pregnant literature out there does little to help real smokers. Not a cig-with-a-drink smokers, but hardcore, cigarettes-are-a-huge-part-of-my-daily-routine kind of smokers. You can only read "Each time you feel the urge, start a project!" so many times before you think how nice it would be to do said project with a side of nicotine.

The urges are hard to ignore. But they're not impossible.

First, make smoking as difficult as you can. For me, the key ingredient in this is making it REALLY ANNOYING to buy cigarettes. I've read stories from people saying they actually kept a pack in their purse the whole time--because it was easier to say NO when they're staring you in the face than saying no to a non-existent object. I call bullshit. If they're in your purse, then you can give in easily. If you have cash floating around in there, it's easy to hand it to the cashier. The longer it would take you to give in, the less likely you'll do it. Take a different route to work. Flick off the gas station when you pass it, because that's easier (and more fun) than pulling in and giving in. Tell your partner (or your friends, family, whoever you see the most) how serious you are about quitting. Having to deal with their shame if you give in is just another hurtle to cross.

One of the key things I did was start telling people--people who really had no right knowing--that I'm pregnant. My coworkers not only know that I'm with child, but I told them that, hey, on top of that stress, I also just quit smoking. Now, each time I get fed up at work and consider taking a break to go buy cigarettes and choke one down, I kinda can't. I'd come in reeking of smoke, and no one wants to be Smoky McSmokerstein Pregnant Girl. I also, seriously, told the woman who is always working at my nearby gas station. It wasn't like telling a total stranger, because I used to talk to her daily back in my smoking days, but it still felt a little odd. She said congrats, looked a little confused at my "Hey, guess what, lady, I'm pregnant!" outburst, and now I'd have to drive completely out of my way for a nicotine-fix because I doubt she'd sell them to me. I'd feel too stupid to ask. And, yeah, I've thought about it. Tell EVERYONE that you spend a good amount of time with that you are pregnant and now a non-smoker. If they give two shits about you, then you know they won't be easy on you if you smell like smoke.

Put it off--mentally. In the beginning, when I still really wanted a cigarette on an hourly basis, I kept telling myself that it was just __ weeks away, that I could allow myself one post-baby. It sounds a little overboard, but if you're a smoker, you understand the power of that far-off promise. One day, these urges will be wane. Whether you do eventually give in or they go away on their own, you won't always want one all the time. And when the urge hits, it will hit with less and less intensity. I even, on a few occasions, made deals with myself, that if I still wanted one in two hours, I'd give in. And then three hours later, I'd remember that little promise, and the urge would be a little less immediate. I'd then give myself another three hours, and so forth.

Look at this picture. Look at this woman's crusty bangs, and just how trashy that looks. Do you want to be her? I'd venture to say no. Print it out. Keep it in your purse. Put it in a frame. Bookmark this page.

Embrace a little guilt. For the real smokers, looking at your ultrasound picture each time you feel the urge won't erase it. It'll probably just add a lot of guilt on top of those withdrawals. Maybe it's the soon-to-be Jewish mother in me, but a little guilt can work wonders. Breathe that guilt in deep and call the urge what it is: selfish. You (and I) want/need a cigarette. Not the baby. Keep that ultrasound picture handy (I tucked mine in my purse for a few weeks), and let the guilt fill you up when you look at it. The urge sucks. Knowing you're doing something potentially harmful to your baby sucks worse.

That being said, don't beat yourself up. I spend a lot of time on those borderline-evil pregnancy message boards, and each time a woman has the balls to make a "I'm trying so hard to quit post," dozens of people sign on to make her feel like a horrible human being. Statistics say you have until week 16 until the really bad side effects kick in, so make yourself a timetable if need be. Be easy on yourself. Quit for the baby, but also for you. Trust me when I say you really will be able to breathe easier, you'll have more money in your wallet, you'll have smoother skin later on in life, and you'll smell a hell of a lot better. (I can't believe so many of my non-smoking friends/family put up with me in my smoking days. Each time I pass someone who's puffed up in the past week I can smell the rotting tar on them.)

Lastly, set a date. I wrote about my two-day adventure as the East Nashville cigarette fairy. What really, really helped after that, and almost more than everything I've mentioned so far, was quitting when I had three days off of work. I told myself that when I woke up the next morning, I was waking up as a non-smoker. Period. I put my head on my pillow that night and let the new title, "Non-Smoker, Non-Smoker, Non-Smoker" wash over me. It truly can feel like an entirely new identity. And when you wake up the next morning, don't ignore the urges. Don't let them overtake you. Feel them. Embrace them. Understand what they're saying--you are no longer a smoker. By the time I got back to work two days later, the title had sunk in a little bit more. Now, I'm no longer just calling myself a non-smoker.

Even though I have quit, I still use all those things on a daily basis. But it's no longer hourly. Maybe, in a few months, it will be a once-a-week thing. The thing so evil about cigarettes is that--from what I hear--it never really goes away. Again, take that in. Don't expect miracles. Expect some suckiness. Wear the urges like a badge of honor, because quitting smoking is hard. Throw in some crazy hormones and it's akin to turning down a winning lottery ticket.

Take it a day at a time. It does, however, get easier every day.

I get so incredibly tired of reading non-smokers' judgments on the rest of the world. You. Do. Not. Understand. The end. You can do it. Even if you fail today, that doesn't mean you can't wake up a non-smoker tomorrow.

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Sober beer pong and self-destructive tendencies

This Sunday was the 21st birthday celebration of one of my close friends. I used to live with this girl, back when Jason and I were broken up last year. We worked together at the university paper, and although she's a good 2 years younger than I am, we bonded one night over a game of beer pong and were inseparable for about the next 8 months.

I moved in with her last fall. I was still living with my parents, and she had a huge, paid-for house to herself with an extra room. I was there most of the time anyway, only stumbling "home" to change out of my clothes from the night before so I didn't smell like alcohol and smoke when I showed up to class.

We spent every night (or, afternoon) sitting on her back patio, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, talking and wondering what crazy shenanigans we'd be getting into that night. And a night rarely passed without some sort of drunken shenanigans, even if it was just the two of us sitting on that back patio until the wee hours of the morning.

And this, sprinkled with our time together at work--at which I was her boss, professional, I know--was our friendship. Beer, cigarettes, and shenanigans. Not that that somehow makes it any less of a friendship. In those months I lived with her, she became my closest friend. I told her everything, things I had a hard time telling my oldest friends. I thought I had finally-finally-formed a lasting bond with someone outside of my high school circle.

But then Jason and I got back together. I moved out to move in with him (and because I had graduated, she had not, and I had to make way for life and work). I watched our friendship morph and change, as I have with so many of my relationships over the years and even more fiercely the past few months.

I still saw her frequently after I moved out. I went over at least once a week, and we made the way to the back patio, beer in hand, and caught up over smoke rings.

Since finding out I'm pregnant, I've gone to her house twice.

I never know quite what to do with myself. We still go to that back patio out of habit, but I don't smoke. She doesn't either, out of politeness. We don't drink. We just... kind of... sit. And then I go home.

I've heard from her less and less since the big fat positive.

For her 21st birthday, I didn't know what to expect. We had grandiose plans for this night, and none of them included my being sober or knocked up. I knew only that I had to go, because she made that abundantly clear. I wouldn't want a pregnant woman at my 21st birthday. But when I asked her what she wanted, she said only "for you to be there."

The whole party brought back so many memories of my old self and how many things have suddenly changed (for good and for arguably bad). I had already gravitated away from that life. Jason and I already both worked full-time jobs and had lost the time to spend a weekend hungover. But it never felt permanent. The possibility of a wild, crazy night always seemed just around the corner. Now it's not there. It'll probably never be there again. Yes, I will have nights to myself again in life, but will I want to wake up and have to piece together the night before while I have a child waiting at home? Probably (I hope) not.

Any remnants of my self-destructive tendencies will have to be ignored. Forever. I cannot smoke now, lung-cancer be damned, because it's no longer just about the "self" in self-destructive. Same with drinking. Same with experimenting with anything, ever. I will be a better mom than that.

So I went to the 21st birthday party, even though I was ready to just crawl in bed. It didn't even start until 9 AT NIGHT. That's usually when I'm waking up for work. I was cranky, and immediately after getting there, I felt like a fish out of water. Surrounded by old friends from college, all drinking, all smoking on that back patio.

I played a game of sober beer pong, for God's sakes. And I still sucked as badly as ever.

I hope that particular friendship doesn't irrevocably change. I hope I can, once again, sit and drink a beer with her. In about a year.

But I find my phone ringing less and less these days, and when friends do call, it's the friends I've had forever, before we knew what it even really felt like to be drunk (and the ones by my side during my first forays into deviance).

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How I quit smoking after I found out I was pregnant

For about two days after I got the big fat positive, I was the East Nashville cigarette fairy.

I smoked just one after that fate-filled trip to the bathroom, in an effort to stop the impending panic attack, and then made a decision right then and there that that was it. Like it or not, I was done, and I just had to be.

I took our last remaining pack in my hand, opened my window, and threw it into the street. It just felt so much more symbolic than calmly placing it in my trash can--not to mention that, in my neighborhood, five minutes wouldn't pass before they'd be gleefully scooped up by a wandering homeless man or drunk hipster walking home from the bar.

My fiance agreed to quit, too, a huge undertaking considering his grandpa gave him his first cigarette when he was 11. He'd smoked at least a pack a day since then.

Freaked out by the fact that I had unknowingly been smoking up a storm while pregnant, and drinking, and riding roller coasters, I took to Google, and waited for the words "you and your baby are dying or you're already dead and just don't know it" to pop up.

And then I found a new study claiming that pregnant women who quit smoking before the 15th week of pregnancy reduce all the risks of blowing carcinogens in a fetus' face to that of women who never did it at all (read more about it here).

Armed with that dangerous knowledge, I got in my car the next morning to make the 30-minute drive to Murfreesboro, one usually made with the trustworthy companionship of tobacco, and I found my car turning left instead of right, turning into the gas station instead of the interstate, and then my car door was swinging open, and I was walking toward the gas station, and I was saying thank you to the nice shirtless man holding the door open for me, and then I was asking for a pack of cigarettes and handing over a ten dollar bill and gripping the tiny box in my fingers and tearing off the plastic cover and pulling out the foil and then I was back in my car, with an easy way out of the panic that was pulling at every inch of my body sitting right at my fingertips.

With just one little puff, it could all be gone, I could be making the drive home just like nothing had happened, like I was myself, a smoker, and all would be normal and okay.

And then my phone rang, and it was Jason. His voice was tense and agitated--the voice of someone who'd just quit smoking. And then it hit me.

This was real. I am pregnant. I always said I'd quit when this happened, but that was always an undefined one-day, and it sure as hell wasn't supposed to happen anytime soon.

But the cigarettes are now just an afterthought, and their relief would be nothing compared to the relief I'll feel if I give birth to a healthy baby, and know that I did everything I could to make it that way.

And so I rolled down my window. I threw the cigarettes on the street, watching as the box broke open and the cancer sticks exploded out, rolling this way and that, yards away from where they'd landed the night before.

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