Your son wants you to play one on one with him, and you love him and you love the time you spend together, so you say yes. But five minutes into the game you are fighting for air and you feel as if your heart is now the basketball, pounding on the inner wall of your chest, so much it hurts. What do you do?



You could lie and say you have to go back to work, yes, that is it, you have to go back in the house, doing something passive, heart-less so to speak. You son will be hurt, of course. He likes the time you spend together too. He may say something, and he may not, but the point is that either way, you have given your son the emotional boot. You have made out that your time together is not important, you have said that work, or whatever excuse you have used is your priority. He thinks you do not love him.

You could tell the truth. You could say, Listen, I smoke like a chimney and so while I am chronologically still pretty youngish, physically I am ancient. So let me off the hook, all right? It might get you out your dilemma. It will also scare him half to death. But, hey, you told him the truth and he knows it was not him, that it was not that you did not want to spend time with him, or that you did not love him.

The fact is that when you smoke, you diminish your capacity to live; to be all you can be. Your role as a mother or father or sister or wife or husband demands that you be all you can be, and when you smoke you are forgoing your end of the deal. Do you think it is fair, do you think smoking is a valid excuse for you not playing your part? Do you think you should be excused because you are a smoker? Maybe, but I am sure your children and family would not see it like that.

It is worth taking a small inventory. List the times you would have shared physical adventures with your family, now mark those that you were unable to complete, unable to sustain, or even unable to attempt at all. It is not hard to guess the reasons why. The air in your lungs would not sustain you. You would have been this side of a heart attack. You had little to no stamina or maybe because you cough up phlegm like it is going out of style.

How many times have you disappointed those you love that traces back to smoking? Maybe the better question is this: How many times can you continue to disappoint before you decide that smoking is not worth risking the loss of those you love?