Why Mummy smokes

It’s 7.02 p.m. and I’m standing outside my house by the bins smoking a fag. Upstairs, I can hear that my six-year-old is awake but I’m choosing to ignore her. How repellent, I hear you murmur. And it is repellent, in many ways. I am a smoker and a mother, hardly the Madonna and child. How can these two realities ever be reconciled? They jam against each other all day long, uncomfortably. 

It’s OK, I tell myself, every single day. I never smoke in front of them. Instead, I smoke when they’re in bed, when the day is done, and the bedroom doors are firmly shut. Often, I smoke during the day too. This is harder to conceal but I’ve got quite good at it: an episode of Alvin here, a nap there; I take my chances stealthily, silently. My hands are red raw from washing them obsessively, my pockets are jammed with mints. 

God knows what the neighbours must think. Do they see smoke curling up from behind the bins and shake their heads? Do I even care what they think? Mostly not. I would, however, care deeply if my daughter came downstairs and busted me smoking because how could I ever explain such overtly self-destructive behaviour to her? Each drag is underwritten by shame. And relief. Don’t forget the relief: smoking is bloody great. If you’re a smoker that is. Otherwise, it’s just disgusting.

I want to understand when exactly I became a bin-dwelling anachronism. I want to understand when smoking turned from something totally acceptable into something so reviled, something so shameful that, as a fellow smoking mother says, ‘puts you one up from a pederast, or, as a woman, perhaps Myra Hindley’. Obviously, there was the smoking ban in July 2007 that outlawed smoking in enclosed public spaces.