3am. Our house. A few weeks ago.

Me: Justin! Stop bloody snoring! {insert viciously sharpened elbow into ribs of lovelyhusband}

Justin: Huh? That’s really funny. The police-shaped miniature Chrysler ashtray I bought at the shopping centre isn’t working anymore.

Silence

Me: …?

Justin: {more loud snoring noises}

Me: {punch wall very hard, storm out of room, slam door loud enough to make entire house shake, throw self onto couch, boil with acidic rage for an hour or so before finally settling into usual insomniac activities of eating things and breaking things}

That pretty much sums up our household at the moment, folks. Justin has lost the ability to make coherent speech and I have ceased to function in anything resembling a reasonably human fashion.

5.30pm. Our house. Some time later that week

Justin: So, um, what do you want…’yknow….um….to…ahhh…um…DO….umm.. now or tonight or…umm….?

Me: {savagely} SMOKE.

Justin: mmm…..ummm….Yes, I know…. so do I, but …..why don’t we go to…..umm….ummm…. {stares pleadingly at me, silently begging for help in assembling the words he once was able to use so well}

Me: {even more savagely} If you have something to say just fucking say it, stop fucking blithering at me.

Justin: Yes. I know, it’s just…um…because I can’t…y’know…umm…ohfuckitnevermind.

Silence ensues.

Stress you ask? More fallout from the financial crisis? Alcohol related acquired brain injury? Alien beings finally about to shed their human skin and take over the planet?

No, no, no and no. It’s far worse than that.

We’ve given up smoking. Again. And this time I am not happy about it.

We have an established pattern for giving up smoking that has served us well for many years. I piss and moan for a few months about how awful I feel and how we really must quit soon. Justin looks a little dubious and mutters non-committal things for a bit, then finally concedes that it’s probably a good idea. We pick a date and cold turkey (sort of) for a week or so; then, after a bit of prodding from me, Justin declares the whole idea was totally fucking stupid and he never really wanted to give up anyway. I look dubious and mutter non-committal things for a bit, then we go belting off to buy lots of lovely cigarettes and smoke ourselves silly, all the while assuring each other that at least we tried and, never mind, next time it will be different.

See? Works perfectly! Why would you mess with such an exquisitely efficient system? Why?? WhyWhyWhyWHY? There is no good reason, but Justin is not playing by the rules this time and I am both bewildered and utterly furious at his intransigence.

It’s been more than six weeks now and, instead of giving me a cast iron excuse to cave in and start again, Justin is still being all firm and grown up about it. He keeps calmly talking to me about how it might be difficult but it’s worth it, and how good we will feel about ourselves when we are finally free of the demon nicotine and think of all the money we’ve saved and blah blah (someone get me a gun) blah blah.

Then, over the last couple of weeks he’s got even worse. As I roam around the house, taking an axe to the few remaining unbroken possessions we have, roaring and/or sobbing about how much I want to smoke, he looks at me thoughtfully and says things like “y’know it’s funny, I haven’t even thought about it for days” or worse “huh, that’s weird, I really wouldn’t want to have one if I could”

If you are wondering how I haven’t killed him yet, you are not alone.

Meanwhile, while he is being all calm and grown up, I am rapidly losing my mind.

I looked up some of the Quitline websites last week, hoping to find some help and inspiration. All I found was inspiration to break (more) things and use lots of noise and violence doing it.

Apparently after more than 20 years of heavy smoking I may experience “occasional moments of wanting a cigarette” after I give up.

No! Wrong! Completely wrong! I don’t want a cigarette, I want 200 cigarettes, I want cartons and cartons of them. I don’t want a cigarette, I want to be a smoker again. I want the nicotine burn of chain smoking as I work or write for hours without a break in concentration. I want the time-out relaxation of being forced to step away from everything I have to be doing while I have a cigarette - after dinner, before leaving for work, after I get home from work and after I put the kids to bed - I had to stop, sit and do nothing else for at least 5 minutes. Now I don’t have anything to drag me away from my daily routine of shouting and breaking things.

I want to medicate PMT with cigarettes again - and, let me tell you, it works a hell of a lot better than any amount of evening fucking primrose oil.

I want to punctuate my conversations and pause to collect my thoughts with it. I do not want to be a non-smoker, it both sucks and blows at the same time and I hate it.

Another pearl of wisdom from the quit site: “quitting may lead to some moments of irritability”. Irritability?? Are they fucking kidding? I am to irritability what the USS Enterprise is to a small rubber dingy. I’m not irritable, I am homicidal. On my best days I comfort myself with fantasies of breaking things, setting fire to them and then sitting back in a black, film noir negligee, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the firemen to turn up. Other days, the things are not things, they are people and I have a large battleaxe and combat gear instead of a negligee.

And then there are the really bad days.

As I rampage around the house, kicking and breaking things and demanding to know whose stupid fucking idea this was anyway, Justin calmly helps the children out from under the piles of smashed furniture and reassures the dogs who are cowering in a corner before he points out that it was, in fact, my fucking idea and perhaps I might want to remember that and try for a little self control. “Self control?” I scream, “Self control?? I have masses of self control!! No-one is dead yet, are they? So there, witness my self control.” I glower at my beloved husband as he gently shepherds the shivering children and dogs out of the room and wonder why I can’t make him spontaneously explode right there in front of me, just through sheer force of will.

My beloved little daughter, whose tearful begging was once the driving force behind my desire to quit, is now tearfully begging me to start smoking again; she can’t take the strain anymore. The dogs, who used to dance so delightedly when I arrived home, now watch me nervously and disappear off to hide under the children’s beds as soon as the sulphuric swearing starts; I’ve had a headache for 3 weeks; my digestive system is sulking in a corner and refusing to come out until I stop pouring jelly beans into it and give it a goddamned cigarette; all my sinuses are filled with concrete (I’ve become a mouth-breather!!); I’ve got the concentration span of a crack addicted dyslexic goldfish; I can’t think; I can’t sleep; I can’t write; I can’t fit into my jeans; and somehow I am supposed to believe that all of this is good for me??

Where is the feeling better, breathing easier that the Quitline website promised me? Why didn’t anyone warn me that quitting would make me feel this bad and that it would last for months? How long before I too am sitting around with self righteous ex-smokers talking about how disgusting the habit is? When does this actually become worth it? Does it ever become worth it?

Despite being relatively calm (everything is relative, the poor bastards that have to work with Justin would probably not have described him as calm; the poor bastards who have to work with me, however, would describe him as Buddha-like in his tranquillity) Justin has also run the full gamut of withdrawal side effects. Additionally, he appears to have lost the ability to form complete sentences or use words (other than the extreme vernacular) in any kind of meaningful way. And still he keep insisting that we carry on with this madness, that one day it will get better and we will be glad that this time we persisted. He keeps showing me the iphone application that calculates the alarming amount of money we have saved since we gave up, and reminds me that if we start again we’ll just have to go through all this next time we give up and we don’t have that much furniture left.

One day I will probably be very grateful to him for dragging us both through this, because it would not have happened without him.

For now though, I am just going to sit on the couch and stare at his head while I try to make it burst into flames using nothing but rage and willpower. I’ll bet all of the $1,000 odd dollars we’ve saved so far that I can do it if I try hard enough.

Then I can sit back, light a cigarette and wait for the firemen to come.

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