Mary Jo began smoking when she was 12 years old, sneaking behind her church and picking up cigarette butts off the ground. As she got a little older, she would steal cigarettes from her brother and, by 15, she was buying her own packs – a proud Marlboro smoker.
“I smoked for 30 years,” she tells me. “I smoked when I was pregnant.” She was desperate to quit, or at least cut down the number of cigarettes, but nothing worked. “The guiltier I felt, the more I smoked,” she continues. “I would just hide my belly so that people couldn’t see.” Her younger son was born premature at only 5lb. “I cried because he was so tiny.”
Mary Jo is now a 58-year-old housekeeper living in Wilmington, Massachusetts, and back in 2006, she finally quit smoking. It took her four tries. (On average, it takes smokers eight to 14 attempts to permanently quit.)
