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I wish I could say that I ever tried to hide my smoking from my children, but the reality is that I couldn’t, because I was around them all the time and I also smoked all the time. When I switched to vaping after about a year into my midlife relapse with Camel Lights, I thought I’d be able to be subtle about my habit — maybe they wouldn’t even notice! But my 8-year-old still gives me a hard time about it every time he sees a Juul cupped in my palm. He’s right to be affronted, of course: Using nicotine is unequivocally very bad for you. It’s also, unfortunately, what gets me through my days. Those days start at 6:30, include a full-time job bracketed by child care, and don’t end till the kids finally pass out around 9, at which point my husband and I watch an episode of Better Call Saul, then try to be in bed by 10 so we can face the next day’s challenges. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is reach for my Juul, like Gollum cradling his precious. I live in fear of running out of a charge or cartridges.
This is not the kale-smoothie-powered, athleisure-wearing, ambient healthfulness I’m constantly encouraged to model around my kids. Almost no parent I know smokes or vapes openly, and even the ones who bum the occasional cigarette at a party would never dream of rolling up to school pickup with a cig or vape pen in their hand. We want to exert the exact opposite influence on our kids, especially when they’re at an age when their peers are starting to experiment with vaping (for kids, it’s all about vaping). So others are doing what I was unable to do: keep their habit a secret. Some even have spouses who don’t know about their relationship with cigarettes or Juul pens or nicotine gum.
“When I walk down the street in Park Slope smoking a cigarette, I feel almost like I’m shooting heroin,” says Una LaMarche, 43, whose two sons, 12 and 6, don’t know about her habit. She fears being judged by them and also by random strangers, and part of her wants to quit, but another, more powerful part does not. “I want to reclaim parts of myself that I think I’ve lost a bit through motherhood and settling down,” she explains. “And it’s just this little rebellion that feels really secret and fun.” She had quit for a long time, but then in 2022 she shared some bedside cigarettes with her dying grandmother: “And then after she died, I was like, well, Grandma would want me to smoke. Saying this out loud, I know that it’s ridiculous, but it felt like this way of honoring her memory.” It also gives her, she says, “the feeling of being 21 again.”
Smoking, as all smokers know, feels fucking great, and there’s no point in pretending that’s not a big part of why we maintain a habit that we know is bad for us. I often take a puff off an Airbar Diamond Clear — a disposable vape with a sweeter taste and a stronger punch that I keep as a backup for when my Juul runs out of batteries — and simply think to myself, Ah, delightful.
Plus, smoking doesn’t impede your facilities the way alcohol or marijuana does. “I’m not incapacitated to take care of my child, which feels very important,” Linnie, who lives in Jersey City and has a 3-year-old, told me. “So many other substances render you less capable or less present, and cigarettes really don’t.”
Every mom I spoke to except one keeps her habit secret from her kids, in part because they don’t know how to explain why they’d do something so overtly self-destructive. My version of this conversation with my 8-year-old, for what it’s worth, went along the lines of: “Everyone is addicted to something. I’m addicted to vaping. You’re addicted to playing Roblox. I’m an adult and responsible for what I do with my body, and when you are an adult, you can make your own decisions.”
Kristen, who lives in Philadelphia, switched to vaping when her two teenagers were kids because, she says, she couldn’t keep up with the constant showering that she needed to do to keep them from smelling her cigarettes. No one outside her close circle of friends knows she vapes — she keeps it secret from her mom friends. Her cover was blown recently when her daughter intercepted a delivery of vape cartridges and asked what it was, but Kristen dodged the question. It’s a conversation she really doesn’t want to have with her kids, even though her husband wants her to. “He says, ‘You should just tell them your story because it’s relatable. Don’t start smoking when you’re 14 because you’ll be 48 and not able to quit,’” she says. But her fear is that they’ll think she’s giving them permission: “It’s going to be like, ‘You do it; I’m going to do it.’ And I don’t want to fight that fight, so I just hide it.”
Another mom told me she’s been tempted to switch to vaping but has resisted because it’s too convenient and she wants to keep her nicotine consumption invisible to her kids. “I can see how easy it can be, and I don’t want to do that indoors,” says Jun, who lives in Ridgewood with her 6-year-old and her 16-month-old. She and her husband smoke in back of their apartment like “trash pandas” when their kids are in bed. Because their 6-year-old is smart and observant, she feels extra pressure to hide her smoking: “She’s aware of the adverse effects of it. She doesn’t like the smell because when we walk by people who smoke, she’s like, ‘Oh, that smells gross.’ And I’m like, ‘I agree. It does smell gross. It’s terrible.’” But another part of her loves the smell so much that, while pregnant and not smoking, she craved the scent of cigarettes so much that she would purposely walk behind smokers to get a whiff.
Kristen worries that even though she now vapes instead of smokes, her kids have a Proustian association with that smell from their earliest childhood. “The scent that they associate with me is probably a cigarette-smoke scent, but they don’t know that that’s what it is. I’m curious if when they’re older, they’ll think, Oh, this is what my mom smelled like.”
Some even keep their habit secret from their husbands. Regina (not her real name), whose baby is 15-months-old, keeps her vape pen in a box of hemorrhoid suppositories the hospital gave her when her child was born: “I went from being (pre-pregnancy) a once-in-a-blue-moon vaper to the most vile consumer of sugary single-use vapes, because on some level I feel like I’ve cosmically earned it” after a difficult pregnancy and postpartum. And Pooja, who only uses nicotine gum, just wants to avoid giving her husband something to be concerned about. He knows she’s used nicotine gum in the past, but not that she currently uses it. “He would be so hurt whenever he found it. He’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m worried about you. You have to take care of your health,’” she says. (Long-term use of nicotine gum, while relatively benign compared to smoking, has been linked to cardiovascular issues.)
Pooja, who’s 47, started smoking in college, never more than four or five cigarettes a day, but quit when she noticed they seemed to dehydrate her and make her feel tired. Nicorette gum, on the other hand, was all upside, just a “teeny buzz.” She gave it up in advance of her 2017 wedding, then relapsed with it during the pandemic, when she was under, she says, “a shitload of strain. Nicotine was a way that I could do something pleasurable for myself that wasn’t harming other people.” The problem, though, was her stepdaughter. Since Pooja’s husband doesn’t approve of her nicotine habit, he and her stepdaughter banded together, rummaging through her things in search of illicit gum packages and confronting her with the evidence of her addiction and asking her formally to quit. She’d promise, then continue to try to hide her habit from both of them.
The lengths she’ll go to in order to keep her husband from finding out that she’s still using the gum are, she admits, absurd, and they also conspire to create a not-great culture of secrecy in their family. “They’d find this nicotine squirreled away in all sorts of corners of the house; they’d inspect the garbage to see if it smelled like mint,” she says. Things reached the height of absurdity when she found herself bribing her stepdaughter not to tell her husband about a recent discovery of stashed gum by promising to take her to Sephora to buy a coveted lip gloss. Clearly, this is not who Pooja wants to be, but even as aware of this toxic dynamic as she is, she can’t bring herself to be open about her addiction and let the chips fall where they may. She also doesn’t want to quit: “I don’t want to make nicotine some sort of flying my freedom flag, but it is a little piece of resistance, I guess, in this fucked-up way.”
Kristen now thinks about quitting vaping, to the extent that she sometimes wears a nicotine patch. Still, she doesn’t really think about giving up nicotine forever. “I don’t actually plan to stop. I mean, at the same time, I think about stopping every day,” she says. The two realities coexist, especially when thinking about her kids finding out that she vapes: “In my mind, I’m like, who the fuck would ever smoke? It’s so bad for you. There’s no way my athletic kids would take that up. I hope that they would criticize me.” Still, though, she always comes back to the essential reality that vaping is, in her words, “so much fun.”
Linnie also has no plans to quit, even though people around her might think she ought to: “I think there’s a lot of judgment, particularly of moms for using anything to blunt the reality or get through the day, and it’s a form of harm reduction to accept that cigarettes or vaping in front of your kids is maybe the least of the possible evils that you could be indulging in.”
When I run some of these justifications by my therapist, I can tell that she’s filing my own addiction away in her mental “things to deal with in 2025 or so” list (a list that exists only in my mind, of course.) I still believe that I will quit eventually, as do most of the moms I talked to. I don’t imagine myself vaping into my dotage, not least because of how ridiculous vaping looks. But in the interim, I am tempted to take a page out of Una LaMarche’s book. She aims simply to acknowledge that she is a smoker, for now. “If I’m going to do it anyway, I might as well not feel bad about it. It might feel really cathartic to allow myself to smoke.”
