A Mother's Day Postscript: My Mother, The Layers Beneath
Personal Perspective: When you can't change your mother's deadly choices.
Posted May 11, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
The Serenity Prayer makes it sound easy: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” It’s not easy. Particularly when you can’t change your own mother’s deadly choices.
My brother and I always wished our mother didn’t smoke. Sunday rides in our stepfather’s lumbering Pontiac meant nauseating fumes of Phillip Morris hardly softened by wafts of Shalimar perfume. Her good-night kiss reeked, as did the overflowing ashtrays left smoldering by the telephone. The kitchen was engulfed in a nimbus cloud from the day’s pack.
I hated the angry snap of those lighters that shot flame too close to her nose for me to watch. I hated the grinding sound of her stub against the saucer, its hot sizzle as the puddle of coffee snuffed it out. In summer, on the beach, the cigarette dangling from her mouth seemed like torture in the baking sun. Yet, by 15, I joined her in the kitchen where I lit her cigarettes and mine.
From my point of view, her smoking had an upside. She was tough, my mom. In her Mafia-striped suit, her slouch hat, and the cigarette between her lips, nobody messed with her. Not the butcher who propositioned her or the wall-eyed building super she’d called on to fix a leak or the frazzled Macy’s customer-service clerk. My brother and I didn’t mess with her either. She puffed on despite us calling her cigarettes coffin nails, even when we asked her to stop. I’m a horse, she said. She’d lived through worse than smoke. And she had, having been widowed at 26 with two little kids and an empty bank account.
She came from tough stock, though. Her father’s heart gave way when, on a dare, he attempted to lift the back of his moving truck. Glaring disdain, she’d told me how he didn’t use the truck much, preferring the distractions of schnaps, “moving pictures,” and tyrannizing his wife. His wife, my grandmother, bore 10 children, six of whom died before puberty .
My mother had learned firsthand about survival of the fittest. She thought she was among them. In her 60s, when she got emphysema, she ignored it. When we told her she just had to stop, as I’d already managed to do, her face got that I-make-my-own-decisions look. I think my brother and I believed she could beat the odds. She didn’t, though.
By then, I’d long since outgrown tolerance. I just wanted her to live. I wanted her well. I wanted her.
So I read her the riot act. I told her I wasn’t going to push her around in a wheelchair with her oxygen tank (though, eventually, I did). I wasn’t going to let my daughter inhale her fumes—my daughter, who at age four was already imitating grandma, pretending to smoke. Just stop, I said. And she did, like that. No nicotine patch, no hypnotist .
And for the next few months, she paced the world with a haunted, hungry look. She flew off the handle easily. She sneaked butts in the backyard. Then she started smoking again.
That’s when I began to see what I couldn’t look at before: My mother wasn’t that tough at all. Tough was in the look, the tone, the ready-to-boil anger . I had taken that outer layer of her as the whole person, as children do, because I needed to believe it. But underneath was a fragile person, one who’d stepped into the adult world at 14, quitting school to earn money modeling fur coats in the garment district’s showrooms, married three years later, had two kids, then nursed and buried her husband. No one to rescue her.
As a child, I’d glimpsed my mother’s deeper forlorn layers, how she’d stare vacantly into space with a look of suffering in her eyes. How she’d see tragedy everywhere or life’s unfairness. She couldn’t sleep at night without her pills. I saw her anguish, but it was just too scary to think about. She was the one who held our lives together, who made me feel invincible.
Instead, I bought into her myth of toughness. For years of my early adulthood, I tried to live it myself. Again and again, I fell under the spell of women who seemed better at it than I was. It’s hard to look beneath a mother’s own sense of herself. But I now think it’s exactly what I had to do in order to look at the deeper, more fragile layers of myself.
All along, she needed that smoker’s metaphoric thumb in her mouth. With the smoke all around her and the cigarette lit, she could fumigate the dark spirits that hovered at the edge of her mind, the ones that had drawn the life from her young husband, goaded her father into taking the dare, and ground her mother into pathos.
She cried when she told me it was a cancerous tumor. I’d only ever seen my mother cry once or twice. After they cut out a third of one lung, she stopped smoking, she told me, her voice like a child’s. I was on the verge of telling her about the supplemental therapies I’d read about in a magazine: breathing exercises and acupuncture, those sorts of things. But I knew because I knew her that she wouldn’t pursue any of them. By the time she died, I knew, too, that this is who she was, how she coped with her unspoken terrors, the ones that filled her dying.
Now, so many years later, on this Mother’s Day when I’m writing, which is also my birthday, that, though it pains me to know it, in those deeper layers of herself, my mother wasn’t tough enough to fight for her life.
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Joan K. Peters, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at California State University at Channel Islands. Her new book is Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.