YOUR SPACE: Woman kicks the habit for more than just health

The month of May was hell for Jennifer Bailey. Just without the flames. At 11:59 p.m. April 30, she snubbed out her last cigarette. Over the next 31 days, the veteran pack-a-day smoker not only had her own nicotine demons to wrestle - she had to save face. Bailey, 49, turned herself into a human fundraiser to raise about $1,000 for The Club of Arts (www.theclubofarts.org), an arts center for people with disabilities.

The nonprofit near downtown at 505 E. Columbia St. offers classes in art, sewing, cooking, theater, fitness and music. It has about 100 students. Some come every day.

Bailey, the group's grant writer, decided to turn her bad habit into a good thing. She got pledges of $1 to $2 a day for the 31 days of May. If she lit up, pledgers didn't have to pay up.

Talk about pressure.

"It made me feel responsible," she says. "I've been a little edgier. Everything about your day is geared around smoking."

But she didn't buckle. The day the carrots and mints in her emergency kit didn't fend off the urge to smoke, she turned to other pleasures: She ate a pound bag of M&Ms, three bags of popcorn and an entire box of cereal.

"I've gained five pounds," she says.

She figured if nothing else maybe she could get her fix by smoking in bed - while asleep, that is.

"I had vivid dreams," she says. "In one, I bought a brand new house and my friends who were smokers were smoking and I chased them out and said, ‘You can't do that anymore.'"

In another dream, she looked at her hand and it was holding a cigarette. "I threw it out the window."

Bailey starting smoking at age 12. "Back then it was cool."

By 14, she was smoking a pack of Kools daily.

The divorced mother of three quit during her pregnancies in the 1980s.

After her first child was born, "I had an ashtray sent to my room," she says. "You could still smoke in the hospital then."

She quit for a few years after the last kid, then pretty much smoked nonstop in the 20 years since.

"Always menthol. The kind that crystalizes your lungs," she says. "When I've tried to quit in the past, I drove everybody else crazy. My kids would say. ‘Go buy yourself a pack.'"

She'd obey.

Still, she didn't want to end up like her mom, who smoked for 60 years and died of lung cancer two years ago.

"Mom's death had a huge impact on me, watching her die. I held her hand while she died."

She tried to quit after that. "Several times. It was way too difficult. One time I made it two days."

Not this time.

"I woke up a nonsmoker on May 1."

It's a pledge she's making to herself from here on.

Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com.