Michelle Obama's Unsmoke Story

Currently I am reading the book written by Michelle Obama, “Becoming”. So far, it is just as it is told in Amazon: An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. 

In the book, Michelle Obama describes the early years of her marriage as she struggles to balance her work and family with her husband's fast-moving political career. She also talks about her perspective about her family’s smoking habit as well as her husband’s smoking habit and shares her actions in order to unsmoke her family.

Let me share some quotes about how Michelle Obama fights and feels against smoking from her book, "Becoming". 

Michelle Obama’s “Unsmoke the Parents” Efforts

When I was a kid, my parents smoked. They lit cigarettes in the evenings as they sat in the kitchen, talking through their workdays. They smoked while they cleaned the dinner dishes later at night, sometimes opening a window to let in some fresh air.

They weren’t heavy smokers, but they were habitual smokers, and defiant ones, too.

They smoked long after the research made clear that it was bad for you.

The whole thing drove me crazy, and Craig (Michelle’s brother) as well. We made an elaborate show of coughing when they lit up. We ran sabotage missions on their supplies. When Craig and I were very young, we pulled a brand-new carton of Newports from a shelf and set about destroying them, snapping them like beans over the kitchen sink. Another time, we dipped the ends of their cigarettes in hot sauce and returned them to the pack. We lectured our parents about lung cancer, explaining the horrors that had been shown to us on filmstrips during health class at school—images of smokers’ lungs, desiccated and black as charcoal, death in the making, death right inside your chest. For contrast, we’d been shown pictures of florid pink lungs that were healthy, uncontaminated by smoke. The paradigm was simple enough to make their behavior confounding: Good/Bad. Healthy/Sick. You choose your own future. It was everything our parents had ever taught us. And yet it would be years before they finally quit.

Michelle Obama’s “Unsmoke the President/Husband” Efforts

Barack smoked the way my parents did—after meals, walking down a city block, or when he was feeling anxious and needed to do something with his hands. In 1989, smoking was more prevalent than it is now, more embedded in everyday life. Research on the effects of second hand smoke was relatively new. People smoked in restaurants, offices, and airports. But still, I’d seen the filmstrips. To me, and to every sensible person I knew, smoking was pure self-destruction.

Barack knew exactly how I felt about it. Our friendship was built on a plain spoken candor that I think we both enjoyed.

“Why would someone as smart as you do something as dumb as that?” I’d blurted on the very first day we met, watching him cap off our lunch with a smoke. It was an honest question.

As I recall, he just shrugged, acknowledging that I was right. There was no fight to be put up, no finer point to be argued. Smoking was the one topic where Barack’s logic seemed to leave him altogether.

Final Comment

In conclusion, as Michelle points out in another paragraph of her book, “everybody had something that they had to work through, something that they were figuring out.” Michelle has a reason and standing point to unsmoke the ones she loved. She showed true effort to unsmoke them. What about you? What is your story about "unsmoke"? Are you “in” to unsmoke your world? Don’t forget it’s time to unsmoke!