Quitter

Throughout the last 7 years I have quit a lot of things: a marriage, several subsequent relationships, alcohol, cigarettes, dairy and coffee.  Each of these things was uniquely challenging to abandon—particularly my marriage to my husband and my marriage to alcohol. Self-pity has become one of the few things that I have been left to over-indulge in.  That, nicotine gum and nail-biting. 

I am still addicted to nicotine gum.  I chew it all day long.  It’s almost more expensive than smoking cigarettes at this point—which is really the only reason I feel compelled to quit it. That being said, I do recognize my flawed superiority over smokers and vapers.  Chronic gum chewing is also kind of unflattering.

I’d like to blame Kroger for the intensity of my addiction to nicotine gum. My local grocery store was recently remodeling and they set up a clearance aisle to purge products they’d no longer be stocking. As luck would have it, they decided they would no longer be selling nicotine gum.  I was shocked by this—it seemed irresponsible—like deciding to no longer carry condoms.  They were toying with the fate of smokers in a five mile radius.  However, I was one smoker that would benefit from their reckless disregard because I had stumbled upon a clearance shelf loaded with nicotine gum. 

Each box was emblazoned with a bright yellow sticker that yelled “WOW” and compared the original price of $25 to the clearance price of $6.  The one downside to my nicotine windfall was that these boxes were the 4mg dose, and I had long been gnawing away at 2mg pieces of gum.  I decided to bite the bullet anyway and I put every one of those clearance boxes in my basket.  All told, I was about to be the proud owner of 600 pieces of nicotine gum. 

While I checked out at the register I felt the lingering gaze of the cashier.  She seemed to be attempting to discern what a day in my life looked like.  What type of person needed 600 pieces of nicotine gum, a smattering of discounted “all natural energy drinks,” some Crunchy Nuggets cereal, and a carton of spinach?  I tried not to let her judgment rain on my nicotine parade.  I was feeling like I had won the lottery.  I was investing, at a discounted rate, in my future as a non-smoker.

I guess it’s true that nothing is ever truly without cost though.  In the weeks that followed I chewed that gum with the reckless abandon of a lottery winner.  Piece after piece disappeared into my mouth without any of the usual efforts to monitor the time between them.  Like any good addict, I was indulging without considering the consequences. In the blink of an eye, the party was over.  I was out of clearance nicotine gum and my mind and mouth demanded that I replenish it—at whatever cost.

My fingers are the other thing that I can’t keep out of my mouth.  I’ve been shoving them in there since I was a toddler.  I remember my parents discouraging my thumb-sucking by drafting a pretty intense behavior modification chart.  The prize for quitting my thumb?  The hottest commodity for a child in the 1980s--a Cabbage Patch kid. It worked and I earned my Cabbage Patch kid.  However, adolescent anxiety directed my hands into my mouth once again. 

Since then, my hands have remained in my mouth.  When I wasn’t smoking or delivering bottles of beer to my lips, I was biting my nails.  Anxiety, boredom and hunger were all reasons to nibble my nails.

My 12 year old daughter exhibits a similar compulsion. “I want to quit biting my nails,” she confided one day.  “Why do we do that?” she asked.

“We do it to soothe ourselves,” I explained. “It’s called an oral fixation.  You know things like biting nails, chewing gum, sucking thumbs, and smoking cigarettes—they’re all ways we try to calm down and comfort ourselves.  They’re all oral fixations.”  

Fortunately she seemed to understand, not asking me to delve too deeply into Freudian theory.  She knew that the take away was that we both needed to find other ways to soothe ourselves. No one, including my 12 year old, wants to consider themselves orally fixated—it just sounds bad. If you are orally fixated, the next bit will likely have you very conflicted.  You’ll feel uncomfortable, but won’t want to soothe yourself. 

In his theories surrounding psychosexual development, Freud suggests that children who were insufficiently fed OR overfed might develop anxiety that later manifests as a neurosis in adulthood.  This neurosis appears as an obsession with oral stimulation.  This sounds and is unattractive in itself but Freud makes it worse by theorizing that these afflicted adults often are manipulative in their efforts to meet their needs and resist maturation.  Thanks Freud.  Basically, instead of becoming healthy, independent adults, those of us with this neurosis look to others and to oral stimulation to fulfill our needs. 

Hold on to your cuticles…there’s more. Oral fixation is not limited to putting things into one’s mouth.  It is also symptomatized by what comes out of the mouth.  Talkativeness and sarcasm are both features of oral fixation.

As an infant, I spent time in foster care.  This meant that I never nursed.  In letters documenting my disposition, my foster mother described me as insatiable. I was always hungry, crying constantly to be fed.  To appease me between feeding, she offered me bottles of sugar water.  Though this shocks me and sort of annoys me (you’d think a foster mom would know better), I can’t help but think it could have been worse.  This was the 80s, so I should just be glad it wasn’t cocaine.

Although I know it’s pointless for me to do so, I can’t help wonder how different I would be if I had been breastfed—or maybe just not fed bottles of sugar water.  Would I have been so needy and demanding in the years between infancy and sobriety? Would I have so readily pursued and found comfort in bottles of alcohol?  Would I have been so fixated and pained by the things that I put into my mouth and the things that I have tried to keep out of it?

I’ll never know the answers to these questions.  I’ll just have to serenity prayer my way into tomorrow and try my best to keep my mouth shut.