I Regret Everything Read Online Free
Author: Seth Greenland
sofa like a ratty afghan.
Let me tell you about my mother. Her name is Harlee Joy Spaulding. I know. Har-LEE. It was Janet Spaulding when she was growing up in Rye, but Janet failed to capture her uniqueness so she christened herself Harlee at Vassar where she majored in art history. She could babble endlessly about Minimalism but when it came to stuff like knowing how to talk to me about anything other than the perils of addiction, forget it. During the 1980s she had worked in an art gallery in SoHo but then she married my father to pursue a life of child-rearing and cocktails. She was in recovery again, sober less than a year, which meant I was supposed to no longer be worried about coming home to find her passed out at four in the afternoon. But the thing is, you never stop worrying.
Harlee was a beautiful woman and that goes a long way toward explaining how she managed to swing another two marriages even if both imploded because of her drinking hobby. I ignored the not-my-real-dads as best I could. There were step-sibs in the mix but since I got packed off these kids were like apparitions who appeared when I was home for the holidays and floated in and out of my adolescence like little ghosts. For husband number two she moved us to the Upper East Side and for number three it was Tarrytown. Like a true New Yorker, she never sold her own place. The Riverside Drive address was her life raft and she always swam back there.
Since my release I had been living at âhomeâ which meant reluctantly cohabitating with my mother, her feline menagerie, and occasionally Dodd. Harlee was hinting she might marry him. She was going to be fifty soon, so her hormones were conspiring to help her make worse decisions than usual.
âAfter a certain point, Spall, you canât set your sights too high.
She wasnât sure Dodd was marriage material since he got downsized from some mid-level job at a bank, went to massage school, and had recently started work at a day spa called Harmony. She was always making him give her âsacral adjustments.â Ten minutes after we met Dodd told me it looked like my shoulders were out of alignment and asked if I wanted one. Like that was going to happen.
âFrom her perch on the couch my mother said, Dodd, can you believe this girl had to wear a brace and stay home from school for an entire year when she was eleven because of spinal curvature and now sheâs turning down free treatment?
A typical day: I got up late, hopefully after Dodd left for the spa. Coffee, black, and a piece of wheat toast with apricot jam. My mother would be in the living room listening to Joni Mitchell on her iPod, drinking quarts of coffee, and working on a sweater or a blanket, yarn snaking from the tote bag she carried with her everywhere, knitting needles pumping like pistons.
âMorning, Spall, sheâd say.
âHey, Iâd say.
âEverything good?
âAwesome.
âGet enough sleep?
This was passive-aggressive because I was sleeping like a bear so it was her way of telling me she didnât approve.
When I stayed home I read novels: Camus, Houellebecq, and
The Sickness Unto Death
by Kierkegaard, not a novel but more my Bible since it said that if you donât get right with God youâre in despair. I wasnât a God person but it worked as a metaphor. My copy had a lot of underlining. And I read poetry. I dug the 20th-century poets who knew how to rock a rhyme. Blank verse was supposed to be cooler and rhyming poetry allegedly for dorks but it was a soothing representation of order in the universe and that was something I craved. Last winter I learned to use it as a coping technique, the Iambic Pentameter Strategy. In challenging moments I would formulate words, sometimes nonsensical, occasionally borderline poetic, that in five-foot lines would mimic the human heartbeatâ
ba-Bum / ba-Bum / ba-Bum / ba-Bum / ba-Bum.
Â
It worked like a breathing exercise for a
Let me tell you about my mother. Her name is Harlee Joy Spaulding. I know. Har-LEE. It was Janet Spaulding when she was growing up in Rye, but Janet failed to capture her uniqueness so she christened herself Harlee at Vassar where she majored in art history. She could babble endlessly about Minimalism but when it came to stuff like knowing how to talk to me about anything other than the perils of addiction, forget it. During the 1980s she had worked in an art gallery in SoHo but then she married my father to pursue a life of child-rearing and cocktails. She was in recovery again, sober less than a year, which meant I was supposed to no longer be worried about coming home to find her passed out at four in the afternoon. But the thing is, you never stop worrying.
Harlee was a beautiful woman and that goes a long way toward explaining how she managed to swing another two marriages even if both imploded because of her drinking hobby. I ignored the not-my-real-dads as best I could. There were step-sibs in the mix but since I got packed off these kids were like apparitions who appeared when I was home for the holidays and floated in and out of my adolescence like little ghosts. For husband number two she moved us to the Upper East Side and for number three it was Tarrytown. Like a true New Yorker, she never sold her own place. The Riverside Drive address was her life raft and she always swam back there.
Since my release I had been living at âhomeâ which meant reluctantly cohabitating with my mother, her feline menagerie, and occasionally Dodd. Harlee was hinting she might marry him. She was going to be fifty soon, so her hormones were conspiring to help her make worse decisions than usual.
âAfter a certain point, Spall, you canât set your sights too high.
She wasnât sure Dodd was marriage material since he got downsized from some mid-level job at a bank, went to massage school, and had recently started work at a day spa called Harmony. She was always making him give her âsacral adjustments.â Ten minutes after we met Dodd told me it looked like my shoulders were out of alignment and asked if I wanted one. Like that was going to happen.
âFrom her perch on the couch my mother said, Dodd, can you believe this girl had to wear a brace and stay home from school for an entire year when she was eleven because of spinal curvature and now sheâs turning down free treatment?
A typical day: I got up late, hopefully after Dodd left for the spa. Coffee, black, and a piece of wheat toast with apricot jam. My mother would be in the living room listening to Joni Mitchell on her iPod, drinking quarts of coffee, and working on a sweater or a blanket, yarn snaking from the tote bag she carried with her everywhere, knitting needles pumping like pistons.
âMorning, Spall, sheâd say.
âHey, Iâd say.
âEverything good?
âAwesome.
âGet enough sleep?
This was passive-aggressive because I was sleeping like a bear so it was her way of telling me she didnât approve.
When I stayed home I read novels: Camus, Houellebecq, and
The Sickness Unto Death
by Kierkegaard, not a novel but more my Bible since it said that if you donât get right with God youâre in despair. I wasnât a God person but it worked as a metaphor. My copy had a lot of underlining. And I read poetry. I dug the 20th-century poets who knew how to rock a rhyme. Blank verse was supposed to be cooler and rhyming poetry allegedly for dorks but it was a soothing representation of order in the universe and that was something I craved. Last winter I learned to use it as a coping technique, the Iambic Pentameter Strategy. In challenging moments I would formulate words, sometimes nonsensical, occasionally borderline poetic, that in five-foot lines would mimic the human heartbeatâ
ba-Bum / ba-Bum / ba-Bum / ba-Bum / ba-Bum.
Â
It worked like a breathing exercise for a
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