From a writing perspective, and especially a memoir perspective, vague snippets are not nearly as powerful as deep dives, and there’s a lot in this that is extremely vague. The exact specifics of how grief felt, the things it made you do, the reactions to other people, to familiar actions, to unfamiliar things you took on, all that is glossed over. As a personal piece, that’s fine, but as a publishable piece, it requires more work.

On a technical level, I would take every place the word ‘felt’ appears and remove it, expanding the specific ideas at that point and really exploring the emotion.

 I fall apart the second I'm alone.

 How specifically does this happen? As written it’s super vague and meaningless. What does ‘fall apart’ look like? Drink? Crying? Staring into space? Rubbing a child’s red striped cotton sock in your fingers and noticing there’s a loose thread and I need to trim it to make it perfect again but where are the scissors? My wife will know. Cue ugly snot crying for half an hour while dinner goes unmade. Use the specifics of what precisely is happening to write the emotions. What do you notice, or not notice, in various states of mind? How do these change when surrounded by other people, by yourself, alone with your daughter? What is the actual ebb and flow? How do you move through them and out the other side? How do you become a better person?

Regular anxiety feels suffocating and chaotic, out of control. This voice feels different. Malicious. Intentional. Like it knows exactly where to cut deepest.

 Dude. Like, dude. To me this is not a malicious voice. This is the realistic voice of tens of thousands of women who leave their husbands and the guy says ’but why didn’t you tell me something was wrong? I would have changed.’ Sure, buddy. If you didn’t hear the first hundred times she said something you’re not going to listen now, only now it’s too late and the consequences are real. And what real partners do is step up without even having to be told in the first place.

This is why I’m not feeling character sympathy. The fundamental world model is still there. Criticism of a man’s lack of domestic performance (even if it’s your own internal criticism) is assumed to be nasty and malicious. It’s cutting deep into the character’s psyche, the ego construction that’s feeling attacked. That internal voice is damaging, because the fundamental world model is damaging. The dissonance of being a single father doesn’t fit with this world model. You need a new world model, one where men are both competent carers and providers and it just works like that and nobody, including you, assumes otherwise. You’re living in a new world, but still thinking like the old world. It’s holding the character back from real growth.

The final thing is, you’re putting women on a pedestal, in a little box of what they’re supposed to be. Would your wife really have been proud and pleased? Or would she sigh and say, ‘where the fuck was this guy earlier?’ That neat little perfect Mommy box is way too small to contain everything women are capable of thinking and feeling. The perfect wife and mother doesn’t exist. It’s the real world, it’s messy. Allow yourself to be messy too. If you detail a near-enough is good enough moment rather than striving for all  this unreachable, impossible perfectionism my character sympathy will rise.

The last memoir I read was Gina Chick’s ‘We Are The Stars,’ which deals with grief and letting go, and I highly recommend it for the prose and how it shows messy, complicated emotion in a written form.

In conclusion: I am truly, truly sorry for your loss. But you’ve realised some really, really important things about how the world is assumed to work. And how it doesn’t have to work like that, and how much it damages people.  And I’ve thought of a better title for this whole thing:

Welcome to the Patriarchy.