Mad As a Hatter

I was formatting a drafted story when I recklessly read one line that caused me to get something in my eye.

The story had an innocuous working title, “Ex Wf.” The premise was a woman coming over to her ex-husband’s home for her once-a-month two-hour court ordered visitation with their son. See how progressive I can be as I put a female character into a traditionally masculine role.

I had to figure out how to make the premise of a 23-year-old single dad credible when the court restricted the mom’s visitation to only two hours a month with her five-year-old son.

The story is a short slice of life piece that slowly rolls out information to the reader. The quick version is that the mother lives in a group home after being in and out of a mental institution following a bathtub self-deletion attempt. This story is about the impact of a person’s mental illness on family members.

As drafted the story is sympathetic and compassionate. No one is a villain in the story; if there is a villain in it that would be (redacted).

While the mother attempts to negotiate more visitation time, the father reminds her that she requires her psychiatrist’s sign off & she would not be asking him if the doctor was agreeable. Meanwhile the ex-husband’s focus is on her getting better as his greatest fear is his son ever finding her in a tub bleeding out as the ex-husband had.

That one line? It was an expression by the father of feeling like he had failed the mother as a husband because he did not know how to protect her from herself.

I blame the influence of Larkin Poe for making me choose to write about such things.