The Perfect Mother

1 The perfect mother lets the cat sleep on her head. The children laugh. Where is she? She is not carefully ironing the starched ruffles of a Sunday dress. What does she say? She does not speak. Her head is under the cat and like the cat, she sleeps. 2 But her children are in a marsh! Bogged, they have gone wild. Yet, no one should worry. See, they are there, in a sunny kitchen. They drink cups of soup and wipe their faces with yellow napkins. What does it matter if they are hatching plots, if in their waking dreams the poor cat is trapped its hair standing on end? 3 Where shall we go? We ask the perfect mother. What do you want of us? She is no where to be found. Not in the cookie jar we have broken to bits not under the shiny kitchen floor not on our lips. Here we are transfixed, mourning the perfect mother, and she is caught in the trapped cat of her children’s dreams.