We Exchanged your Son for a Haircut

for Cathy, July 2003

So, this is where my mother said goodbye.

Quite difficult to contemplate, and yet

I do. A different woman, who is also

my mother, (though she wasn’t at the time),

stole me away. Her husband, full of kindness

and sympathy (there is no irony

intended), took my no-longer-mother

to have her hair done. ‘The past is a foreign

country; they do things differently there.’ Was
he referring to the hairstyles, do you think?