A Fable and a poem......The fable was written when I was a single working Mother raising two boys alone...This was before I met my husband and I was very cynical.. A Working Mothers Fable A sheep in wolf's clothing moves through the pack. She is safe as long as she does not expose her tender insides. In a double-breasted and hose, low heeled pumps, she almost looks obscure, hardly different from the rest. She must act like a wolf to keep her job. Then she must act like a sheep to keep her family. But sometimes the big bad wolf wants her to take off her wolf suit while she is still at work. She cries. "But that's the way it is," they tell her. She cries again and agrees. Living two lives is hard enough without trying to fight the system. That's the way it has been. Superwoman changes in her bedroom, more practical than superman. Jumping out of her wolf suit (made of sheep's wool at great cost), she transforms herself. As a sheep she cooks and cleans, fixes and make do, settles fights before they start. And submits even when she doesn't want to. It gets harder to be just a sheep the more she wears her wolf's clothing. She is startled to see fangs in her sheep face in the morning, she feels wolfish in her mind. Yet she can never be a wolf entirely-she can not loose half of herself and become whole. Besides, being a wolf means being carnivorous and unable to change, which is not something the children need to learn just now. The changes scare her. She feels alone. So secretly she talks with her sisters and daughters about changes, and being neither a sheep or a wolf, but a woman. She discovers she is not alone in her changes. And she teaches her children that a woman is not born sheep or wolf. She is born free, but, in order to survive, accepts the chains which bind her to roles she doesn't like. Even knowing the first secret truth, she finds it hard to act like a woman when she has had more practice being a sheep or a wolf. One day the secret gets out.. The hidden women unite to affirm the truth of their secret. All the sheeps coats and wolves clothes are burned, and the people who once wore them step forth, loudly announcing the truth. "We are women. We are mothers, sisters, daughers. We don't want to be wolves. We want to be free again." The wolves look silly covering their ears, but bare their fangs, smiling at their prey, pretending they see sheep. Of course the women are afraid!! But they are sick of suffocating in their costumes which, don't fit well in the first place. The women repeat the truth quietly, to themselves, trying not to feel like someone else's dinner. They don't run away or put out the fires of rebellion. "Let the old roles burn! Let the chains melt!" Soon the wolves will not have to change their minds (a sheepish trait)so their egos will not have to suffer a surrender. The mothers, sisters, daughters practice being women even they, are not free yet. Some of the children begin to grow up ignoring the idea that they must be either sheep or wolves.They will become women,and men, people, not beasts, slaves or masters. For the second truth is that self is not something a wolf owns, to give or take at will. Freedom will actually come when the women (and men) act as themselves despite what the wolves do. And as women found herself, so must the wolf discover himself alone. That's the way it will be... dj cook 1985

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