Four compliments open the poem, and every one of them is about talking: a mother people wish they had, a mother you can speak to. They arrive as bare quotations, the way a person actually hears them, flat and repeated and impossible to answer. Then the speaker turns: "But no one knows how she is / How she is at home." Everything after that is a reply to those four lines. The mother admired for being easy to talk to is, in her own house, the one who stops listening.
"Stops" is the engine of the poem. She "stops everything" for her boyfriend, then "stops talking to her kids," then stops "to talk to her boyfriend" again a few lines later. The repetition works like an accusation, the same verb landing again and again like a door closing. The irony is neat. Outsiders praise a woman who talks, while at home the talk runs in one direction only. The image that sums it up is "he is always above," a spatial picture in which the children sit beneath someone else's needs. Even the detail that "a book was more important" is small and ordinary. The poem names nothing dramatic, and that seems to be the point: the hurt is built from everyday choices about where attention goes.
The form is plain. This is free verse with no rhyme, in short, speech-like lines made of simple words. Nearly every stanza is a quatrain, and from the fourth stanza on, most open with the refrain "If they knew." That repeated phrase builds like a list of evidence for a hearing nobody has agreed to hold. The refrain stumbles at first: "Only if they knew... / Of if they knew..." (the "Of" reads like a slip for "Or"). It sounds as if the speaker is trying out the sentence before she can say it properly. Other small slips, such as "This are all quotes" and "That's she's one of the reasons," suggest a text written quickly and urgently. Whether or not they were intended, they keep the poem from sounding rehearsed or polished.
The emotional movement is careful. "I love her / But sometimes I hate her" puts the whole conflict on one small word, "But." The most painful line comes later: she is "one of the reasons I hate me." Here the failure turns inward, and the child absorbs the blame that belongs to the parent. The reasoning about trust is almost legal in its calm: "I can't trust her / Because she showed me I couldn't." The speaker isn't being dramatic, only logical. It also echoes the friend's remark from the opening, "I can talk to your mom but not mine," so the quotes that seemed like compliments turn out to describe the speaker's own exclusion.
The last two stanzas hold the poem's real tension. "So they think I'm ungrateful" shows the double bind: the outside world's praise makes the truth harder to say, because speaking up would look like complaining. Yet the speaker is fair. "Maybe she doesn't mean it / Maybe she doesn't realize it" gives the mother the benefit of the doubt. Then the poem refuses to soften: "But she failed me / More than once." It ends on something close to a tally, not a feeling, and there is no reconciliation and no advice.
The title helps. "UN-PERFECT" is not "terrible" or "bad." The hyphen pulls the word apart, as the poem pulls apart the public mother and the private one, and the mild phrasing suggests a speaker who cannot quite bring herself to condemn.
The poem matters because it gives words to a hurt that is hard to claim. No one is shouting and nothing visible has happened; the problem is attention that goes elsewhere while everyone else sees a good parent. "If they knew" is a conditional the poem itself fulfils, since by the end the reader is the one who knows. It shows that plain language, a steady refrain and a rigid frame can carry feeling as well as ornate metaphor, and it lets a reader who has felt unheard in a house that looks fine from outside recognise that experience on the page.