Bedtime reading

Just came down the stairs after reading, with our 6-year-old at her bedtime, The Cat in the Hat.  Is it just me or is there something kind of alarming and sinister roiling beneath the surface of the rhyming anapests?  Where has the mother gone, anyway?  It is not right to leave young children alone at home, apparently with the doors unlocked.  At the very end, she arrives back home and speaks, but she is never shown--a figure of mystery, which is a poor trait in a mother.  In her absence, the children sit and stare out the window at the bleak day until the Cat arrives on the scene.  He is no substitute for a decent mother and the children do not appear to be entertained by his "tricks."  There is no one to cheer for.  The fish?  No.  He is right, in a way, but he is also an unimaginative scold, and his repeated appeals to what the absent mother would say are morally repellent.  The children you just feel sorry for.  Until near the end, when the boy, who is the narrator, captures with his net the two Things, they appear flummoxed and passive.  I tell Rianna that of her books it is my favorite, and that is true, but I don't blame her for not liking it.  The story is sad and upsetting.  When on the last page the narrator asks the individual reader whether she would tell her mother what had happened, he comes close to making the same mistake as the fish.  I would not tell that mother a thing.  She is not to be trusted.