Motherhood Quote by Erma Bombeck

Childhood freedom gets sold as lemonade stands and scraped knees; Bombeck frames it as hazardous labor with an unregulated boss. Calling it a "high-risk occupation" is classic suburban satire: she upgrades the idle, sunlit sprawl of summer break into a job category, the kind that should come with a hard hat and workers' comp. The joke lands because the risk isn't snakes or strangers, but the logistical violence of modern family life: a kid alone, a mother at work, and the phone as both lifeline and weapon.

"If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour" is engineered hyperbole. Thirteen is ridiculous, but it’s also specific enough to feel observed rather than invented - the sitcom math of panic. The line turns maternal care into a pressure system. Mom is not a serene nurturer; she's a stressed employee caught between two authorities: the workplace that demands competence and the child who demands reassurance. In that squeeze, even love acquires sharp edges.

The final snap - "she can hurt you" - does two things at once. It punctures sentimental motherhood and admits a taboo truth: affection doesn't erase impatience. Bombeck is writing from the late 20th-century domestic front, when more mothers worked outside the home but cultural expectations lagged behind. The subtext is that the "danger" of being home alone is less about the house than about the fraying bandwidth of adults. She makes it funny so it can be said out loud.