Motherhood Quote by Dave Van Ronk

Van Ronk’s line lands like a punchline, then keeps bruising. The first sentence captures a very American reflex: class as self-description, not balance sheet. “Very stridently” is doing heavy work here; it suggests not just identification but defensiveness, the way “middle class” becomes a moral position - respectable, self-reliant, not needy, not elite. It’s a label you can cling to even when the numbers don’t add up, because it’s really about dignity.

Then he snaps the frame with “so he doesn’t count.” On the surface it’s a joke about divorce arithmetic, but the subtext is sharper: family narratives are curated, and inconvenient facts get edited out. If the father’s absence affects household stability, income, and status, pretending he “doesn’t count” is both an emotional survival tactic and a class tactic. It’s how people protect the story they tell about themselves when life has already knocked the structure loose.

Coming from a folk musician who lived around bohemian scenes and the postwar churn of New York, the quote also reads like a sideways critique of authenticity. Folk culture prized “realness,” yet even “real” backgrounds get mythologized. Van Ronk’s humor isn’t just self-deprecating; it’s diagnostic. He’s showing how class identity often functions like a song you keep singing because it’s the only one that lets you stay on key: proud, normal, unbroken - even when the family, and the economy, are anything but.