Motherhood Quote by Arthur Godfrey

A whole American life gets flattened into a résumé you could file in a drawer, which is exactly the point. Godfrey’s sentence moves like small talk, but it’s really a status report from the middle of the 20th-century bargain: you work steadily, you build a family, you accept the churn, you keep it moving. The plainness is doing the heavy lifting. No punchline, no self-pity, no showbiz gloss; just facts stacked like timecards.

Coming from a major entertainer, that restraint lands with extra charge. Godfrey was a master of intimacy-as-performance, the guy who made audiences feel like they knew him. Here, he borrows the cadences of an ordinary working man - Post Office, 18 years, “seven facilities,” “three states” - and lets the specificity authenticate him. It’s not “I’ve had ups and downs,” it’s a map of transfers, relocations, and obligations. The bureaucracy becomes a kind of biography.

The family details are equally clipped, almost transactional: “married and divorced,” then the daughters tallied by age, custody, and tuition. “Lives with her mom” is a dagger hidden in a neutral phrase, the sort of emotional aftermath men of that era were trained to compress into logistics. The subtext is strain managed through inventory. He’s signaling reliability and endurance, but also the quiet cost of being movable, employable, and replaceable.

It reads like an audition for respectability - the entertainer insisting he’s also the guy next door - and a snapshot of a culture where personal meaning often had to be smuggled inside paperwork.