Motherhood Quote by Ellen Goodman

Goodman takes a scalpel to the gendered double standard that still structures American family life: mothers are punished for being too present, fathers are excused for being barely there. The opening couplet works because it feels like common sense we never bothered to interrogate. “Closeness” and “distance” aren’t just personality traits here; they’re socially assigned roles, with critique functioning like enforcement. Moms get overpoliced for emotional labor; dads get a long leash for opting out of it.

The real sting arrives in the pivot to “How many of us…?” Those questions aren’t requests for data. They’re an indictment aimed at the reader’s private bargains: the lowered expectations, the gratefulness for minimal effort, the quiet normalization of absence. Goodman’s subtext is that patriarchy doesn’t run only through institutions; it’s sustained through everyday emotional accounting. If you “expected less,” you helped build the system that lets fathers stay peripheral without consequence.

As a journalist, Goodman’s intent isn’t to offer a neat therapeutic takeaway; it’s to provoke a cultural audit. The line “let them off the hook” borrows the language of culpability, not misunderstanding. Distance becomes a moral category. She’s pointing at a generational script (especially resonant in late-20th-century conversations about divorce, work, and “involved fatherhood”) where fatherly affection is treated as a bonus, motherly care as a baseline, and accountability is unevenly distributed.