Motherhood Quote by Diane Arbus

Arbus frames adulthood not as liberation-by-graduation but as a small, almost absurd transfer of risk. The line is funny in the way parental warnings are funny once you’re old enough to hear the anxious machinery behind them: “Wear rubbers” is practical advice, also a stand-in for a whole maternal worldview in which danger is everywhere and the body is perpetually one bad decision away from consequence. Her punchline isn’t rebellion so much as permission: you get to test the superstition, the caution, the inherited script.

The subtext is about authority and the pleasure (or necessity) of finding out for yourself. Arbus doesn’t romanticize that discovery. “You have the right” is clinical, almost bureaucratic, as if adulthood were a legal status conferring the ability to make mistakes in public. The final shrug - “It’s something like that” - refuses a neat moral. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a photographer’s calibration, describing experience by approximation rather than certainty.

Context matters: Arbus built her work around people and scenes that conventional society treated like warnings - the “don’t end up like that” logic of normalcy. This quote fits her eye. Growing up means inheriting fear disguised as care, then choosing whether to keep wearing it. Her photographs do a similar experiment: step closer, drop the protective layer of polite distance, and see what’s actually there. The risk isn’t just catching cold; it’s catching reality.