Erma Bombeck
Erma Bombeck
Erma Louise Bombeckwas an American humorist who achieved great popularity for her newspaper column that described suburban home life from the mid-1960s until the late 1990s. Bombeck also published 15 books, most of which became bestsellers. From 1965 to 1996, Erma Bombeck wrote over 4,000 newspaper columns, using broad and sometimes eloquent humor, chronicling the ordinary life of a midwestern suburban housewife. By the 1970s, her columns were read twice-weekly by 30 million readers of the 900 newspapers in the U.S...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth21 February 1927
CityBellbrook, OH
CountryUnited States of America
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.
Children make your life important.
All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.
A child develops individuality long before he develops taste. I have seen my kid straggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory -- an empty bottle of gin.
I have never understood, for example, how come a child can climb up on the roof, scale the TV antenna, and rescue the cat ... yet cannot walk down the hallway without grabbing both walls with his grubby hands for balance.
I read one psychologist's theory that said, "Never strike a child in your anger." When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he's recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?
I will never understand children. I never pretended to. I meet mothers all the time who make resolutions to themselves. 'I'm going to ... go out of my way to show them I am interested in them and what they do. I am going to understand my children.' These women end up making rag rugs, using blunt scissors.
For the first two years of a child's life, we spend every waking hour tryibg to get the child to communicate. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how we can reverse the process.
Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.
Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people's children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.
When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.
Maybe you know why a child can reject a hot dog with mustard served on a soft bun at home, yet eat six of them two hours later at fifty cents each.
I see children as kites. You spend a lifetime trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you're both breathless. They crash . . . you add a longer tail . . . you patch and comfort, adjust and teach. You watch them lifted by the wind and assure them that someday they'll fly.
A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.