Erma Bombeck Quotes

I can't stand a house to be dirty or even messy, even. I am a bit OCD. Wash the dishes when you finish eating.

I think all mothers are alike, regardless of cultural background, when it comes to illogical cleaning.

I always feel like the odd mom out, because trust me when I tell you I'm on my girls. And every time I am, I know from the outside it looks like I'm an overbearing, controlling parent. But I don't think we have any responsibility to anybody else but our kids and ourselves.

I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.

I have sporadic OCD cleaning moments around the house. But then I get lazy and I'm cured. It's a very inconsistent personality trait.

I don't remember my mother ever playing with me. And she was a perfectly good mother. But she had to do the laundry and clean the house and do the grocery shopping.

Crawford washed her hands a lot. She washed her arms all the way up past her elbows. She just couldn't get enough done in that direction. She was compulsive about being clean, clean, clean!

When I was a young boy, very young boy, mothers didn't work. Women were home, they took care of the house, they washed the dishes and took care of the children. That's what they did, and that's what my mother did.

I'm not the bake-sale-mom type - though once in a while, I'll make challah French toast for my sons.

I'm super OCD, so everything is clean.

I love watching documentaries on people like 'clean freaks,' because it's just so interesting to me for some reason.

I do ironing not only for myself but for everyone at home, everyone in the studio if they want it, and if I run out of ironing to do, I put everything back in the washing machine and get it out again clean so I have some ironing to do.

I'm a great cleaner. I'm actually kind of addicted to cleaning. I could clean anything.

I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.

I've been baking bread and looking after the baby...Everyone else who has asked me that question over the last few years says. 'But what else have you been doing?' To which I say, 'Are you kidding?' Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. After I made the loaves [of bread,] I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus, don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?

One of the few articles of clothing that a man won't try to remove from a woman is an apron.

I was a perfect housewife. Being a mother has always been the job I liked best. Absolutely.

I feel myself acting like a lunatic, but I can't stop. It would be like refusing to breathe.

She had her addictions and one of them was reading.

He that cockers his child, provides for his enemie.

Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD.

It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.

There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.

Stay at home mom is still a job.

Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.