A suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

De Vries’s aphorism satirizes mid‑20th‑century American suburban life, where motherhood is imagined less as an ongoing intellectual or emotional vocation than as a logistics job. The joke hinges on the contrast between the singular, biologically momentous act of childbirth (“obstetrically once”) and the endless, mundane labor of chauffeuring children through car-dependent suburbia (“by car forever after”). Implicitly, it critiques gendered expectations that confine women to domestic service roles and critiques suburban design that turns daily life into perpetual driving. The line’s bite comes from compressing a social system—automobility, childrearing norms, and the erosion of adult autonomy—into a single, memorable inversion.