On Elly and eyeglasses....
Jun. 2nd, 2018 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadedcandiru2Of course, John's being an infant makes him slightly better company than the idiot he married. If Lynn had bothered lining the reprints up better, we'd be dealing with a big, ugly reminder of a big ugly truth because we'd be watching Elly make a moron of herself dealing with Liz's having to get glasses. We start things off with her blowing off Liz's anxiety about her appearance like always because doing so means acknowledging that her child's feelings matter. We know how little they do matter when Liz mislays them temporarily and Elly's reaction is oh so typical of her: telling a frightened, unhappy child who knows that her mother is more worried about the inconvenience to herself than whatever Liz might feel that she's a stupid, careless monster who doesn't listen because she's thoughtless and wants to buy glasses in bulk to just throw away. Knowing who Elly is and knowing how little she cares to understand how people think, it's obvious that she thinks Liz is play-acting being sorry to avoid the punishment she deserves. It matters not that Liz says that she didn't mean to do her harm or that she herself loses things, Elly was jolted out of her beloved routine and therefore Liz was bad and nothing could ever make anything okay so the idea of reassuring someone who inconvenienced her to a minor extent was a non-starter because she'd made Elly pay attention.
This leaves the people around her with a problem: Elly thinks that she's a more sympathetic and understanding person than she is because she glosses over all the times that she's made her children unhappy and hates to be reminded that this is not the case. It also leaves John with a dilemma in that he cannot simply tell Elly "The reason Liz doesn't come to you with her problems is that when she misplaced her glasses at the beach, you stood there screaming like a maniac for hours on end about how she was a careless, thoughtless monster who hated the family. When she said she was sorry, you didn't listen. When she felt bad, you told me that children just fake that to make you feel guilty for nothing. When they turned up, you didn't apologize because you still think that the kids are trying to destroy you" without having to engage in Klingon foreplay (being roared at, clawed at and having heavy objects hurled at him).
This leaves the people around her with a problem: Elly thinks that she's a more sympathetic and understanding person than she is because she glosses over all the times that she's made her children unhappy and hates to be reminded that this is not the case. It also leaves John with a dilemma in that he cannot simply tell Elly "The reason Liz doesn't come to you with her problems is that when she misplaced her glasses at the beach, you stood there screaming like a maniac for hours on end about how she was a careless, thoughtless monster who hated the family. When she said she was sorry, you didn't listen. When she felt bad, you told me that children just fake that to make you feel guilty for nothing. When they turned up, you didn't apologize because you still think that the kids are trying to destroy you" without having to engage in Klingon foreplay (being roared at, clawed at and having heavy objects hurled at him).
