Swallowed rage makes you nervous.
May. 10th, 2007 08:04 amI notice that Mike is starting to take on a characteristic behavior of his mother: worrying needlessly over trivialities. A once confident young man has beome a basket-case, paralyzed by doubt in a world he feels is no longer under his control. What happened to him to make him feel like this? I think it's because, deep down, he knows it isn't and hasn't been for some time. It may look to outsiders that his wife is a Stepford robot blindly validate his every screw-up but the way she blithely decided April's future for her makes me think otherwise. All her flattery of the man seems to me to be a reward for doing what she wants. What got me thinking this way was the manner in whivh Mike was forced to return to 'Portait' after the Diviala incident. Mike had planned to become a freelance author, perhaps even a columnist for a weekly paper but that didn't synch with his wife's ambitions at the time. I, for one, never bought her 'innocent mistake' story about the mix-up with her birth contorl meds and believe she deliberately got pregnant to force her husband to do what he wanted. Since he was raised to avoid confrontations at all costs, Mike meekly accepted his wife's biological ultimatum and went back to the magazine. As time went on, of course, she got the idea of having an author as a husband would bring her more status, so she pretended to take his 'dying of stress' bullhucky seriously. Since Mike kinda knows Deanna's setting the agenda and he can't or won't call her on it, his anger is transmuted into a vague fretfulness. Kinda like Mom.