John Patterson, the Motivation Creep….

Now that it’s certain that we’re about to see the trip Elly took to Vancouver by herself, it’s equally certain that John’s reasoning behind suggesting it is not going to change significantly. It initially seemed as if he was genuinely trying to address Elly’s feeling of being overwhelmed by the responsibility of housework and child-rearing as well as attempting to demonstrate that he could pick up the slack in the domestic front should she ever be incapacitated. The revelation that he’d left her an awful mess to clean up when she got back revealed his true intention: to show her that she ‘couldn’t’ leave home or anything like that. He, you see, took years to realize that his need to have things not change was making his life a mess. Once he’d done that, he’d allowed as how that maybe having a second source of income was a fairly prudent thing so long as the kids weren’t lost in the shuffle. It’s sort of too bad for him that Mike is even slower-witted than he is; even when he was trying to be modern, his son still thought that the universe would implode if Elly wasn’t chained to the Pattermanse waiting to respond to his every whim. That’s one of the few behavioral traits he shares with John, you see; not only is their default tendency towards a more rigid definition of gender roles but a passion to avoid change. All Mommy’s trip to Vancouver did for Mike was show him that she had no business being away from home and abandoning him.