Ted's mother: Fake Big Bad

The latest official story about how and why Ted broke things off with Connie is that his evil, overbearing mother is to blame; since he would rather please her than be his own man, Connie stood a snowball's chance in a blast furnace of marrying him. The trouble I have with this idea is that last June, she'd told us that the woman wanted to lose two hundred pounds of mama's boy. Later on, of course, she'd blamed Ted's emergency stand-by girl, Irene for the break-up before deciding that Ted was a screwed-up jerk with commitment issues. The thing is that we'd have been a lot better off if she'd said that last thing from the get-go and ran with it; that way, John can resent him with a clear conscience if he sees Ted as a moron who only thinks he's doing the right thing. That being said, he's not going to explain to Elly why he hates Ted more than she does; that's because he knows that his wife isn't going to be swift enough to realize that Ted's mother might resent being used as an excuse for her idiot son's refusal to get her grandchildren because he thinks he's supposed to do something he shouldn't. (That being said, his having cold feet beats his objecting to the way she treats Lawrence; the poor kid has enough on his plate without Connie's belief that he wants her to die alone because he's selfish being reinforced.)