The woman who lectured and the family that tuned her out.

Here's a question for you that should be easy to answer: how does Elly spend the time she doesn't squander doing endless laundry, moaning about living the life she more or less signed up for or being a malicious, self-righteous gossip? If you said "Lecturing her husband and children about inconsequential hang-ups", you've proven that you've been following the strip fairly closely. John and the kids cannot make a move without her standing around, jabbing her finger in the air like an idiot and ranting about how something most people would ignore harkens the downfall of Western Civilization. What makes things all the worse is that they know damned well that she turns the slightest hint that they don't care about what's got her annoyed into an excuse to accuse them of hating her and wanting her to suffer. What Elly tends to lose sight of is that her family ends up thinking that she doesn't have it in her to be satisfied with anything; granted, this is true but she shouldn't make it quite so obvious. She should also have realized that she wound up being regarded as little more than a dimwitted old blowhard who substituted syllables and decibels for thought. She, of course, did no such thing; her other annoying characteristic is that she doesn't really remember the past the way it actually happened. In her mind, the past was a lot more enjoyable than it actually was because she doesn't consciously remember the imagined slights she uses as an excuse to own horses; if asked, she simply wants to make sure her kids have the same sort of easy life she had.