Further notes on school teachers.

As you might or might not know, I once long ago wrote an essay in which I made a sweeping generalization about how Elly has an abiding love of school teachers because she sees them as allies in the fight to suppress the love of chaos and hatred of goodness inherent in the horrible children who want to destroy her ability to express herself. Wednesday's reprint reminds us of another reason why she has her warped respect for the educators of the world: she fears for and pities them because they not only have to deal with her horrible monsters but also the horrible, mother-hating, attention-demanding, chaos-loving Hellspawn other mothers are blighted with.

This is because of a sort of necessary blindspot that she needs to maintain in order to function. You see, aside from the occasional moments of lucidity in which she admits to being a self-pitying idiot lashing out at good kids just because she's in a permanent bad mood, the part of her that assumes that she can't back down lest she lose her ability to do anything undergoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde like transformation into the screaming lunatic we know and loathe. The self-pitying maniac can't allow herself even for a second to admit that anyone can actually coexist with children without being worn down at all lest she expose herself to the dangerous information that there are people who can do better than she does. Anything not to let the cruel, evil and wrong voice that tells her that she's a self-pitying incompetent who never learns from her mistakes that crazy, mean people who hate her and want her to suffer call 'her conscience' win. She'd be much happier if she were an inhuman monster like John; his not HAVING any sort of conscience makes his life easier.

Miss Edwards: the exception that confirms the rule.

Of course, there's one exception to Elly's need to turn teachers into figures of pity because they have to put up with her chaos-loving monster children that proves the validity of the rule by being interpreted as an existential threat by our hero: Sharon Edwards-Taylor. It alarms, angers and saddens Elly that Liz goes to someone else with her problems when Mommy is there to fix everything. It also never seems to occur to her to understand what the appeal is because doing so would reveal her as being what Malcolm Tucker of "In the thick of it" called an omnishambles.

This is because Miss Edwards does something that Elly can never be asked to actually do: understand the situation Lizzie has to deal with. Unlike Elly and her delusion that the sibling rivalry she stupidly aggravates is abnormal, she correctly identified Mike as being a non-descript, dime-a-dozen jackass whose fragile ego can't cope with being the centre of attention, correctly identified Lizzie's obsessive need to let Anthony monopolize her free time as the cause of a petty disagreement with Dawn and even explained that the trick to things is to understand what other people want out of life. Elly, on the other hand, has the inconvenient habit of allowing her biases, wishful thinking, envy, self-pity and ignorance on a situation and always gives Liz horrible advice when she isn't shrieking about how everything happens to her or simpers about starving orphans in war zones. What this all means to her conscious mind is that if Miss Edwards is more loved, Elly can be replaced. What the evil, scary, wrong voice that tells her that from bean to cup, she [BOXCAR]s up tells her is that Liz went elsewhere because Elly is a huffy fruitcake who doesn't know what's going on and has a hair-trigger temper touched off by nothing much at all. This results in Miss Edwards being not sympathetic because she can coexist with Liz without losing her temper or treating her like a freaking monster trying to destroy her.