Young Elly and the great refusal.

Lynn might not actually realize that she's confirmed it but her biography makes it rather clear that Mrs Ridgway was a product of her time. As such, she clearly believed that spoiling a child was the worst possible thing she could have done. It was held as a common-place that doing so would create a weak, dependent child with no sense of initiative. It was harsh and hard but it was held to be necessary in order to give the child the best possible start in life. While every bit of evidence we have tells us that she loved Lindy, she refused to spoil her because that was how you did things. What's more, she didn't apologize for it because her love for her child manifested itself in a way that confused, embittered and angered Lynn and still does. After all, Lynn made a crap-load of money and married a great guy so it's clear that not coddling her kid worked so why apologize for success just because of some freakish need for hugging and soppiness?

The problem is that Ursula was incapable of realizing why it was that her daughter hated her and never grew out of spouting rage-filled accusations that she was a vicious monster who delighted in her daughter's pain and suffering and never had any love for her or faith in her. It made no sense that someone would never grow out of the need for constant reassurance and praise and cuddling and all the other things that would surely destroy Lynn's future. Since we're dealing with a mainstay of every family (specifically, the embittered eccentric who can't and won't shut up about a perceived slight so is best left to rant because she won't change), it's clear that the more Lynn thinks about her childhood, the angrier she gets at her mother because she feels cheated because she refuses to admit that she's either somehow defective or that she's made a life and living of misunderstanding her mother.

What this means for any sort of series about a younger Elly series is that we'd have a recurring theme: a studied refusal to consider that Marian is anything other than a cruel monster who delights in inflicting pain and tearing Elly apart. The series bible and the writer would drop broadish hints that Marian is fiercely proud of and genuinely concerned for her beloved daughter but the dialogue coming out of El's lips would paint much the same picture as Deanna's please despise my mother letter. Every move the woman makes would be gratuitously misunderstood by our unsympathetic clod hero because we're dealing with someone with a fatal flaw: a hole in her soul where the ability to feel gratitude is.