Elly at sixty-five: a proposal.

A cursory reading of the official character biographies tells us that Elly is going to be sixty-five next August. It will also be pretty much eight years to the day after the Settlepocalypse which she saw at the time as a final vindication of her life of passive-aggressive beefing, witlessly pitting her children against one another, corrosive nagging that kills initiative, huffy lecturing about there being only one 'right' way to do housework that guaranteed that people didn't want to help her and a grating insistence that the outside world might look good but is actually scary because she got eaten alive owing to her being an oblivious clod who expected to be carried around on a damned litter.

The problem is, of course, that real life doesn't work out as tidily as Elly probably thought it would. Anthony has more than likely turned out to be not the go-getter that she knew he'd be but instead is the passive, envious and entitled jackass whimpering about how his degree meant he should outrank someone like Gordon and his work-and-work-and-work-to-win philosophy we expected him to be. This means that while Liz has the same problems she used to, it also means that Liz has the same problems she used to. The continuity in affairs isn't as reassuring as she'd hoped it would be because it might somehow mean that the problem isn't her children or who she married or the dog or some evil conspiracy of men to make her feel bad. The problem might have been her all along just like her mother said. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to take a few days to examine each of her less delightful tendencies and see how they're making a dog's breakfast of her latter years.