On never quite having enough.

Of course, another reason that the Elly of 2016 is akin to the Elly of 1979 is that, despite believing otherwise about herself, she's filled with envy of everyone else. Most of the reason that she wanted her own identity is that she envies John his improbable life of demanding and ungrateful patients and all of the reason that she got pissed off at her children was her fallacious belief that they were allowed to do whatever they wanted and got so much more than she ever did. Like a lot of people who assume sight unseen that if no one says anything good about them to their faces, there's nothing good to say, Elly seems to have spent most of the sixty-five years of her life in much the same manner Lizzie is shown to have behaved: freaked out and filled with fear and sadness because everyone is scratching and sniffing except her. There's a reason that I make that irritating comment you're sick of by now about how she's the victim of ALL victims, surpassing all others. That reason is that the part of her soul that can be satisfied with what she has is waiting on Marian to tell her she deserves to have it.

Since Marian went up the chimney convinced that she was right to never let Elly know how proud she was of her because doing so would make her quit trying and since children learn how to behave by emulating their parents, it stands to reason that the children would also envy others and also deny it to an extent. While Mike (who seems to have developed something almost like a moral code) was and is at least honest about how he's resented Liz most of her life because she was clearly loved best, Liz and April (who have not) dissemble about how they are consumed by envy of sitting duck antagonists who're living wind-blown existences because their insecurities distort unhappy people like Therese and Becky into monsters declaring war on them. This leaves us with an odd little paradox. That's because even though Michael can do more damage, his being straight about how people want to take away what 'little' he has because of a conspiracy to ruin him makes him better company than condescending twits like Liz and April who bleat about evil distracting stars. Meanwhile, Elly doesn't get that she taught her children to be filled with envy and smugness because of the most important of her damaging traits: her refusal to admit that her children learned how to live by following her and John.