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As I've said in the past, what Elly thinks is happening around her is rarely what actually is happening. The template for this is the strip in which Mike discovers that he can suction a drinking glass to his face and she stands around screaming like a banshee because she assumes that whatever unknown thing he's doing, it HAS to be bad. She has no real idea what's going on but since she doesn't really like children or trust them, it's easy to assume the worst of everything.
This leads another problem that I've mentioned before: Elly doesn't actually understand what's expected of her. This leads to great suffering. The template to this is the Easter Parade in which she thinks horrible thoughts about the terrible person who stole her chance to prove that she was a competent mother everyone should trust. This is because it's damned obvious that Elly still after all these years thinks that the point of the Easter Parade was to show that she could defeat her child's need to embarrass her in public by baulking and thus denying her praise for raising a good, obedient child. The woman who had the Needle-nose of being Evil and Superior is thus supposed to be a stand-in for people who cheer on the wrong person because Elly and Lynn fail to understand a simple fact: when an average person sees someone trying to force a frightened child into doing something she doesn't want to do, most of us want to smack Elly in the head for being a pushy nitwit stage mother who sees her child as a means to an end.
Where this applies to mess two years from now when she fails to address Mike's poor impulse control because she's too busy blaming a mess she made by ignoring him and telling him to stop being selfish and hateful because she made a love object of Lizzie and treated him like he should maybe be left on the curb with the other things that have been replaced on the Feds for not parenting for her is that not only does she not realize that most of where he picked up bad language is from exposure to a husband with two left feet, ten thumbs and a need to save money on inferior freelance joinery, she also has a crazy idea of what the end game is. This is a woman who still thinks that she saved Mike from a criminal record at best and being gunned down like a rabid dog by the police at worst for dressing as a punk rocker for Halloween. I am not quite certain what she thinks would happen to him if his language were not kitchen clean but you can just bet that if we could have her monologue about it and film it, we could use it as a PSA for the Partnership For A Drug-Free Canada.
This leads another problem that I've mentioned before: Elly doesn't actually understand what's expected of her. This leads to great suffering. The template to this is the Easter Parade in which she thinks horrible thoughts about the terrible person who stole her chance to prove that she was a competent mother everyone should trust. This is because it's damned obvious that Elly still after all these years thinks that the point of the Easter Parade was to show that she could defeat her child's need to embarrass her in public by baulking and thus denying her praise for raising a good, obedient child. The woman who had the Needle-nose of being Evil and Superior is thus supposed to be a stand-in for people who cheer on the wrong person because Elly and Lynn fail to understand a simple fact: when an average person sees someone trying to force a frightened child into doing something she doesn't want to do, most of us want to smack Elly in the head for being a pushy nitwit stage mother who sees her child as a means to an end.
Where this applies to mess two years from now when she fails to address Mike's poor impulse control because she's too busy blaming a mess she made by ignoring him and telling him to stop being selfish and hateful because she made a love object of Lizzie and treated him like he should maybe be left on the curb with the other things that have been replaced on the Feds for not parenting for her is that not only does she not realize that most of where he picked up bad language is from exposure to a husband with two left feet, ten thumbs and a need to save money on inferior freelance joinery, she also has a crazy idea of what the end game is. This is a woman who still thinks that she saved Mike from a criminal record at best and being gunned down like a rabid dog by the police at worst for dressing as a punk rocker for Halloween. I am not quite certain what she thinks would happen to him if his language were not kitchen clean but you can just bet that if we could have her monologue about it and film it, we could use it as a PSA for the Partnership For A Drug-Free Canada.
