The end of hockey, the beginning of dangerous body language.

The interesting thing about this year is that if I remember correctly, we're about to see Mike's last season of pee-wee hockey. This means no more of Elly whining about sitting on a cold bench, no more yowling about her precious free time going away and no more having to care about silly team sports that lead inevitably her having to thanklessly nurse a hopeless cripple after a sports injury destroys Mike somehow. The reason that I mention this is that another baseless anxiety is about to take its place this August. This anxiety has curly hair, freckles and parents who think that her poor angel Mike is a sex offender bent on its ruination.

Yep. That's right. No sooner does he give up on the team sports of encouraging violence to mothers does he start getting interested in cheap little floozies who clearly want to trap him in their web and destroy his loving mother's hopes for his glorious future. Or, to put in English instead of Crazed Egomaniac, Elly needs something to fear, hate and worry about in order to feel alive. It just so happens that a slip of a girl whose folks think of that dreg Mike as THAT boy from THAT family takes the place of sports for a while.

The Martha Perplex

The interesting thing about the whole deal with Martha is that as far as I can remember, Elly has never once encountered the girl's family and thus has no real idea how they see things. She has no idea that Martha has an older brother who's still glad that at least his kid sister didn't marry that tool who churns out abuse porn. She doesn't realize that her parents still think that Mike was a jerk and creep she'd be better off without because she was going too fast.

This is because I don't think that she wants to know anything about this girl that isn't "she's a threat to what I want for Mike and thus must be plotting my destruction" because the alternative is super-scary: realizing that she's seen as the parent of the bad kid who wants bad things to happen. She can handle thinking of him as bad when he doesn't eat his greens but she can't tolerate someone else seeing him as a threat.