Phil: childfree by choice.

[dreadedcandiru2]

As we all know, Elly has all the imagination of a turnip and the childlike tendency to think that what she experienced growing up is some sort of law of nature. It's why she got married at the age she did, it's why she impresses on her family the need to keep her house the way her mother did and it's why she thinks that having a boy-girl pair of children is a divinely-mandated ideal. Not only does this mean that she thinks that all her later misfortunes come from having an extra child, it blinds her to the fact that people can choose to not have children and not be monsters. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Mike's neighbors the Kelpfroths that don't involve their not wanting kids, after all. The thing is that you can't get Elly to see any of them any more than you can get her to see that motorcycles aren't the tool of the Devil. She's as deaf to the arguments against being a parent as she is the arguments for it; all she knows is that having children is something you have to do; whether you like the company of children is, to her, immaterial. This sort of puts an interesting spin on the glurgey bit of evasiveness in Phil's Liography that discusses the medical problems that are supposed to have prevented him and Georgia from having kids. It seems to me that if he'd simply stated that they'd decided that they were the sort of people who did not want kids, Elly would explode with rage. The idea that he could get away, as she might put it, with not going through the Hell she did would send her clean around the bend; since he knows that, it seems to me that he'd have to have a great defense against her bellowing about injustice. The greatest injustice of all, of course, was that Phil took the "good advice" she gave him growing up with a grain of salt.

Comments

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

There is a tendency in the website to take history of the persons who are represented in the strip as the history of the characters in the strip. In the case of Georgia and Phil, Georgia started off as a jazz flautist (http://catalog.fborfw.com/indexkeywords.php?q=flute&Submit=Search), but her Who's Who page describes her as an audiologist which is apparently Alan Ridgway's wife's profession, even though I cannot find any reference to audiology in the strip. Likewise, I don't recollect any reference to Georgia or Phil's infertility, and since the liography is from the pen of Beth Cruikshank, I suspect that this also may be a part of the real life of Alan and Joan. They both work in the Ottawa school system, so it doesn't seem like they are the types to have problems being around children, contrary to how they are portrayed in the strip.

As for For Better or For Worse characters, there are some couples like Josef Weeder and Carleen Stein, Candace Halloran and Rudy Dodd who do not plan to have children and are not considered evil for it. The childlessness of the Kelpfroths was only mentioned in the monthly letters, which is the place where the aforementioned couples were taken to task for not having kids. Once you get past Phil, the only references I found to "settling down" were to Mike and Elizabeth, which were not-so-subtle messages to Aaron and Kate to get married and start pumping out the grandchildren. Based on them, I suspect the real reason we see references to settling down and having kids in the strip is more from Lynn sending these messages to her relatives than any actual belief about mankind in general.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

Once you get past Phil, the only references I found to "settling down" were to Mike and Elizabeth, which were not-so-subtle messages to Aaron and Kate to get married and start pumping out the grandchildren.

The really sad thing is that it all sort of boomeranged on her. If I read the situation right, all it did was stiffen their resolve to live their lives as they see fit.