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.