Self-sacrifice is self-defeat.

[dreadedcandiru2]

Here's an interesting little experiment for you; try to remember a strip in which Elly spent some time for herself without being crushed down by unnecessary guilt. I'll bet you're like me and can count maybe ten or so out of the tens of thousands out there. This is because she can't simply sit back and do nothing; sure, she resents how John can sit on his ass for hours on end while she slaves away but it's her own damned choice to do so a lot of the time. As by way of example, she does not need to work that poor washer-dryer to death every single blasted day of her life; she just wants to because she needs to fill the empty hours somehow without feeling like she's doing something bad. Where her need to feel like she's done something selfless fails is not just because she's doing more to satisfy some impulse that she can't control than to be a genuine help, she's made her children not only dependent on her but inured to the idea that a mother is by nature a whirling dervish that is always doing housework. This, I should think, is one of the things Mike meant when he called the Elly of 1982 a real mother; since his personality congealed into its current unpleasant shape when he was seven or eight, the idea that a mother can be something other than a harried wreck who never sits still and is always doing housework is alien to his way of thinking.