dreadedcandiru2 | She's always so emotional about her children......

I'd like to conclude my look at how foolish and stupid the whole "Let's pack children off to remote farms so John's pontificating hippie road-apple brother-in-law and snotty, unsympathetic redneck pain-in-the-arse niece can make repulsive imbeciles of themselves" business is by pointing out that certain people in the world are going to cheer the Patterswine on. Said people work in the local library and seem to have made a pet out of Elly. The reason that I say this is because Susan seems as deaf to the idea that her passive-aggressive bitchery has destroyed her child's enthusiasm for piano practice as Elly's endless ranting about how her ungrateful children are selfish and evil for wanting to do something she never let herself do and enjoy life did. Also, Susan seems to have the same rather low tolerance for children being children that Elly herself has; like her, she thinks that children are evil, ungrateful monsters who exult in tormenting their poor, put-upon mothers because they love CHAOS; it's like she's Elly in a nicer looking package.

What this means is that like Elly and Connie, she probably assumes that when a child starts to mature and develop an identity independent of his or her parents, nature isn't taking its course. What an Elly or a Connie or a Susan see is the pliable, dependent baby being replaced by a series of menacing strangers who exist to defy parental authority, unleash an era of chaos and to bruise fruit. This means that anything that would remind children that having a point of view of their own is evil, selfish, wrong and ungrateful is seen as a good and noble thing. It also tells me that Meghan spent her childhood being packed off to various places she didn't want to be because she had a mother who thought that only she was allowed to rebel against her parents.