"Somebody's gotta be mad at me!": Where Elly gets the martyrdom urge.

[dreadedcandiru2]

As we know, Jim spends a great deal of his time engaging in pointless busywork because he's trying to decompress from having to retire. Like a lot of men his age, he finds the enforced idleness involved to be less a liberation from dull care and more a sort of prison sentence where he's not allowed to contribute to the world. To that end, he decided at one point to test the insulation in the attic and proceeded to kick a large hole through the ceiling of Lizzie's room. His reaction to being told that these things happen so there's no need for the sort of angry recrimination he was expecting was to tell a baffled Marian that people should be as angry at him as he is.

The reason that I mention this is that we sort of get an echo of this when Elly demanded that John boil over with rage about a minor car accident so she can finally feel better about things. What this tells me is that both Jim and Elly have the underlying expectation that any sort of mild inconvenience is going to result in a major blow-out and are baffled and confused by silence, forgiveness and understanding. Oh, they like the latter two just like everyone else. They just want to earn them by having to endure chaos and uproar and hurt feelings like they're 'supposed' to.