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dreadedcandiru2As I've been saying the last little while, a person doesn't have to spend a lot of time reading the strip in order to see that Elly has a personality confict with her children: they have personalities and that leads to conflict. We hit the ground running with that in the first year or so watching Elly bellow at Mike for 'arguing' with her when he didn't immediately agree with every damned thing she said. The obvious conclusion is that once again, moron Elly was too blasted stupid to remember that a four year old generally hasn't the least idea of what he's doing to irritate his mother or that he simply can't see things from her perspective. Since she's a dolt, she assumed that he was a shrunken thirty year old playing mind games with her.
Her next great act of total mental failure was, of course, forgetting that he remembered things when that was an inconvenience. According to her, she was supposed to be able to yell about how miserable he made her life and how she could have a life outside the home if he were not a selfish, cruel demanding monster who wanted to destroy her. This (as well as John's need to undermind her to stay in charge) led to his hating the idea of her working outside the home when she was supposed to be at home because she was supposed to love him and take care of him and not treat him like he's a bad kid who wants to take and take and take.
This would have been bad enough were she not to insist that to be fair to Lizzie, he could never talk about all the great things he could do because that was boasting and it would hurt the feelings of a toddler who didn't understand English and that he couldn't win at anything because that would be bad and that he had to clean and clean and clean because she's not put on this Earth to be his slave and he really, REALLY had to erase from view any sign that her house had been invaded by children. Also, there was the shared duty he and the other children had to never do anything to disgrace Mother in public by calling attention to themselves or following trends or developing scary outside interests that might make them anything other than the blandest, least interesting people in the world.
The capper to all of this is that she used to spend most of her free time whining about how baffled and angry she was that for some reason, Mike resented her great big love and her loving attempt to suppress and destroy any scary sign of individuality that might make him leave her some day and live far away and leave her all alone old and used up. It doesn't matter that his horrible yearning for his love to be returned has made of him a highly dysfunctional adult who needs her to keep him ending up in a pile of his own filth, he needs her and that's enough because, unlike someone in Calgary, he's grateful.
Her next great act of total mental failure was, of course, forgetting that he remembered things when that was an inconvenience. According to her, she was supposed to be able to yell about how miserable he made her life and how she could have a life outside the home if he were not a selfish, cruel demanding monster who wanted to destroy her. This (as well as John's need to undermind her to stay in charge) led to his hating the idea of her working outside the home when she was supposed to be at home because she was supposed to love him and take care of him and not treat him like he's a bad kid who wants to take and take and take.
This would have been bad enough were she not to insist that to be fair to Lizzie, he could never talk about all the great things he could do because that was boasting and it would hurt the feelings of a toddler who didn't understand English and that he couldn't win at anything because that would be bad and that he had to clean and clean and clean because she's not put on this Earth to be his slave and he really, REALLY had to erase from view any sign that her house had been invaded by children. Also, there was the shared duty he and the other children had to never do anything to disgrace Mother in public by calling attention to themselves or following trends or developing scary outside interests that might make them anything other than the blandest, least interesting people in the world.
The capper to all of this is that she used to spend most of her free time whining about how baffled and angry she was that for some reason, Mike resented her great big love and her loving attempt to suppress and destroy any scary sign of individuality that might make him leave her some day and live far away and leave her all alone old and used up. It doesn't matter that his horrible yearning for his love to be returned has made of him a highly dysfunctional adult who needs her to keep him ending up in a pile of his own filth, he needs her and that's enough because, unlike someone in Calgary, he's grateful.
