Foobonia and Points West.

The problem with Elly blaming all of her bad decisions on John is, as clio_1 pointed out, that it makes a grown woman who has free will present herself a helpless puppet of fate. Lynn's lack of any real sympathy for women seems to have the odd symptom of making them all into helpless children who either suffer from the baleful domination of bad men or huddle under the protection of the good. The idea that women are actually responsible for their lives is not something that she wishes to acknowledge as it means that she can't blame anyone but herself for her woes. This tendency would tend to interfere with the on-going attempt to turn John into a supervillain and thus make a mockery of the new-ruins. One of the strips that Lynn probably has no intention of reprinting shows us John's basic dilemma:

Simply put, he can't know who Elly is because she not only won't tell him, she doesn't really know who she is either. All she does seem to know is that she can never seem to be satisfied with her life and that someone else is to blame. We thus end up having to look at a clumsy, stubborn, slow-witted goofola who doesn't have much tact dealing with a volatile mess who needs to have someone to scream at when she's feeling lost and confused or someone to bully into complying with the notion that he or she owes her when she feels wronged. Since she doesn't know why she's upset, he and the kids have to absorb a lot of cheap theatrics and manipulation; since he's a gullible dunce who's been conditioned to obey mother figures, he believes her bullshit stories about what the kids do and acts accordingly. What makes things worse is that the sullen doorknob made this happen to himself; just as he doesn't question the outdated values he believes in because he's not smart enough to ask himself why he believes them, he was dim enough to believe the false Elly he dated was the real deal. Anyone stupid enough to fall for HER sales pitch is not worth our respect so he sort of deserves to live with a walking, talking fountain of sulfuric acid. What is even worse is that trying to adapt to her insanity is making him a worse person in his own right; he started out as the Great Provider who'd hand out money as needed to all comers but, after being constantly yelled at by his insane wife for 'being demeaning', turned into a skinflint who thought that he had to make a six-year old vacuum a car to make him feel self-actualized.

Once, a long time ago, I came up with the odd premise that how the Foobs behaved made more sense if you were to assume that the adventures of the Pattersons were what a Japanese national would come up with if he were asked to write a story about life in North American suburbia. This is because Elly seems to be what that man would call a "tsundere"; this odd term refers to a person who reacts to feelings of uncertainty and doubt about how she feels about a person by lashing out at him. This cranky, tsun-tsun phase can consist of giving the man the cold shoulder while declaring that he knows what he did to upset her when it's obvious that he doesn't, the use of disproportionate physical force to avenge trivial slights, keeping a mental tally of all the things that he's done to offend her and so on and so forth. It usually takes a blue-eyed miracle to get the lady into the affectionate dere-dere phase but when that happens, she usually blushes as she unsuccessfully tries to deny the feelings of vulnerability and insecurity that she hides under layers of aggression and wounded pride. This sort of woman is always paired up with a character type called "The Jerk with the Heart of Gold" to form what is called the "Takahashi couple"; how things are supposed to proceed is that the two of them get over themselves before they get married to become the Happily Married duo that the Japanese prefer to see as the ideal parents. If their antics persist into the first years of their children's lives, it's obvious that the result will be chaos, anarchy and children who cannot function in the real world. Or, to put it in terms we can understand, the result is Foobery.

Now that it's sort of obvious that the New-Ruins are more or less a director's cut of the original time line, it seems clear now that the writing class story arc is taken on an importance it never had before. As howtheduck said, Elly will be shown to have genuine promise as a writer only to have her potential squashed by her 'loving' family. The casual, unthinking malice and selfishness on their part will change how we see them and how we see Elly herself. This is because, as I've said, Elly seems to have spent her life trying to become a person in her own right instead of someone's something and never quite got there; her one shot at becoming Elly the writer instead of John's wife or Mike's mom having been taken away from her will inspire her to seek revenge by controlling their lives. Since we know she succeeds, let's see what they did and how she nailed them:

John: It seems to me that the arc will end with John issuing an ultimatum that more or less forces Elly to give up her dream until such time as her children are old enough to take care of themselves; this will be seen as the insanely panicky over-reaction to a non-event that less rigid souls would not use as blackmail material. The means of her vengeance will be to encourage his model train hobby; since she knows she's a boorish perfectionist, his need to tinker will drive away lesser enthusiasts, isolate him and turn him into a walking punchline.

Mike: It's not hard to see who causes John to go loonie and browbeat Elly into flushing her hopes down the crapper. Something that Mike does will so horrify John that he goes looking for something out of the ordinary to blame his own failings on; that something will, of course, be Elly's attempt to better herself. To put it bluntly, Mike has to become a flabby shnook churning out pabulum for Lifetime because his idiocy ruined Elly's life.

Liz: It seems to me that the Settlepocalypse is simply Elly getting teal-and-lavender revenge on her daughter; if she can't have an exciting life, neither can Liz. This is why she went out of her way to sell a man she knows to be the same sort of whining moral bully and smirking hypocrite as John.

It could also be that Elly's later refusal to take child safety seriously as she should is a nasty side-effect of John's cancellation of her destiny; since running around like a fool keeping idiot children from killing themselves is getting in the way of her happiness, she'll do so with great reluctance.

As howtheduck reminds us, John's allowing Elly to work for the week is simply a means by which he can discourage her from working outside the home. Given that he's deprived her of the chance to learn how to hunt for jobs like other people, not bothered discussing salary and hopes that showing her what the working world is like will scare her back into the motherhood that's supposed to content her. Given that she really is a self-absorbed, narcissistic poser who only wants to do this to make a big production out of it, his scheme works. Her next craze is trying to pretend that the only degree she wants isn't the MRS. He doesn't even have to do anything to stop that because of her low boredom threshhold. What he does have to do is stop her whining about his impulse purchases; cynically (and correctly) judging that when he buys nice stuff for himself, she wants nice stuff too, he hit on the scheme of sweetening the pot by more or less bribing her into compliance with his buying ego-gratifying toys and train houses.

As has been said before, Elly really is making a big deal over nothing here; since John is simply repairing things around the yard and not proposing to wear the Red Green chic that's got her in a tizzy around town, it's sort of nuts to freak out like she's been doing. Sure, she thinks that John is treating her like an idiot whose opinion is worthless when he simply wants to do what he wants (she'd, for instance, be the perfect customer for those plaques that say "At least my plants listen to me"), he's really simply trying to have a hard time seeing why the neighbors would care what he throws on of a morning. If he were the sort of man to live dangerously, he'd turn the question back on Elly and point out that she dresses like his mother does. She started out with ultra-unflattering shirts and Mom jeans as her basic look and, when April made the scene, started dressing like a contemporary of Ed Crankshaft and Mel Lazarus's Momma; getting fashion tips from her is thus as stupid as asking directions from Quincy Magoo.

As we all know, John resisted Elly's odd tendency towards culinary grandstanding. In his mind, ordinary days deserved to capped off with ordinary meals while the heavy food that Elly wanted to serve him were for special occasions. This is because he's an ordinary man with simple tastes raised in an ordinary English Canadian household; that means he was raised to believe in a secular trilogy as well as the religious one. That trilogy is the fabled "Meat and Two Veg." Dinner must consist of a meat dish that's easy to make and two vegetables, one green and the other mashed. It may seem that he would want Elly to churn out the same damned thing night after night but that isn't the case; anyone with an imagination can vary the meat and the two veg and satisfy both the family that eats the food and her own instinct to be creative. Her belief that he wants to eat gray slop night after night comes from her need to be pointlessly upset.

The stunning lack of communication that we see in the strip isn't, of course, solely the fault of Clunky Old John refusing to understand what Elly really wants. That may be what Lynn wants us to believe but it's far too simplistic and is, what's more, unfair. John eventually does learn that what Elly says isn't always what she means and learns to compensate. Granted, he still getting yelled at for not knowing what Elly really wanted from time to time but and runs off to his shed to avoid getting into trouble but he does cope. Elly, on the other hand, cannot break the habit of not getting to the bloody point. Instead of accepting that John relies on her to say what she means, means what she says and tell him what she expects of him; she continues to hide her true intentions behind a smokescreen of misleading nonsense. I have no real sympathy for a person who won't help herself make her life better so I'm just going to say that Elly is the real problem here. If she weren't stupider than the man she married, she wouldn't have made such a mess of her life.