dreadedcandiru2 | Entries tagged with connie versus using her brain

The interesting thing about the strip for 3 November 1988 is that, after reminding us yet again that she simply cannot be asked to trust Molly not to do something stupid just to spite her, Connie states that as far as she knows, Greg's first wife has simply dropped off the face of the Earth. Much as Lizardbreath would later go on to puff her own damned stupid self up with the self-righteous self-justification "I may not be her but I'm here" because, as a facet of Lynn's personality, she confuses physical closeness with emotional closeness, Connie assumes that her looming presence in her stepdaughters' lives means that she's weaning them away from a mother who clearly selfishly abandoned them.

The problem is how Lynn ended up explaining why it is that Gayle was not around. Rather than simply turn her into Norm from Cheers's wife Vera and keep her off camera until Connie could moan that with Gayle away at University, she has no chance at being the mother of the bride so her life is all used up and done and worthless now, she says that Gayle moved back in with the mother who supposedly vanished from the mortal plane. What this tells me is that when Connie was puffing herself up by thinking that she's the only option Greg's kids had for a mother, the two of them had been in contact with their real mother all along without the dozy, scrawny idiot who bewitched their dad and her huffy sidekick with the monster pervert idiot son being aware of it.

Okay. I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna point out that Greg might have pointed this out. That's because you've probably forgotten that Greg sees it as Priority One to keep Connie settled down. He tossed Lawrence to the curb because he panicked the shit out of Crazy Monster Woman first and was pitching for the other team second so if he knows that his kids are talking to the wife who checked out of their marriage but NOT out of being their mother, he's not going to inform the squawking idiot he wants to keep happy.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1012432.html

As you might all remember, during the sixties, Archie Comics used to run a semi-regular feature called “Betty’s Diary” in which she would write down heroic tales of a glorious life where she was the apple of Arch’s eye only to have the artist throw her under the bus by showing us what actually happened. It thus became the mildly sinister tale of a deluded school-girl convincing herself that a boy who only dated her when his real girlfriend was being a jerk to him was her true love forever. The reason that I mention this is that how Connie Poirier describes herself is not what we actually see. The reason that this is important is that it puts an odd and unsettling spin on her eternal whining that she doesn’t rally have a grandchild of her own to be wonderful to.

After all, we have to remember things she’s at pains to avoid remembering. First off, she’s spent about twenty-five years not remembering that she’s pretty much disowned Lawrence for turning out gay and ruining her chance to be an actual grandmother. Second, she wants to avoid having to realize why it is that Gayle ran off to her birth mother as soon as it became an option because she doesn’t want to remember that she’s seen as more or less what would happen if Vicky The Babysitter were shtupping Timmy Turner’s dad. This tells me that she’s not going to have the self-awareness to look in the mirror and see that she’d be the same sort of entitled, short-sighted, short-tempered, immature, self-righteous and judgmental failure as a grandmother as she is everyting else in her life. The only substantive difference is that she’d also have someone to neglect and defame when Elly yaps about how haaaaard it is to pretend to be a grandparent.

Crossposts: http://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/983673.html

You want to know a funny thing? Here's a funny thing; when Connie moved to Thunder Bay two years ago, the greatest part of me wanted to take her aside and tell her to re-enroll in high school because she had no business running around in the adult world. Any sort of objective, disinterested person would behold her fixating on Ted like she was some idiot teenager crushing on someone who just wasn't in to her and realize that she ran away from home because instead of fearing something rational like the indifference and/or sympathy of her peers, she feared that everyone would laugh at her for wanting love or some such adolescent drivel.

The reason that I mention this is that she's just now turned right round and started making noise about how her step-daughter clearly isn't mature like her and doesn't know what love means so she should just turn her emotions on and off like a light switch to make life easier for a deluded flake devoid of the quantum known as self-awareness. I almost prefer Elly's still being angry at the paper-boy who told her that he had a girlfriend already so he didn't need an annoying, clueless tag-along shadowing him to Connie's repellent and flagrant hypocrisy.

As we know, Beth strongly hinted that Greg had to pull an awful lot of strings to get his blended family to Milborough. While the Liography pulled its punches by having Connie speculate that maybe Greg might have perhaps called in a bunch of markers to make her happy and torpedo Molly's relationship with some other proto-emo sulking because he thought he was the first person ever to realize that the world isn't a sunny place, it's a dead certainty that he had to do a lot of horse-trading to move everyone next to the Sainted Pattersons. Connie doesn't really realize this because she's Patterson-like enough to think that transfers are easy and convenient.

What she also doesn't realize is that it's pretty much a dead certainty that he's going to be facing legal trouble from his first wife for violating their custody agreement. It's bad enough that he seems to have made a point of keeping his wife away from them back home in Thunder Bay and worse that he married a woman too stupid to understand that the reason she and the kids don't hear from the woman she replaced is that Greg is keeping that from happening. While any major dude could have told her that more or less kidnapping them in order to placate a moron was never going to fly, said imbecile and her nitwit buddy Elly blamed Molly's more forceful personality for bullying Gayle into returning to her obviously inferior mother when anyone with a brain would have no choice but to realize that it would have to be a family court magistrate's call.

The problem with Connie and Elly's common inability to realize those two super-critical facts (which is, of course, based on Lynn's ignorance) is that Lizardbreath thinks that Paul and Warren didn't really love her because she doesn't understand what a contract is either and how even with the best will in the world, they're stuck where they are. She also doesn't understand that the reason Thérèse isn't there is because someone's lawyer has placed a sort of force field around Françoise that she'd get in trouble for violating.

Of course, the realization that Molly is just supposed to endure taking crap from people because she isn't instantly wonderful about a stupid change in her life is sort of par for the course. After all, the whole move to Milborough was as well-thought out as the removal of Connie herself was. Greg did a stupid thing that probably messed up his career trajectory in order to avoid a boy that frightened him and Connie thought that she could work miracles by shoving wonderful things down Molly and Gayle's throats and that would make them instantly wonderful children who loved her better than the mother they were probably supposed to forget. In the words of probably about to become a cyborg detective Sterling Archer, that is so classic Connie.

This is because an outside observer would perceive Connie as being the perennial victim of her own unrealistic goals. After all, one of the first extended arcs had the needy, clingy idiot hare off to Montreal to fling herself at someone who just wasn't as in to her as she wanted and neeeeeeeded him to be and the collision with the reality that Phil will always sort of see her as an ex-girlfriend who's got too many issues to make any sort of relationship tenable made her saaaaaad while her current status is someone who's all disappointed that no one will let her be mother of the bride because Lawrence won't pretend to be straight just so she can be the center of attention. She lacks self-awareness so she doesn't know that her whole life is a series of self-induced crises that she willed upon herself by having eyes bigger than her stomack.

Said observer would also see Elly as being a terrible friend for not calling Connie on her own stupid crap but instead cheering her on as she destroyed herself. In this particular instance, Elly is aiding and abetting a folly by trying to pit the siblings against one another so that they might be normal and fight like scorpions. Sadly for her, Molly is too smart not to see what Elly is trying to do and manages to convince Gayle that the nice lady is not really her friend. This, of course, makes her an evil dark person because Elly is ENGLISH Canadian first and foremost and has the Anglo-Saxon tendency of having her feet planted firmly in the middle of the air while being able to see anything except that which is in front of her owing to a racial tendency towards fecal encephalopathy. There are no canny Scottish people in the strip using good old-fashioned common sense to save all those fatuous Sassenachs from themselves and the result is telling.

Given who Greg is, it seems to me that a lot of the problem Molly had with Connie and Milborough is that she had no real idea why it is that her mother went walk-about in the first place. Just as Big Daddy Caine angrily rebuffed Anthony's attempts to find out what the Hell was going on in his life because the old fool blustered that it was none of his business, we have Greg not really wanting to discuss something important with his children openly because it was too painful. This means that Connie wound up taking a lot of crap about how she's simply a temporary replacement for the real thing because her invertebrate of a sugar daddy simpered that he'd rather not upset his children with knowledge that would probably have made everyone's lives a damned sight easier.

This means that Molly and Gayle only found out what the Hell happened while they were directed to not pay attention to something that would change their lives after they left town and met up with their birth mother again. What it also means is something else given a key limitation of Pattersons and Patterson-like life forms; it means that Connie went into things not knowing a Hell of a lot about the woman she replaced and, given an appalling but oh-so-typical lack of curiosity, that she still has no real idea about this person or why she did what she did. She might have been told to her face many times but it's like explaining to Elly that Georgia has a birth name, friends and relations that she is not aware of; it's an exercise in futility that's based on the person in question not allowing herself to hear things that can't be allowed to matter because they're not involved in it. Elly thinks of Georgia as an adjunct of her side of the family because she doesn't care for a life that doesn't have her in it and Connie wants to know very little about her predecessor lest she feel empathy for someone whose family she's trying to take over.

As we're about to see, Elly is about to be made very happy because Connie is about to return 'home' where she 'belongs' so that Elly is not exposed to the 'humiliation' of having to drive to Thunder Bay like 'some sort of slave being commanded by a tyrant.' While she's not exactly able to articulate why this is a good thing, it's obvious to an outside observer what Connie provides Elly and it's the same thing Kortney faked providing her: behaving as if a frustrated, angry lunatic going out of her way to die miserable and miss every good thing being a self-important petty tyrant who can't handle conflict and who won't treat her children as anything other than enemies to be vanquished is a role model worthy of emulation. While Kortney was sucking up to someone she thought of as an unusually oblivious mark, Connie actually does seem to look at the hot mess screaming at her children and see someone she wants to be.

The problem is that every deviation from this insane and false norm is seen as a defeat. Not being able to prove her love to Greg by having a child with him is a defeat. Having her son turn out gay and not present her with a grandchild as tribute to her sacrifice is a defeat. Getting divorced from Pete was a defeat. Having Molly's mother come along and ask her where the Hell she gets off pretending that there's a genetic connection between her and someone else's grandchild is a defeat. I should even think that seeing Elly for the pathetic mutant living her life all wrong that she actually is would be a defeat because it would mean that Connie wasted her own life defining herself by a failure.

As we've seen, there are a lot of similarities between who Connie is right now and what Liz becomes. Just as Connie eventually tries to claim a genetic connection that can't exist with someone else's grandchild in order to deny the fact that by any rational standard, her family dies with Lawrence, Liz wants to think that being here instead of her makes up for the fact that she ruined a stranger's life because she's too stingy a person to share anything or anyone. The interesting thing is that they got there by different routes.

This is because unlike Liz who lives in an eternal present tense in which mistakes simply don't exist because if history did exist, she's a selfish, demanding jerk who puts too much stress on being thought well of by parents who don't matter, Connie seems to be transfixed by the idea that the past might somehow be altered. She thinks that if she does the right thing, her vain, self-pitying idiot father would stop taking out his rage that he can't pass his family name on out on her and her imbecile mother wouldn't keep whining about being unfair to a massive-diameter dickhole whining for a toy he can't have. Simply put, being made to feel bad about something that can't possibly be her fault created a monster of vanity and envy. Not only do we have the obsessive need to prove her worth to the worthless, we also have someone so messed up, she actually envies a low-life like Elly.

Of course, the irritating thing about Elly's being forced to spend time with her family is that the next day, she'd be complaining about the horror to a far crazier person: Connie. From the very beginning in which they whined about how their children never took them seriously despite making threat after threat they didn't bother carrying out to the very ending when they complained about how long it took for parenting to pay off, Connie always seemed to have even stupider and crazier priorities than Elly did. All Elly seems to want out of life is to feel good about things despite being biologically and psychologically incapable of being happy. She's a marvel of sanity compared to her friend.

Take, as by way of example, the arc in which Mike got a hair up his stupid ass because Lawrence was trying to avoid getting himself in a mess he didn't need and couldn't easily extricate himself from because the big dope thought (and likely still thinks) that Lawrence wanted to humiliate him by pretending to be straight. Greg's need to settle down Connie by getting rid of the person upsetting her is horrible and craven but at least he's an understandable evil. After the screaming and whining about how she'd try to accept this horrible thing that destroyed her hopes of being presented with a grandchild so as to prove her excellence was over, she ignored the ramifications of having a gay son to focus on something that really mattered to her: giving the dog she adopted in response to Elly having a child when she couldn't really 'prove' her love for Greg by having his baby a nickname.

Hmm. Weird. Most of the odd crap she does in her life like chase down reluctant males to have her own John Patterson and colonization of the lives of a stranger's daughters seem to have the singular and bizarre purpose of trying to be a bargain basement version of Elly Patterson. It's as if she looks at the frazzled and slow-witted mess that everyone else sees as a peevish, self-destructive nutjob who blames her children for her own stupidity and ineptitude and says "I want to be just like her" instead of "There but for the grace of God go I."

The oddest thing about Connie is the proprietary interest she takes in children not related to her. As we see in the coda to her liography, she looks at Molly's oldest daughter, notices her plain-spoken ways and takes pride that her spirit will live on in one of her grandchildren. The fact that Molly isn't her child means very little to Connie because of an eagerness to take credit for things she didn't do. A reasonable person would be just as likely to ascribe any such tendency in Little Mercurochrome to Greg's first wife, Nonamegiven....which, of course, disqualifies Connie and Elly and Lynn.

Ah, well. She's probably just as likely to take credit for Lawrence's success in life despite more or less washing her hands of him because he will never present him with the flesh grandchild she can wave in the air above a hole in the ground filled with a dead Franco-Ontarian misogynist who really wanted a son and yell "How do you like me now, Dad?" She isn't part of his day to day life because she's too busy talking to Elly or watching Greg play golf ineptly to do anything else but damned if she doesn't tell the whole blasted world that his success is a tribute to her excellence as a parent.

What this, of course, means is that Molly had to do most of the adjusting to get to relate to this person on a non-confrontational level. Said adjustment means seeing her for the pitiable and ludicrous figure she is instead of the monster she was supposed to be.

To continue on from yesterday, it seems that Sue and the gang are not the only people who see Elly in a way she does not. The Liography of Fiona Brass has this to say about Elly:

1) "Cousin John was friendly and easy-going, and Fiona liked him from the start. His wife Elly - that was another story."

2) "She seem(ed) to think that Fiona was there to be some kind of slave. She also turned out to be a neat freak, who had an insane number of picky rules and obsessed over every little bit of dirt or mess in the house. The kids had learned the same fussy ways, too. Fiona did her best to get along with everyone, but it was hard work getting the Pattersons to loosen up so that she and Beaumont could be comfortable."

3) "It didn't surprise Fiona when Elly started getting snippy. She didn't have the guts to tell Fiona straight out that she wanted her to leave, of course. Nice woman never did. They just pasted on their phoney smiles and got someone else to do their dirty work.

Sure enough, Cousin John started hinting to Fiona about getting a job and moving out. She could tell he hated doing it, that it wasn't his idea, he was just acting on orders. She didn't really care much whether she stayed or went. It wasn't much fun living in a place where there was a fuss over every scratch on the furniture or cigarette butt in the sink. But it bugged her to let Elly get away with being so manipulative.:

Granted, she doesn't know about the howling loon squealing about cigarette smoke or prowling cats who suck life out of babies but, yeah, she makes a good case for Elly being a high-strung pain in the ass. We got a good look at Elly from the perspective of someone she wasn't trying to impress and it wasn't flattering.

The reason that I mention this is that in a year's time, we're going to meet up with someone who also has a poor opinion of our hero and also has a good reason: Molly Thomas. It would be bad enough to be uprooted from her home and have to listen to weeeeeeak as water Connie howl about wild animals because the stupid, gutless nincompoop expected to storm in, take over their lives and expect instant obedience and adoration despite not actually giving a photon in a solar wind about the children she wants to be Insta-Mom to if Connie didn't have someone in her corner telling Molly that she's an ungrateful jerk who should be glad to have Connie treat her like a space Nazi bent on spreading chaos and anarchy.

The interesting thing is that, as one could expect, Molly and Connie eventually do build some sort of connection somewhere between Deanna talking about marriages for heart and for family and Liz wondering who's guiding her destiny. This, as I've said, is because Molly recognizes Connie for what she is and has learned to stop resenting the delusional nitwit. Connie seems Hell-bent on proving herself to a dead man that he was wrong to treat her the way he did and she can't change because doing so would mean having to admit that the peace of mind she sacrificed just wasn't worth it and that would be awful so Mol is gonna let it slide. The thing is that she's still going to kind of resent Elly Patterson for enabling Connie for so long. Every time it looks as if her step-mom is going to clue in and realize that no, she wasn't really tough or loving or fair or firm or kind or anything like that, there's that old bat who runs around shouting her head off over every little thing dragging her down again.

When you read the Liographies and the relevant chapter of "The Lives Behind The Lines", it's obvious to anyone who isn't knee-deep in the situation that Molly took the collapse of her father's first marriage a lot harder than Gayle did. Like a lot of children in her situation, she couldn't quite come to grips with the idea that the only solution to her parents' troubles was divorce. This means that any person luckless enough to get in the way of her implausible fantasy was going to get a mauling. Since Connie is sort of dim and kind of vain and kind of never figured out how the world actually worked, she made the bonehead mistake of taking things personally instead of shrugging, accepting the fact that she was going to be a lightning rod for childhood discontent until Molly had the maturity to admit that her parents' divorce was an inevitability and wait it out. A better person would laugh the whole mess off and remind Molly that she couldn't be anyone but the angry child she was.

The reason that I mention this is that I think that everyone in the Poirier-Thomas household would have been a damned sight better off had Connie not moved right next door to her enabler Elly. If they'd moved more than a fifteen minute's walk from the Sainted Pattersons, Connie might have had to actually meet people who don't feed into her martyrdom complex and explained what was actually happening to her. Also, Molly wouldn't have had to deal with a stupid cow who won't see that Greg is screening phone calls and getting rid of 'hostile' mail when she poured her heart out or said dullard's dimwit son who peers through windows and tells friends to out themselves when it can backfire on them at the worst possible time and damn the consequences because it's unfair to make him clean up messes he makes. If only the perfect house for them were far enough away that Elly's hatred of having to go to people would make coffee with Connie prohibitive; that way, Connie might actually have had a shot of being thought of as a mother instead of their dad's wife.

Of course, you can't tell Connie that either because she never realized that the worst thing to ever happen to her is not Lawrence outing himself or her marriage to Pete or her messed-up thing with Da Silva. She can never see that meeting Elly is the worst thing to have happened to her because the woman looks so harmless despite how much it costs to be friends with Patterswine.

As you know, I wish that Lynn had been prevailed upon to simply drop the first year of the strip when she started the Classic Foob experience. That way, we'd be watching Lizzie hint at why Elly fears team sports by cowering in fear of the baseball heading her way because if she gets hurt, the pain will last forever and ever and she'll cry FOREVER and so on into eventually running around in downtown traffic protesting something that was decided a year in advance. We'd also be watching dimwit Connie not realize that the reason she's treated like an evil stepmother who dragged Molly and Gayle from their homes so she could drink coffee with some other old woman who hates children is that her gutless husband absents himself when it's time to accept him some blame for being a jackass.

It kills me that Connie doesn't realize that she's simply a figure-head for why Milborough isn't a very appealing place to Molly because she's kinda dumb and kinda doesn't get that her happiness is a side-effect of her arsebucket husband's need to step on a relationship like the cowardly, ignorant ogre he is. She also doesn't realize that Mike's stupid need for sensation became something of a deal-killer. There's Molly sitting there feeling lost in a strange town where she knows exactly no one and next thing she knows, the horrible son of the unsympathetic clod housewife who ALWAYS takes her mother's side is getting the other kids to peer into her window like she's a sideshow attraction and not a person; worse, when he gets caught and punished, the scruffy little piece of trash whines about the inconvenience to HIMSELF because her feelings clearly don't matter to the little arsewipe.

Speaking of said Mommy's Cheerleader Supreme Elly Patterson, you'd have to be a real freaking idiot to wade into a situation in which Greg is clearly maintaining a sort of communications barrier meant to protect his viri.....little girl from a clear threat to her father's mascu...virtue and declare someone she's never going to meet a no-hoper just because her first crush called her an adhesive irritant to her stupid face. Having one high-handed imbecile who doesn't know what's really going on dismiss her feelings is one thing. Elly's presence leaves Molly with the impression that Milborough is populated by scruffy mutant children like Mike and self-absorbed, judgmental and unsympathetic drips like her and Connie. Getting away from there and spending the rest of her life with people who don't treat her like a chump might baffle a Foob but it makes perfect sense to someone not as dumb and vain and short-sighted as Elly is.

The other interesting thing that I've noticed about the soap opera is that after Ted slumps off in defeat, we never really see him and Connie talk to one another afterwards. Connie talks about how Ted cheated on her with Irene and how it is that Ted blows his chances with everyone because he never got it through his thick skull that he's supposed to a one-woman man if he wants to be taken seriously but after she rings out the old next week, they never seem to lay eyes on each other.

The reason that I mention this is that we also never see Connie and Phil interact after this year either. Despite her moving back in triumph with Greg and his money, she never seems to have thought to maybe mend the fences with the man and actually be friends with him. This is not just because she's the creation of a woman who can't believe that a man and woman can't not pair off and the like. It's as if Connie is sort of terrified of having to be near anyone she's left behind. This, I should think, is because she might fear asking the question "What if the problem was me after all?"

Failing that, she could simply have convinced herself that since she and Ted had nothing to say any longer, it was best to avoid him. After all, she was happily married and couldn't possibly be seen talking to a single person any more than she could talk to Georgia because she outgrew Phil or Elly's parents because they were old people who would spout unsolicited advice. This sort of sweeping declaration as to who cannot be spoken to seems to me to be the only rational explanation for Lynn's inability to imagine a scenario in which more than three people speak to one another.

The interesting thing about the need Liz had to be drawn back into the fold so that she could do her duty to her parents seems to be something of an exception to the rule. Just as it's okay for Josef Weeder and Carleen to merely cohabit because their lives don't affect John and Elly's, anyone who doesn't owe the Patterswine a living or get in the way of the owning of horses has every right to expect men to follow their every whim no matter what the cost. Take, as by way of example, the man who Lynn retconned into being Lawrence's dad, Doctor Da Silva. For some reason that escapes anyone remotely Patterson-like, he heartlessly and gutlessly left poor Connie in the lurch. The closest he got to explaining what it was that made him leery of relocating up North is the ridiculous comment about his not being able to survive the harsh frozen wasteland that is Canada.

The problem is that unlike the Patterswine and their kind, I do a really stupid thing called thinking. This really inconvenient habit of mine makes me wonder what, if anything, he was supposed to get in exchange for holding Connie's hand and feeding her ego. I also remember he'd been asked to give a lot in order to accommodate a chuckle-head who regarded the idea of assimilating into Brazilian society as being on all fours with flaying herself alive. First off, he was asked to give up his life's work and leave sick people in the lurch so he could fawn over a dull-witted Franco-Ontarian who's so stupid, she still doesn't admit that there's something called the Portuguese language. Second, he knew that he'd have the devil's own time being accepted in the white bread world filled with old soaks like Will Patterson and Jim Richards who blather moronically about how French on the cereal boxes today leads to fealty to Rome tomorrow. Finally, there was the fact that he resented being oopsed into an untenable position by a shrill imbecile who will pass from puberty to senility without ever having reached maturity. Other than those minor obstacles, I really don't see why life in the Great White North didn't appeal to him. I also don't get why he's apologizing for not being a slobbering imbecile.

As you will remember, one of the things that most bothered me about the Housening is that the Pattersons made a point of keeping April locked out of the loop as much as possible. We saw a confused child paralyzed by fear and doubt going crazy because no adult would talk to her and her 'friends' spouted bullshit about war zones and expiry dates. The Pattersons clearly saw something else. Either they saw a hindrance to be treated like crap or a princess making a huge deal over nothing. It never seemed to occur to them that most of the undesirable behaviour that irritated them would have been mitigated if they took five seconds to talk to her as if she were a reasonable human being who could be brought on side. Instead, they chose to see her as being a noisy obstacle who couldn't be reasoned with but instead had to be kept in the dark.

We're going to be seeing this in its prototype form in a few months from now when Lynn reruns the sequence in which Connie bravely flees from what she's convinced herself is the mocking scorn of the completely disinterested. As we see here, Connie handles the problem of Lawrence's potential reaction by crossing her fingers hoping she could keep him in the dark until the moving vans showed up. The underlying fear seems to be "My unreasonable child will make such a large amount of panicky noise about wanting things to stay the same, I will feel bad about something I'm doing for myself and that will be awful. How dare the awful, selfish child make me feel sympathy for him/her!!"

This, of course, is owing to my belief that Lynn seems to honestly believe that children only feign upset in order to be horrible, selfish, chaos-loving monsters who eat a mother's happinness because children are horrible, selfish chaos loving monsters who hate mothers and eat their happiness and so on through the circuitous logic that implies that life is a zero-sum game and that children are always chaotic evil. Well, that and the fact that Connie and Elly had convinced themselves that everyone would take the child's side if he or she displayed visible upset and the fake, impossible, imaginary freelance shame brigade would descend upon them en masse and declare them to be bad parents.

Oops. I told a lie just now. What really terrifies them is the crushing indifference of the people around them. The idea that the reaction of the masses is that we're not dealing with a princess or ogre parents but just a bunch of clods too into themselves to talk things out for the sake of peace is what really scares the crap outta the Foobs.

Of course the real fun of reading all the strips that have evil, picky-faced princess Molly be treated like a spoiled and deluded idiot who should be grateful for the 'caring', 'responsible' way her not-at-all entitled and in no way, shape or form tyrannical, fearful imbecile father kept her from throwing her life away hanging out with a boy who was so God-damned white bread that he should have come in a polka-dot wrapper is the fact that she looks so damned much like the April who ruined the Housening for everyone. Just check out this little gem wherein Molly is supposedly too stuck up to go out into a town wherein no one knows her name and compare it with this little wonder wherein April is supposedly a twit for accurately remembering that the last thing any of the smug vermin that surround her care to do is admit that she has feelings that have to be taken into consideration. The two of them could practically be twins. What's more, they both have to contend with the same problems. Let's list the parallels, shall we?:

Self-serving dipshit fathers: As I hinted at, fearful petty tyrant Greg got himself a transfer so that he could not only step on a relationship with some bland clodhopper who dressed in a manner that scared the fool, he could also have help from the Pattersons in being a pompous ass. John decided to move down the block so he could play with trains.
Transparent dishonesty about parental motivation: Just as John made huge noise about how a fait accompli was just an idea he was kicking around, Greg appears to have made a big noise about career advancement in the hopes that his daughter would aceept that as the primary reason he uprooted them.
Underestimation of targeted teenager: They seemed to believe that they could get away with blatant lies because they thought that they'd raised gullible simpletons when that was clearly not the case.
Weak-minded stooge mothers: Dim Connie was so excited to have a man in her life, she failed to see that said man threw her under the bus so as to take the hit for the move; Thinking-impaired Elly moved into a clapped-out old bungalow so she could get new stuff.
Moral Cowardice: The reason I think that both John and Greg are chicken-shit rat bastard idiots is that most of why they threw their little wifeys under the bus was so they could avoid having to listen to their children. After all, they might end up being made to feel bad and that's just terrible.
Unearned Martyrdom: Since the women are too stupid to realize that they've been shivved by Hubby and since they're too spoiled and selfish to care about anyone who ain't them, the presence of a hurting child is an occasion for Mommy to whine about being tyrannized by a spoiled brat.
Parenting via stereotypes: In both cases, the legitimate concerns of troubled adolescents were dismissed as a cry for attention from children too young to know what they should want. Also in both cases, it took years for the alleged adults in the room to admit that just maybe they made a mistake.
Dissonance between goals and result: Greg clearly intended to control Molly's behaviour by showing her what would happen if she didn't play ball; the end result was that he made it obvious that he didn't see her as having any right to an opinion that was not his. The consequence was to make him a non-factor in her life. John and Elly clearly intended to make April see that home was less a place and more a group of people; they ended up convincing her home was not in Milborough.

The moral, if any, of these two stories is that if you parent as if your children are your enemies, your children will become your enemies.

I was looking through the strips about Molly when I came upon a rather interesting little exchange the girl had with Elly. We started off with Connie complaining about how the poor girl still had hard feelings about how Daddy moved them hundreds of miles from their home just to get her away from some boy whose only known crime was to terrify a fear-filled ignoramus. Given that Molly found a suspiciously similar substitute in a local boy named Dirk and given that said new love interest was described as being evil, scary and weird because he was Canadian Jerkemy from Zits, I tend to think that Control Freak Daddy did something really God-damned dickish for a really God-damned stupid reason. Much as he would later angrily kick Lawrence out of the house because he was afraid that the boy would instantly turn a ‘respectable’ house into a homophobic numbskull’s opium dream horror fantasy of a gay Hell-world, the ignornant, easily-frightened, angry idiot with the need to shove people around so he can feel like a man moved his child to somewhere she felt isolated and friendless because she was getting too close to someone who frightened him.

Anyways, Molly comes to the neighbour lady that “You AREN’T my mother” hangs out with for some perspective and gets told sight unseen that the boy is a jackass because he never wrote or phoned her to her knowledge. Leaving aside the sheer awfulness of having her being blindly dismissive to the girl’s feelings because she wasn’t “old” enough to be taken seriously, it amazes me that Elly never stopped to think that Greg did the same thing to Molly that Martha of the scary body language’s parents did to her and blocked any attempt the boy might have made to make contact. Not, mind you, that Elly would have seen that as being especially wrong. The same woman who saw no problem with packing her own children off to a farm to be mocked by a lantern-jawed idiot bitch cousin who needs a kick to the teeth for being a smug ignoramus because they don’t know how to run a tractor isn’t going to see any more of a problem with Greg playing KGB censor than she would with any of the other dickish shite he’s pulled. What Elly took away from this is that she was dealing with another teenager making a pointless point about something that she’d just have to adjust to. What she didn’t see is that her stupid comment made the girl feel more isolated than ever.

Given how her attempt to find a voice of reason led her to a voice defending her idiot father and nitwitted stooge step-mother, what Molly took away from this is that her hunch that Daddy let That Woman talk him into moving next door to the dentist’s wife so she could have back-up bossing her around and treating her like a stupid kid being rotten for its own sweet sake was right on the money. Instead of having two people barge in and expect her to say “You know, I really am a selfish child making lives miserable because I’m bad, really appreciate the verbal flogging from entitled dimwits and would like more,” there was a third moron moral authority barging in telling her to adjust because she wasn’t old enough to have an opinion yet.

Her need to escape people telling her that she’s a problem because they can’t face up to being entitled nitwits propelled by the need to tyrannize others explains why she left but doesn’t seem at first blush to cover Gayle who did seem to be able to co-exist with Mrs Patterson next door. The interesting thing is that Connie’s Liography hints as to why Gayle also stayed with her mother during her years in Senior High; the thing talks about how Gayle tended to follow Molly’s lead in most things. One of those things is probably realizing that not only would Daddy and Not-actually-Mommy agree that she needs to be treated like a paroled convict, the doughy ding-dong next door would agree with them. Simply put, Elly’s smug ignorance and need to dish out useless advice is some of why the girls don’t think of Milborough as home.

One of the things that I should have mentioned yesterday is that Greg managed to get away with his selfish need to impose his will on his children by exploiting one of Connie's signature weaknesses: her inane habit of assuming that the awful children in her life want her to die old, alone and unloved. Just as how she can't see that her incessant bleating about her evil son wants her to not have any sort of happiness makes it very difficult for him to care about her opinion, she can't allow herself to see that just because she wants to be a mother to those two girls that that doesn't automatically guarantee that that'll happen. The instant that they opined as how they miss their real mother, Connie reacted exactly as how one would expect and turned into a shrill, defensive and belligerent idiot squealing about being hated for no reason and how attitudes needed adjusting.

Since Connie's an idiot as well as an entitled goofola, she can't quite see that her habit of shrieking like the hysterical numbskull she is is most of why she became a wicked stepmother and why Greg married her. God forbid that he be married to a person who had the inconvenient habit of assuming that no, children are not extensions of a domineering arsebucket of a bank manager's fragile ego and pathetic need to feel like a man by being a tin-pot fascist. Having explained who I think Connie's predecessor was, I think it behooves me to explain why it is that Connie allows herself to be played like a God-damned Atari by anything with a Y chromosome. Simply put, the same woman who makes great big speeches about how she doesn't need a man to be a complete person is as lacking in self-awareness as the passive, timid, clingy nitwit who drifts through life letting everyone but herself make any decision more complex than breathing in and out when she bloviates about being a take-charge person. Men can sense this need to do damned near anything to find and keep a male companion and can and do exploit it to their own ends.

I've already covered Greg but feel that it only fair that I talk about his predecessors. Ted wanted a maid, cook and nanny to cover the home fort for him so he could prowl the streets checking out the local action while Phil wanted a mommy figure to sit in the background and tell him how swell he was. Heh. Even though I despise the repellent dick known as the mama's boy, I find them preferrable to a bargain bin Führer like Greg.

It would appear that I owe Connie something of an apology for the way she and her step-daughters didn't get along. This is because in all her talk of having been assigned the role of wicked stepmother, she, Molly and Gayle had no idea of who was doing the assigning. The man who cast her in that role is a figure as manipulative, self-serving and gutless as Anthony Caine: Greg Thomas.

The reason that I'm starting to remember what an ass the man is is that just as all the Pattersons really know about Thérèse Arsenault comes to them from biased sources, all we know about Molly and Gayle's mother is what a bloated oaf and the clingy, needy, malleable nitbrain he married tell us. It's like a foreshadowing of how Lizardbreath smugly palmed third- and fourth-hand gossip off on Candice as if it were the gospel. Given that Gayle spent the last few years of high school with this alleged negligent idiot and that both of them sought her out to help with their weddings instead of the pinhead squealing about ingratitude and heartache, my guess is that there is more than meets the eye here.

Let's also bear in mind that Greg is the jerk responsible for moving them to Milborough. The reason he gave is supported in the strip itself: simply put, indulging the little woman's need to have more ready access to her girlfriend Elly allowed him to put the barrier of at least five hundred miles between Molly and some innocuous drone of a B-grade rocker whose tastes in music and clothing terrified our boy. Given that most of why he kicked Lawrence out is that he labored under the lunatic misapprehension that Lawrence's being a straight gay would turn his tidy suburban home into a homophobic idiot's opium dream of a fantasy gay Hellworld, this might have been yet another over-reaction.

He bears yet another similarity to the Sainted Assthony: his need to throw the poor, dim woman he's married to under the bus. Like Pornstache would after him, he did so by exploiting Connie's innate stupidity and belief in miracles. The Liography and the strip made it quite clear that she (like Lizardbreath) believed then (and believes now) that the instant a new mother figure came into their lives, they should have been so grateful that they'd automatically love her to death and forget their birth mother. When this turned out to not be the case, the dough-head's reaction was to explode in rage and weeping and bullshit.

Since the poor, dumb woman was so heart-broken that two plus two equaled four, she didn't notice that she was being used as a lightning rod to protect Greg from absorbing complaints about his being a manipulative dick. It's like how Anthony uses Liz as a human shield when he wants to manipulate his own child. Remember "This is Daddy's girlfriend's ass. Kiss it or Santa won't come"? Same damned deal.

What Connie is right now tells us what Liz will be when she's sixty or so: a horribly ignorant woman who doesn't know that she's been used as a means for a gutless ape to mess with her step-daughter and can't figure out why the woman who 'rejected' her gets thought of more fondly that the woman who was 'there' for her. She'll also probably bleat about how she'll never get to be mother of the bride.

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dreadedcandiru2

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Foobonia and Points West.

Four Panel Babylon

Entries tagged with connie versus using her brain

Connie and the ghost.

Connie and the phantoms

Life is fun because Connie's a hypocrite and a flake.

Personnel transfers don't work Lynn's way.

What's in Connie's blindspot?

Following the Phantom.

Connie's failings, Part Two: Envying Elly.

Connie's failings, Part One: Yearning for a mutable past.

Connie's skewed priorities.

Connie didn't build that.

Elly through Molly's eyes.

The Connie reconciliation perplex

On paperboys, voyeurism and David Bowie tapes.

The dismal denouement of the soap opera.

Whither Doctor Da Silva....

"This IS my way of telling you": on keeping children in the dark.

Unwitting parallelism while dealing with picky-faced princesses.

Further musings on Molly and Gayle.

The exploiters in Connie's life.....

Greg Thomas: Supervillain.