Foobonia and Points West.

Of course, it's not just Elly's inability to admit that people honestly don't know what she's talking about that makes it painful and difficult to watch her angrily throw away one opportunity to transmit her values after the other to her children. It would be one thing if it were just her not wanting to admit that just because it would simplify matters for her children to be born speaking English at an adult level and understanding how to do chores her way that it doesn't make it so and that they're not bad children who hate her and want to hurt her for being honestly ignorant. What appears to be going on is that this marches in lockstep with her inability to actually understand what's going on around her and refusal to admit to who she actually is as a person.

This, to me, is the key to understanding Elly's being terrible at this whole parenting thing. I've never had the impression that Elly really understood what she's seeing and this leads to her angrily screaming at her children because she's convinced of the manifestly not-so. When we see her baffled and angered that her children respond positively to the positive, we do so in the knowledge that she labours under the misapprehension that she isn't a testy old nag who really only did have children so she could boss them around and irrationally hate them. She's wrong to think that she's loving or tolerant and she's wrong about who they are but she can't admit that because she's too stupid to be able to tell chicken shit from chicken salad.