Now, I’d say it was pretty safe to say that Deanna clearly sees herself as being a better mother to Meredith and Robin than Mira ever was to her. Strip after endless strip is, after all, predicated on the notion that Deanna has to defend the new, better way of being a mother from the evil criticism of the domineering monster mother who used her evil family politics to dominate HER DADDY!!!!!! and make Deanna’s life a misery. There is a problem, however, with the time-not-presents orthodoxy that The Sainted Elly preaches: it doesn’t work out so good because neither she nor Deanna seem to be willing to spend any time with their children. What generally happens is that the two dimwits stand there scared out of their tiny, tiny minds because children evilly refuse to do what they’re supposed to: sit quietly where ever it is that Mommy plops them down and not do anything or think anything or want any sort of mental stimulation. I can readily see Deanna shrieking that she cannot be asked to give her children attention either. Simply put, Deanna is a worse parent to her children than Mira was to her. All Mira wanted was a tacky wedding without that gay guy angering God by stinking up the joint and a son-in-law who isn’t a sponge-headed man-child. What Deanna clearly wants is to have the evil, scary, baffling tendency of children to move around, speak and think on their own initiative to go away so that they can become mindless drones who only move when she wills it.
This desire, this longing to abolish the free will of her children seems to be why she idolizes another pair of failures who think themselves superior to their better antecedents. Granted, Jim and Marian did do something wrong by giving the world a petty, manipulative and tyrannical imbecile woman and her yawping man-child of a kid brother and somehow, Will and Carrie messed up big-time by blighting the world with a grinning gargoyle with a train fetish but they’re clearly better parents and people than their children. April, as a for instance, pretty much owes her life to Jim’s presence in it and it shows. One could say that Jim saw her as a way of raising Elly properly. It’s kind of too bad that the old boy popped his clogs before he could crow about how his way is better but you can’t have everything, right?
One of the things he wasn't allowed to have was a daughter who actually believed that he and Marian did a good job. Oh, they tried their best but they were hampered by a double standard and thus made her life a misery. This means that Elly sees herself as trying to raise her children the way Marian could have raised her had she not been brainwashed by the patriarchy. She thus differs from Deanna who wants to raise her children the way Mira should have raised her had she not been sick with the impulse to interfere.