Foobonia and Points West.

As I've said before, April gets her angry refusal to admit to bitterly envying someone from her parents. John isn't against music as a career because someone left him for someone with the stamina to stick with music lessons and Elly doesn't see John's staff as a harem who yearn to wreck her marriage despite both being the case. The reason that I mention this is that what Elly doesn't know doesn't sustain, delight and reassure her. Said unknown known that should be known is that it's obvious as all Hell to me that the women Elly sees as a harem follow the lead of their mother hen Jean and despise John.

After all, Jean is little more than a walking sitcom cliché in that she's a sassy annoyance who lives to berate the man who signs her pay cheques. She started out thinking that her boss was a louse who'd cheat on a woman she saw as a put-upon and mistreated figure in a heart-beat and pretty much ended that way. Since she arranged his work environment to suit herself, it's quite likely that John's staff see him in the same dim light. Thus do we have the comic irony of Elly seeing the only people on Earth as she'd like to be seen as threats who seek her ruin. Were she to become aware that his staff and her co-workers loathed John beyond mortal comprehension, she would not know whether to be thrilled to have supporters or confused that they don't do what her fears tell her they should.

The interesting thing about the "Mike waits for the Hormone Fairy to arrive" sequence is that it ends with John cheerfully admitting that he spent his teenaged years drooling at the girls as they started to develop. This is because it almost organically flows into the next arc: Elly fretting about how she looks in contemporary swim wear and yowling about how selfish, evil MEN no longer saw fit to provide her a suit that makes her feel desirable and attractive and thin. The problem is that people around her remember something she'd prefer not to: she can't look in the mirror and actually see someone reasonably pleasant looking.

It's sadly obvious why she doesn't want to draw the logical conclusion implicit in her never allowing herself to be consoled when she's having a 'fat' day. First off, we'd have to have her look at her past and admit that she's simply not wired to be happy with who she is or what she looks like. It's not NORMAL to be unable to be happy and wanting to be normal is pretty much what Elly lives for so her inability to take pleasure in life is something she can't admit to. Also, she'd have to look back and see that maybe, she'd misjudged people and situations and that would lead to the humiliation she's been fleeing from ever since her damaged mother conflated high spirits with being tyrannized: being forced to apologize for something.

The irritating thing about having to watch Elly at Mike's hockey practice is not that she doesn't like him doing anything that isn't a chore that makes her life easier by showing his love for her by erasing every trace he might have of an individual identity. Most comic strip housewives labour under the misapprehension that their function is to take the people in their vicinity and erode away any impulse they might have that diverts them from the life they think they have to live. You can't read a comic strip with a female protagonist that doesn't have her get her nose out of joint because some evil, conflict-causing MAN denies that there's more to life than pointless chores, random periods of unconsciousness and, as a reward for a life of dull, useless toil, the sweet release of death.

Elly's stupidly sitting in the seat she takes without even realizing that the Thought Police aren't going to show up and shoot her if she moves around or anything is visual shorthand for this mental defect she's got. Just as she only thought that the point of an Easter parade was to reassure the other parents that she could force a balking child to do what she was told, sitting until her ass is numb is yet another of the false obligations that only exist inside her empty head.

As you know, there used to be a one-season wonder animated series starring the Pattersons. Since Lynn seems to have had the same obsessive need to stay on message that destroyed her hopes of being a children's author, it was a lot like the strip in that we had the characters endure the same stupid crap for the same idiotic reasons. Since it is December, I should think that the Later Years segment of the Christmas episode should do as an example.

As you can see, the segment starts out in the kitchen with Elly preparing to make eggnog only to find that she's out of nutmeg. While John and Jim are vaguely sympathetic, they point out that lots of people do without it so it isn't a big deal; they do so in vain because Elly wants to make it a big deal because she keeps muttering that nothing is the same any more. After John and April put the star on the tree because Mike is on the fence about driving through a snow storm to get home from Uni, we have Elly make a big ugly fool of herself because Liz and April's playing a headache music Christmas song causes yet another fragile object Mike bought her for Christmas to get broken. Said breakage occurs because April stumbled into the tree to avoid the unpleasant phenomenon called "shouting blowhard mother making a big deal over nothing". An ugly scene between Liz and Elly transpires and Elly storms off to the kitchen after blubbering that nothing is ever the same.

After Liz and Elly go off to neutral corners, John explains what traditions are and Elly starts getting all sentimental about how Marian is no longer their to brainlessly nag her and how Mike's going to open his crap in the afternoon and that makes her sad. Jim quietly tells her that Marian is still sort of there because he and Elly still anticipate her constant stream of unsolicited advice and Mike's absence isn't the end of the world and she kind of chills when it's driven home that if she were to talk about a problem, it would go away. The problem is, of course, that learning morals is not something Elly does. Always and ever, her fear of being seen as being weak and silly makes her clam up and things fester stupidly.

To continue on from yesterday, it's rather hard to really sympathize with Elly when she screams about how important her many, many meetings are because they seem to me to be the public equivalent of the mounds of laundry she does every day. This is owing to the fact that just as the great big job at the library she'd invested pretty much most of her identity in turned out to be "glorified intern", it's sort of obvious that the only reason people on committees would miss her is that she's the answer to the question "What pathetic and needy idiot can we dump all of this useless busywork onto?"

The reason I'm confident about that is that Elly reminds me of a lot of people I knew in high school; they just couldn't sit still no matter what and they had a need to be thought well of that was painful to behold. When these flaws marched in lockstep, the sufferer would almost always end up becoming a public service announcement warning people about the dangers of over-extending and over-committing. Given that Elly is pretty much the same moron she was when she was a plastic flower child driving her mother bonkers, the yearning for approval and terror of inactivity still sabotage her. Hell, the present day Elly is still burning herself into the ground being somebody's damned packmule.

For long-term readers like myself, there's nothing quite as interesting as a trip back to the very early years in order to provide context for what we see in the current batch of reruns. One example is the very early strip in which John is baffled by the nebulous nature of Elly's discontent. She can't put why she's out of sorts into words but she knows that she feels that family life is not nearly what it's cracked up to be and for whatever reason she can't express, she knows she doesn't much like the idea of staying home and being taken for granted while everyone else gets to go out and have a public identity. It doesn't seem fair to her that she should wait because she's haunted by nightmares she doesn't realize she has of people only ever appreciating her and thinking that she should have had a life thirty years after she died.

The reason that I mention this is that most of what drives the conflict between her and the kids is a fear she cannot express. Every single thing the children do seems to terrify her for a reason she doesn't consciously know. If you were to suggest to her that she seems to fear that either a crowd of vigilantes will shoot her down in the street for being a bad mother or that her mother will materialize out of the ether and tell her to go to her room and think about what she's done while she raises the children properly, she'll actively deny it despite those being the content of her dreams. Her waking mind is protecting her from seeing the nightmare fantasy images but it can't protect her from the fear those images inspire. Thus, the endless gobsmackage. Thus, I should think, also the recurring image in Mike's later books of an otherwise kind person being twisted into a fearful fury by images of great suffering that baffles his mother. Who is this angry, anxious mother filled with fear and doubt and why does she feel as if no one cares? Certainly not her.

Recently, aprilp_katje linked to a strip that had Elly have no real idea what she would have done with her Bachelor Of Arts degree if she ever bothered getting it. The interesting thing is not that she joins most of the cast in assuming sight unseen that getting married and having kids and getting her degree were mutually exlusive (which is the subject an upcoming look at the collective stupidity of the Patterson family) but that she has no more idea of what she would have done with it than she has any idea of what Marian really expected of her.

The reason for this is that it's easier for Elly to make a self-serving assumption that cast her mother in the most negative light because it spared her the awful burden of having to see her as anything other than a heartless antagonist who yearned to see her feel terrible and ugly and stupid and confused and miserable. To live in the World That Is in which Marian was a fallible human being doing her stupid best instead of the World That Makes Her Feel Good in which Marian was an ogre who loved every minute of busting Elly's ass is a horrible thing because it makes Elly into part of the problem. It's thus simpler for Elly to assume that her awful mother wanted her to die alone and for her grandchildren to never be born because she doesn't want to admit that she should have told John to shove his passive-aggressive huffing and puffing about living in a hooooooome up his God-damned ass, a deal is a God-damned deal.

Now, if you'll recall your early history of the Pattersons, you'll remember that Elly had the expectation that when she was done supporting John during the post-grad era and he'd established himself, she could pick up where she left off and please her mother by getting her Bachelor Of Arts degree. It didn't quite work out that way because, well, the repellent choad thought that one of the things he should have been praised for saving her from was getting a degree. Given the setting, it's sort of obvious that the fifty year delay looks like a denial because even if he does convince himself he's being a wonderfully progressive person for letting her get that degree that seems to have been a potential reason that she resented her lot in life, it's too fucking late to do anything with it. That being said, Elly has no right to complain because she let John walk all over her because she was afraid of losing his ass and reverting to the status of 'child' instead of progressing to the status of 'woman who dodged a big, stupid, entitled bullet.'

This is where an annoying habit people have of protecting themselves from having to admit to having pointlessly endured needless suffering at the hands of imbeciles comes into play. I should think that if April were to have the horribly poor luck of expressing sympathy for Elly because of the long, long delay in realizing her dream and so on, she'd be met with Elly defiantly claiming to have survived quite well without it. This is so she can look down on and feign sympathy for Therese for the same reason everyone else does: she eventually grew sick of her life and told Anthony to shove his narrow point of view up his scrawny ass. The need Elly had to be in a relationship that's based mostly on her exploitation because the alternative seemed scarier blinds her to the fact that most of the men in her life don't like the idea of people not buying the bullshit they're selling. Since she can't deflect her asshole husband and doesn't really want to live without him, she really is responsible for her own problems. So is Liz for the same reason. So is Deanna for quite another.

You want to know what's really interesting about the bake sale mess? It isn't that Elly is yet again biting off more than she can chew because she thinks Miss Lyon would react negatively to her doing the smart thing that she wants to do and politely extract herself from the situation. If it were simply a case of stupid Elly stupidly over-exerting herself because of her stupid belief that if she were to fail to fulfill an obligation that doesn't actually exist, Miss Lyon would spread the word that the AWFUL Patterson woman simply can never be relied on to do anything and, yes, damn it, the Quality Women would never allow her to join their ranks.

The interesting thing also isn't that Elly is too stupid to realize that the obligation never existed in the first place because she doesn't live in the real world where teachers take the overblown comments of five year olds at face value. She lives in a stupid world where, yes, damn it, Miss Lyon put her name down and will exact brutal revenge if she declines. She also lives in another, stupider world: a world in which her children will freak out and throw fits if she wants time to herself. Mike only does that sort of thing when his stupid-ass frienemies are on his case about how she's deliberately trying to embarrass his dumb ass so her concern in this area is, shall we say, overblown and silly. Mike will not die if she doesn't sit in the stands bellowing "SKATE" like an imbecile and Lizzie flat-out told her that no, she will not be crushed if Mommy just sends a plate of cookies to take to be sold.

Of course, this leads to another interesting thing: Mike's stupid-ass attempt to make up for all of this by throwing his "buddy" the Martian under the bus. Not only did he volunteer her to serve at Lilliput's, I should think that most of the reason that April had no support at all growing up is that he gave Elly license to sit on her fat ass complaining about how the princess expected too damned much.

Of course, it's not just the need Elly has to prevent her children from growing up too fast (which, since that naturally leads to her having no purpose in life, would necessitate her immediate death) or her desire to prevent unauthorized people (like other children or Evil, Conflict Causing Men who want to make women feel bad about themselves) decide what children should wear that cause her to lose her already tenuous grip on reality when it comes time to buy clothing for the children. John is far and away the better parent in this respect because he isn't sick with the paranoid dread that the children are deliberately growing faster than he expected them to so as to prevent him from getting new clothes.

We're about a year or so away from seeing this survival of Elly's baffling dread when she gets all panicky and stupid because the snowsuit she bought Lizzie is too small despite her buying it the size she thought Lizzie would be. Instead of simply admitting that she had guessed wrong and that Lizzie hadn't decided to grow larger than Mommy expected she would to be mean to her, dimwit Elly persisted in thinking like the nutbag from the early eighties and GROOOOOOANED!!!! in despair. This led to her going on a shopping spree to buy expensive new clothes for the children and Mike wondering howcome she never seemed to buy any new things for herself. The intent of this was clearly to make the kids look like ungrateful monsters who refused to see that because they made demand after demand, their poor mother simply couldn't enjoy life BUT the problem is that sane people see something entirely different.

What sane people see is a woman who was taught to martyr herself growing up as a sort of means of getting the attention her imbecile parents seemed to lavish on her kid brother just for breathing and also as a means of making herself look better to a mostly imaginary group of Quality Women who decide her worth for her. We know that Elly could very easily have bought herself something nice for herself but her conscious mind told her getting stuff for herself when the kids were there made her look like a failure as a person and thus unworthy to join the Respectable Ladies teamed up with the subconscious mind that wanted her children to wail piteously about how terrible and cruel they are to expect her to give and give and give to keep her from doing the smart thing.