dreadedcandiru2 | Entries tagged with elly versus lizzie

Of course, John's being an infant makes him slightly better company than the idiot he married. If Lynn had bothered lining the reprints up better, we'd be dealing with a big, ugly reminder of a big ugly truth because we'd be watching Elly make a moron of herself dealing with Liz's having to get glasses. We start things off with her blowing off Liz's anxiety about her appearance like always because doing so means acknowledging that her child's feelings matter. We know how little they do matter when Liz mislays them temporarily and Elly's reaction is oh so typical of her: telling a frightened, unhappy child who knows that her mother is more worried about the inconvenience to herself than whatever Liz might feel that she's a stupid, careless monster who doesn't listen because she's thoughtless and wants to buy glasses in bulk to just throw away. Knowing who Elly is and knowing how little she cares to understand how people think, it's obvious that she thinks Liz is play-acting being sorry to avoid the punishment she deserves. It matters not that Liz says that she didn't mean to do her harm or that she herself loses things, Elly was jolted out of her beloved routine and therefore Liz was bad and nothing could ever make anything okay so the idea of reassuring someone who inconvenienced her to a minor extent was a non-starter because she'd made Elly pay attention.

This leaves the people around her with a problem: Elly thinks that she's a more sympathetic and understanding person than she is because she glosses over all the times that she's made her children unhappy and hates to be reminded that this is not the case. It also leaves John with a dilemma in that he cannot simply tell Elly "The reason Liz doesn't come to you with her problems is that when she misplaced her glasses at the beach, you stood there screaming like a maniac for hours on end about how she was a careless, thoughtless monster who hated the family. When she said she was sorry, you didn't listen. When she felt bad, you told me that children just fake that to make you feel guilty for nothing. When they turned up, you didn't apologize because you still think that the kids are trying to destroy you" without having to engage in Klingon foreplay (being roared at, clawed at and having heavy objects hurled at him).

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1044661.html

Of course, there's a reason that isn't Elizabeth telling herself "Mom will leap down my throat if I say something she doesn't like", "You can never tell what will set Mom off", "Mom wants me to enjoy her childhood", "Mom is a fine one to talk about body image issues!!" or "Mom thinks that she's the only person I could be mad at" that keep Elly from magically blaming Liz for being the cylinder that doesn't fire during the heart to heart mother and daughter talks that the two of them never have. Liz has the inconvenient habit of remembering another thing Elly is at pains to avoid admitting to doing: lying to spare her children's feelings.

This means that Liz also thought "I can't ask Mom how I look! She'll lie to my face in order to avoid an argument!!" and was right to do so. This means that by extension, anyone that Elly personally knows and likes has been press-ganged into tricking Liz into admitting that she doesn't have to fit in with the crowd despite that causing the ostracism she fears. This means that she seeks out the advice of people who make Elly feel uncomfortable because they haven't been ordered to spare her feelings.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1022119.html

As I've mentioned before, Liz spent an appallingly long time as Daddy's Little Girl only to be banished to the Land Of Wind, Ghosts And Middle Children when a new, more pliable emotional crutch came along to make John feel manly and also not ruin his life by talking about her feelings. This, along with Elly's attempts to disrupt her social life because of an exaggerated dread of teen pregnancy and John's attempts to use brute force to make her smile again, led to Liz feeling a vague sense of discontent. The problem, of course, is that Elly is deeply silly and stupid and lost her temper when confronted with Liz not being an especially happy person really.

Judging from her panicky, stupid squawking to Connie about the Evil Bad Mood That Was Evil, the dozy cretin seems not to have realized that she was in sort of a treadmill here because she expected yet another stupid thing from her own children that she never delivered on herself and wanted them to be happier than children who are figuring out the world can actually be. Simply put, she never expected to be on the receiving end of the "You just don't understaaaaaaand.....you're old and your life is oooooover with and you've forgotten what it was like to be young" and Liz is bad and wrong and evil because Elly is a dimwit who thinks that everyone else is having a better than she is. No damned wonder they call her a woman of dim intellect on Platypus Comix.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1021944.html

One of the sadder things about having to revisit the past is having to remind ourselves that Elly and Liz haven't been what you'd call close since she reacted strongly in the negative to the child developing a personality when she was two years old. In the here and now, it manifests itself as her having nothing in the shop window but ridicule, bellowing and hypocrisy and having to farm out actually cheering the poor girl up to a classmate. In the years to come, it becomes Elly thinking that Liz's unhappiness about her lack-luster social life is actually directed at her because that's the only explanation she can come up with for the Moods That Drive Her Crazy. It's only when Liz is a grown woman that Elly starts to think of her as a person she can talk to without getting all bent out of shape.

This, I think, is because by then, Anthony is in the picture and Liz is no longer competition for John's affections. Lynn as much as said so in "Lives Behind The Lines" when she pretty much pinned all the blame for Elly's inability to cope with her daughter on Liz for being closer to John than she should. This way, one can avoid the dreadful suggestion that perhaps Elly is to blame for the cooling down because she sees every other woman in the world as a threat to her happiness.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1020728.html

As we know, we’re about to spend the next decade or so watching Lizzie walk down the same self-defeating path Elly does when she tries to make sense of a world where no one lets her trade on her looks quite like Trash Bag Johnny does. She got a lot of mileage outta pretty much flirting with her dad but when she got out into the world, no one would let her get away with shit because she was cute. Rather than admit that John was an anomaly and that she actually had to bring stuff to the table, she’d convinced herself that no one likes her because she’s got a big flaw that makes her ugly and unworthy. The strip that comes closest to proving my point is the one where she seemed to have actively sought out someone who’d mock her for having her hair all braided up so it would confirm her belief that no one really liked her.

Ordinarily, this would be the part where I talk about how it’s also her mind’s eye that’s myopic because she spent so much time on that damned fantasy island in her head that she never bothered figuring out exactly how the real world worked. Today, I'd like to talk about the heaping helping of hypocrisy Liz seems to have forgotten that she saw when Mommy talked a good game about how people like you for you only to turn around and spout her loony gospel about how suddenly, after years of being okay with the woman in the mirror, she’s old and grey and fat and her life was like literally OVER before it had begun. It’s like watching the public information film that has the drug addict boy tell his dad he learned being a dope fiend from said dad. The Yank had a shocked look on his face because he realized the truth in the anvilicious slogan. Elly would deny that Liz learned that girls just wanna fret about their looks from her because nothing bad is her fault.

Crossposts: http://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/987662.html

One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is that Elly and John have the irritating habit of assuming that what we would see as children who are far too damned young to be given adult responsibility are really slackers denying their responsibility to their poor parents. This is, as you will no doubt recall, why I make that snotty comment about Trash Bag Johnny wondering why Mike is being a selfish little creep who wants to laze his life away playing when children his age in Lagos are actually earning their keep and notworrying about trivialities like “living to be thirteen.” While John’s problem is sadly easy to diagnose, it’s slightly more difficult to comprehend Elly’s need to shove children out the door too damned quick without remembering a sad fact about her: she married too damned young and doesn’t really want to admit it because it would tend to make her mother right.

Now, as any major dude will tell you, the very real need not to admit that she rushed into a foolish decision for a questionable reason always mutates into the need to convince ones’ self that said decision was not a mistake after all. This means that the Elly of 1979 who admitted to herself that she had to wait until her kids were no longer underfoot to do what she wanted has become the Elly of 2017 who insists that she and John were simply destined to be. The odd fact is not just that she almost fully believes that and wanted Liz to have the same ‘happy’ life she did; the odd fact is that just below the surface is the malicious old cow who delighted in the idea of her horrible children marrying the same sort of overweening asshole she was stuck with. Having Anthony be a dreary sack of shit whose idea of ‘humour’ is cutting everyone else off at the knees for kicksies is thus not a bug but a feature. The angry moron who scowled at a kindly lady for sticking up for the cruel, selfish child who dared to run away crying when she ‘knew’ that the point of Easter Parades was to show how well Mommy has got her kids trained somewhat loves the idea of her child having the same lousy life she did and would be revolted to see be ungrateful to poor mother by being happier.

Crossposts: http://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/986586.html

One of the more irritating things about having to listen to Elly wail about how having April meant that she would be tied down to diaper rash and daycare while her friends were talking about careers and travel is having to remember who really got tied down: Elizabeth. Unlike her idiot mother, Liz clearly saw that Mike would be allowed to go where he wanted to while she would be expected to do all the grunt work Elly tells herself that she did. It’s almost as annoying as watching Elly and John nail themselves to their cross about the horrible disrespect their horrible children were showing them by losing track of time like morons, having snacks because there isn’t a fucking clock in their stomachs and clearly making fun of them by looking through their closets for a Halloween costume. This, combined with the infamous sequence in which Elly stood around wailing about how awful it was that Liz dared to have a social life when a good child would rush straight home and dedicate herself to housework because back in the sixties, no one in North Vancouver had much interest in socializing with the angry know-nothing know-it-all, tells us something about the possibility of Liz being allowed to attend anything like a sleepover.

What it tells us is that Liz would have better luck flying to the moon flapping her God-damned arms than getting to go to one. Her idiot parents barely tolerated Mike and April having one and made God-damned sure that the kids knew that the old, angry people thought that they were all extra-bad kids for making noise and keeping their parents from the zombie sleep that isn’t actually good for anyone. We also now that having to drive kids to sporting events a bit early is seen not as being part of being a father but as a cruel imposition selfish kids who don’t know who’s really in charge inflict on the Trash Bag Johnnies of the world. I can’t see Elly allowing Lizzie to go anywhere on a weekend night unless they’re away at one of those horrible kid-hostile vacations of theirs. The problem is that the only place she would be allowed to go is the Poirier house so that she can be subjected to a different sort of self-righteous incompetent parenting predicated on the notion that someone who totally dominates the conversation and wins all the time is a martyr backed into a corner because she’s too stupid to realize it.