Foobonia and Points West.

Of course, Elly has what she believes to be a really good answer when confronted with the terrible idea that she and her mother could be mistaken for clones because they do the same things for the same reasons. Said answer is puffing herself up, looking as if you've accused her of axe murder and claiming that when she does things to her kids that she hated when her mother did them to her, she's not doing it for the same reason. She's not some evil old witch who hates children and only had a daughter to have someone to push around and mistreat and tear down because she's heartless, no, not her.

The example I intend re-using is her need to step on the relationship Mike and Martha had. Any major dude would be able to tell you that it was going to go exactly nowhere that wasn't Michael squealing about how cruel it was that he wasn't the one to end it because the deluded clod was going to take Martha for granted and ignore her feelings and drive her into the arms of someone who paid attention to her. Elly insisted on believing that they were too close and going too fast and too far and if she didn't stop it, this person who was obviously a gold-digger bent on ruining Mike's future and not some harmless little girl whose only real crime is reminding an angry idiot about her own blighted social life would destroy everything she had worked for. Mike would eventually thank him for her working on his behalf to save him from the girl with the dangerous body language because she's a responsible mother, not a panicky old grouch who's reading far too much into a harmless little dalliance like her crazy old fossil of a mother.

This, of course, is not the only instance in which Elly can simultaneously roll her eyes at the memory of a mother who never let her do anything because she was a panicky tyrant who let her fear of the unfamiliar screw up her daughter's life AND BE a panicky tyrant who's letting her fear of loss of control mess up Mike, Liz and April's life. Marian couldn't see the world clearly but she can because the alternative is that she's as blind and stupid as her mother used to be because she too thinks that assuming the very worst is a substitute for having a brain.

The second thing that a new reader would notice about the Elly of the Middle Years is that she's sort of a worrier and sort of takes everything too seriously. It seems to her that she's surrounded by a group of apathetic slobs who don't understand how important every little thing is. No matter how trivial the problem, you know that Elly is going to make it into a full-blown crisis that has to be addressed now lest chaos, anarchy and ruin be visited on the world. In the ordinary run of events, we'd assume that Elly is simply one of those unhappy people who see the bad side of every situation and is fighting against the devastating loss she assumes is the natural outcome of events.

What teaches us what drives this need of hers to stiff-arm catastrophe is less a default negativity that makes her see the world as something akin to a side-scroller in which everything is out to crush her and more a need to stave off something personal is the occasional appearance of her mother in the strip. When Marian bounces into view grinning her vapid grin so full of hate it hurts, we know that a woman who strives to project an aura of competence and authority is going to be treated like an incompetent and defiant child by an older woman whose need to be needed overrides her sense of propriety. Marian doesn't see the damage she's doing because she can't abide a world where she's the one who's waited on; just as Jim had to tinker because stopping means death, Marian has to take over the parenting because if she rests even for a second, she'll drop dead on the spot. If Elly's feelings get hurt and she ends up being humiliated in front her of family, well, she'll get over it and life will somehow work out for her BUT the point is that Marian must not keel over and die.

Eventually, of course, Marian realizes that maybe this need of hers to be the mother forever is actually a problem after all because what few photos Elly allows to be taken remind herself of all the times her bitter failure of a father made her feel like crap; Elly seems to have the same haunted expression on her face that she used to and it dawns on her that just maybe, Jim was right all along about how stupid it was to try to suppress Elly for her own good. Not, of course, that Marian ever explained why or apologized or anything. After all, she never wanted to look weak in front of people and admitting to being a colossal screw-up because she let her fear do her thinking for her is going to be a sort of humiliation from which she could never really recover. Best to let Elly wonder why the mother who loved her so much, she HAD to sit on her never cared for her at all.