Foobonia and Points West.

As I reminded you, Elly seems to have been labouring under the misapprehension that John would react violently to having his car smashed by a moron driver because she doesn't realize that he handles stress differently. Unlike her, he tends to try to somehow escape from stress instead of zapping the source immediately. It's why he plays with trains and why he buys sports cars and why he cowers in sheds and why he talks shit about princesses and how neat it is that his kids do things he'd like to do himself and so on and so forth.

This blindness stems from the fact that she does not handle stress in remotely the same way and assumes that everyone else has the hair trigger she has got. It's why she's all passive-aggressive and never tells people who she sees as a threat what she actually thinks of them. This is why she throws coffee cups and why she screams in horror at minor bullshit and why John stands around scratching his head wondering why she has the masochistic need to have her self-loathing validated. It also blinds her to the fact that the few times John does blow his top, it's because he behaves like a cornered rat who attacks when it cannot escape.

Of course, the ultimate example of people not really communicating especially well would have to be John and Elly themselves. While at first blush, it looks as if the primary source of the conflict is that John is a stupid old stick in the mud so married to the past that he makes Elly's life miserable because he's too stupid and too hung up on what his mother did to notice that Elly's crazy woman hormones have nothing to do with why she's upset, I should think that it goes deeper than this. It seems to me that John could be progressive in his outlook and still not get Elly because of a fundamental difference between them.

The horrible strip in which John plays the filthy problem hair stunt on Lizardbreath and the equally horrible strip in which he declares that Lizzie is too young to be sensitive about her looks and the especially horrible strip in which he tries really hard to not understand why Liz feels so lost and unhappy remind us that John wants very much to live in a sort of bubble of not having to deal with things. I'm reminded of lyrics from a really, really old song by Chicago back when they were pissing people off by adding the words 'Transit Authority' to their name: "If you had my outlook, your feelings would be numb, you'd always think that everything was fine...EVERYTHING IS FINE!!!" Simply put, his detachment, his serenity, his life of idiot glee is motivated by his very real need to blind himself to the problems around him because he's too squishy inside to deal with life.

This means that marrying someone who wears her heart on her sleeve like Elly is going to be a rather troubling proposition. There's no one who feels more and with more sincerity than Elly does and her non-stop need to face issues that scare the shit out of him because all roads lead to him getting what he wants being the grand unifying theory of why his life sucks and why his kids act the way they do. Acknowledging a problem means acknowledging the possibility that the problem is him so he'd rather not be subjected to the humiliation of being always wrong and also a bad person.

As we saw last Sunday, the John of the very early years had no real problem saying chauvinistic things, publicly disrespecting Elly or making nasty comments at her expense. The interesting thing is that the John of the later years was never that bold. He probably hasn't changed his tune to any great extent (as his blanket condemnation of a woman he's never met and never will meet indicates) but he seems to have finally learned when not to sing his song of idiot misogyny. All it took was for him to finally become afraid of her intemperate, irrational rages.

The problem is that almost everything angers her because she seems to have wasted her childhood trying to make compliments out of insults because of a deep-seated belief that people who were nice to her were lying in order to either get her to do something or get something from her. She figured that because the only time she was pleasant to anyone was to extract favors so it made sense that everyone else is a lying jerkwad too. This means that even when John is being a stand-up guy, her inner paranoid idiot is telling her that he's actually being a jerk. This means that she might as well be green and running around yelling "smash puny humans."

As I said quite some time ago, Elly tends not to tell people what she really wants or expects owing to a belief of hers that she never wants to disabuse herself of owing to said horrible information tending to make her look like a right idiot. This limiting notion is that people think exactly the way she does and see the world through her eyes. The end result of this is that she and the other person argue witlessly at cross purposes because Elly stupidly thinks that they're only pretending that they don't see the world precisely as she does in order to make a great big fool out of her.

This tendency tends to make buying her a Christmas gift a near impossibility. As I also said some time ago, Elly loves to rant about how no one should make a fuss over her despite her wanting exactly that. This would be bad enough had she married a man who didn't see her as being a domestic servant who he had yearly bedroom privileges with; since she married an oafish cluck who, upon seeing women in ads gush over another great big God-damned appliance or other practical thing that doesn't require the man to do something scary and wrong like finding out who the Hell he married and what the Hell she wants, assumes that since the actress feigned delight well enough to fool a blockhead with a model train fetish, the baffling stranger he married would also be happy. Thus does Elly's inability to see who John is collide with his refusal to understand people lest his beloved stereotypes be proven wrong to produce another Patterson holiday tradition: Elly getting snow tires or a rug shampooer instead of jewelry.

Now that we're in the era where Elly is a working mother who has to deal with children who want to eat her feeling of self-respect with their hateful need for attention and time, I'd like to tell you why it is that John, despite being a jerk who doesn't quite see why Elly needs to be away from her children so much, is still declared a good father. Simply put, he doesn't do anything stupid like defending them from Elly's insane wrath.

What seems to be happening is that John was raised to follow the volume when it came to settling disputes. Since Elly is always screaming her stupid head off because she over-reacts to a situation she's misread in the most ridiculously self-serving manner possible, it seems to him that the best way to handle things is to settle down the angry lunatic who simply will not talk things out like a sane person. Either she explodes in rage when confronted with the terrifying implication that she's an empty-headed bag of wind who doesn't understand what she's screaming about or she does something else repulsively immature and refuses to speak at all. Since Elly can't be an adult about anything and since the children are quieter than she is, he assumes that they can suck it up and deal with getting shorted out of something that they probably should have just to make their hateful nutbag of a mother shut her stupid face. After all, he does it despite knowing that he's in the right most of the time. This is because his idea of family harmony boils down to placating a stupid narcissist who needs to think that everyone is out to destroy her lest she realize that she isn't a special snowflake after all. If kids come along and try to bring right and wrong into the picture, you'd better believe he's gonna want to put a stop to THAT action!!

As we know, the Pattersons viewed their month at the farm as a means of accomplishing certain goals. While John’s only real goal was to have wonderful mindless fun running farm equipment so he could recharge after the horror of having to interact with human beings, Elly’s to do list was slightly larger and, owing to its not quite being realistic, less likely to be accomplished. Now that we’re about watch them go home, let’s see what Elly wanted to do and how well she made out doing it:

• First off, she seemed to want her children to learn the value of hard work. Given that the method she and John use to do so remains the same and is copied by Bev and Danny, having four adults race around braying about being owed labour in return for lodgings fails to do so twice as fast.
• Second, she seems to have been transfixed by the notion that if the children were to see the hard work that went into growing food, they’d become suddenly wonderful and eat her slop. This worked almost as well as her on-going campaign to trick her children into eating foods they dislike so that she can whinny about how since they didn’t die, they have to eat said foods.
• Third, it seemed to me that she went into things with the goal in mind of raising consciousnesses and getting the throwbacks that seem to populate farm country to admit that “You know what? We’re horrible people for believing in the gender roles we do and really want to thank a city-dweller for telling us what to believe.” Given that no one on Exile Farm seems to be conscious, that worked as well as working children to exhaustion and calling them lazy did.
• Lastly, she seemed to want to get John to respect her as a hard worker. What a joke that was! He made an assy comment about how he was glad to see her finally work because it took him twenty-five jeezly years to entertain the possibility that Elly might actually feel overwhelmed and underappreciated.

About the only thing that she did succeed in doing was watching the ‘miracle’ of piglets being born and even that left a sour taste in her mouth because Danny wouldn’t join her in being unrealistic. Simply put, John got more of what he wanted done because he had a goal based in reality. Elly didn’t and she failed.

As we're about to be reminded, the Pattersons don't really socialize much after Lizzie is about three or so; beforehand, we used to see them in social gatherings but afterwards, they became the sort of homebodies that we're more familiar with. The reason Lynn and Elly give for the two of them behaving the way their nature dictates is somewhat telling: John got hammered at the one party Elly actually threw and embarrassed her so badly that she can never go out to parties again.

The problem with that is that John warned her ahead of time that he didn't like crowds at least twice only to have her ignore his feeble attempts to sway her in the name of her being a party planner extraordinaire. In her mind, putting him in a social setting he felt uncomfortable with would magically make him not horribly self-conscious; that being said, she should also have noticed that compared to her, he's a lightweight. She can hold her liquor while he's more or less down for the count as soon as he sniffs the bloody cork. When you realize that she ignored his warning her because she'd rather not hear him and failed to remember that mouthwash would leave him staggering, this upcoming mess is at least partway her fault for tempting fate.

The problem, of course, is that this is symptomatic of a larger problem: Elly's refusal to heed any sort of warnings that might require her to reconsider an idea she's got stuck in her head. Another example of this is, of course, her insistence on not listening to flood warnings during the early spring of 1995; in her mind, you see, a child will ALWAYS sit quietly where ever Mommy plops her down so she never actually had to worry about where April was. Any sort of suggestion that April had to be watched over or that children aren't grinning little dummies content to sit and stare quietly into space were immediately rejected so, well, it's not as if it were her fault, right?

As we’ve seen, Lynn loves to remind us all that John really doesn’t know what to get Elly for Christmas. In the normal course of events, we find her giving him the cold shoulder because she gets an appliance instead of the jewellery or dress that she actually wanted; the end result of this tendency is that she ends up complaining that John thinks of her more or less as a maid or short-order cook or something instead of a love interest. Granted, it turns out that this is the case there are those who detect a hidden agenda behind the decision to be practical: the fact that John has no idea what size of clothes Elly wears. The reason for that is that he’s not only not very curious about something that doesn’t affect him as well as the fact that Elly thinks that he’s magically supposed to know this going in and thus will not tell him.

This presents our boy with a bit of a dilemma. He knows that if he gets something too large, she’ll complain that he expects her to grow into it and if it’s too small, it’s because he thinks that she’s fat. Since both paths lead to his being accused of calling her obese, old and ugly, it’s better for him to be accused of calling her the organic adjunct of a food processor than it is for him to be yet again unjustly accused of calling her fat. In my not-at-all humble opinion, she should save her rage for when he actually is insulting her.

What makes this all the more ridiculous is that she stands there grousing about how he can never do anything right and expects a compliment while she gets him exactly what he wants and isn't as appreciated as she'd like to be. It doesn't matter if he gets her the coat she really wants because it'll be wrong somehow or an appliance she could use but won't because Marian didn't, he can't buy her a damned thing without disappointing her. Since she's kind of like a kid in that she doesn't know why people are in a bad mood, she doesn't seem able to connect her non-stop negativity to his low-key gratitude.

As we all know, John works fairly hard and thus doesn't really have the energy to do much housework at the end of a busy day staring down people's throats and worsening the pain in his lower back even if he wanted to. The thing is that even if he did have the energy, he'd still insist that Elly shoulder most, if not all, of that burden because she's the woman and that's like her thing. Not only does this entail deceiving her into thinking that he's helpless, it also means that he has to blind himself to the fact that she not only feels overwhelmed by the challenge at the best of times, she doesn't want to be defined solely as his little slave-girl. Rather than admit that he's a boorish clod who wants free maid service or that the woman he professes to love feels severe self-doubt, he ascribes her discomfort to woman hormones clouding her thinking and thus making her unhappy with something that's supposed to fill her with mindless glee. By the time he did figure out that she needed more in her life than to darn socks and bake cookies, they were both wringing their hands in terror because the spoiled princess that they didn't realize that they'd raised was making unfair noises about not wanting to move to the Tiny Train House just because Mike was too selfish and lazy to find his own housecleverly frustrated Mira's attempt to ensnare him in her family politics; since he was at that point inhabiting his shed and working on his eyesore model train layout, he didn't have to apologize for being an arsebucket.

This, of course, raises a second problem; given how slowly John's mind works, it's sort of an annoying turn of events that by the time it did occur to him that she wanted more out of her life than housework, her exposure to the real world scared and embarrassed her so much, she retreated to the safety of her comfy little home so that she would not have to face the stigma of her many failures. Her retiring from Lilliputs because she had to work for real is a foreshadowing not only of Mike's running home to Mommy after Gluttson told him to do his job, it's also a foretelling of why Deanna opens up that sewing school. My guess is that she'll either be too stressed out to do her job or be told to leave after accidentally killing someone by getting their meds mixed up.

As you may or may not know, an interesting pattern emerges when you look at the history of the Patterson family; what usually ends up happening on those occasions when John isn't trying to thwart Elly out of fear for what the neighbors might think or because her ambitions clash with his needs, he genuinely doesn't see the problem that agitates her. Case in point: Elly has spent years trying to cajole, plead and threaten her family in order to make them eat the overly large helpings of food she knows they hate because she knows better than they do. Her life is made worse because she's got a husband who doesn't see the problem. It doesn't make sense to him that she should obsessively gobble down everything in sight because he knows that it isn't the end of the world if Mike's plate isn't clean or if he isn't forced to eat foods he hates. What's more, he says so; the problem is that Elly would rather be miserable doing something counterproductive because to do otherwise would mean that she'd have to do something she hates and admit being in the wrong. Therefore, she makes herself pointlessly and needlessly upset because she's sort of stupid; also, she needs to be broken of the habit of compulsively cleaning plates.