When she explodes: the rest of the parenting axioms

As I said yesterday, Elly finds it nearly impossible to think when someone is in her presence because of an exaggerated flight or fight response. Where you and I would see a small child simply sitting around doing nothing of note, Elly's disproportionate fear of chaos and violence makes her see someone who wants to drain her substance and chain her to the stove and keep her from expressing herself and so on and so forth. What makes all of this so much the worse is that her default refusal to allow herself to own up to the complex of negative tendencies and emotions that dominate her personality lead us to a horrible limiting factor. The best example of this is when she cried her eyes  out when Lizzie made a casual observation about a mean old witch who didn't let her children do nothing. A normal, healthy person is going to feel bad that her kids see her as an ogre but she isn't going to let it crush her like Elly does because being loved all the time by everyone isn't a realistic proposition. Sadly, we have to contend with the following problem when dealing with our hero:


Axiom 1m:


Elly's yearning for her mother's uncritical devotion is merely part of a greater desire to be thought well of by everyone without reservation.


Her pathetic yowling to Connie about how she hated been seen as cruel and unfair when all she wants is the uncritical devotion she isn't designed to accept is, of course, only part of the problem. Her inability to admit to herself that she has hostile emotions because of a black and white viewpoint that would make her a depraved, heartless monster if she didn't like her kids sometimes leads her to be living in a state of denial as to how she's perceived. It doesn't matter if she cries her heart out, makes passive-aggressive noise about strangers in her house that makes a little boy who yearns for her love feel like crap or blowing up in his face when he gives her the right name of lecturing irritating, we have to contend with another two limiting factors. The first is:


Axiom 1n:


Elly makes her clear hatred for everything her kids say, do, think, like, wear, listen to or want for themselves a secret only to herself.


while the second is best explained by her wailing piteously about Lizzie going away and being replaced by a hostile stranger the second she becomes more difficult to control. As it is when thirty-five year old Elly forgets that the thirty year old Elly who stood at a mirror freaking out because suddenly, she was old and fat and ugly had no problem with her appearance, Elly assumes that she was a calmer mother to better behaved children.


This leads us to a transitional axiom that leads us to why she screams and moans about that fictitious ten pounds that messes up her mind:


Axiom 1o:


Elly seems to be transfixed by the notion that the fictitious crisis that she's screaming about is a sudden fall from a much better past when the facts are that she was never happy with anything.