John and Elly: neither stone nor gelatine.

There’s another irritating reason as to why John and Elly are very terrible parents: John gets a lot of help from Elly on not knowing what the Hell is going on around him. The most irritating example is that months after the fire and downsizing, Elly finally sat him down and explained to him that the youngest child he’d written off as a spoiled little princess who didn’t understand the needs of others was actually feeling (rather correctly) as if her family took tongue in teeth and ran away in horrified disgust when her emotional needs and feelings as if she didn’t matter worth shit needed addressing. This was an unfortunate misunderstanding but, hey, kids are resilient and also, he didn’t actually have to get involved with his family because he’s the man and it’s the woman’s job to do all the heavy lifting because he’s a big bag of shit with a train fetish and Elly likes using him as a bludgeon when the kids don’t knuckle under to her insane demands. The less John knows, the less his desire to meddle in her life and make her out to be a screaming wacko who can’t tolerate kids any more than she can do housework comes into play. This leads to

Axiom 3c:

1) Elly prefers it that John doesn’t really intrude on her life because of the dreadful possibility that he might realize that their children aren’t monsters trying to destroy them.

2) John doesn’t like to be part of any discussion because of the dreadful possibility that he might have to admit that most of what he knows about his family is bullshit.

I mean, if he has to start doing that, he’s going to run into something neither of them wanna face. You see, at the same time he was being an unreasonable dick about that stupid car, Elly was acting like an ingrown hair because April was starting to develop a personality like a bad child instead of being good and remembering that she’s an automaton who can only move and think and act and speak when Elly wills it. John didn’t see the point of this because she was a cute kid any more than Elly saw the point of jumping up and down on Mike because his rat bastard idiot father simply never bothered learning to like his son much. Elly was starting to see a fellow artiste, you see and so he was suddenly great. The problem is that we’re dealing with

Axiom 3d:

1) John and Elly each have children they clearly favour and clearly dislike.

2) They ain’t going to admit that no how.

You see, if they own up to that, they gotta admit that Mike is right about something they don’t want him to be right about. They gotta admit that for the longest time, both of them fucking hated him and wished he’d go away.