We don’t like Mike

While to the outsider, the Pattersons look like an average family, it’s obvious to someone who’s been stuck observing them that the question of which of the children is loved best is pretty much the driving force behind the story. While it might look as if Michael’s having the ability to inherit the name and manufacture more Pattersons might make him the Son around which things rotate, it’s Elizabeth’s ability to confirm that Elly lived her life right after all by also marrying an oafish clod who doesn’t actually respect her that makes her the favourite after all.

The reason for this is rather sadly obvious. It’s quite clear that despite John’s belief in the so-called maternal instinct, Elly has never actually known what she was doing as a mother. Her later panicky bleating about how her beloved Lizzie had gone away and been replaced by a hostile stranger bent on her mother’s destruction and her passive-aggressive poem that has as its premise that a six-month old child deliberately developed colic to rob her of sleep indicate that we’re dealing with a simpleton who believed that an infant was a superior sort of play-toy that she could put away if she got bored or tired or frustrated.

When one considers that the merest development of free will on Lizzie’s part led to horrified shrieking on Elly’s part about her baby vanishing and being replaced by a cruel monster child and that Lizzie risks being mistaken for a potted begonia owing to her excesses of passivity, it should come as no surprise that an active, healthy, curious and dead-on average little boy like Michael would drive the hysteric he called a mother clean round the bend. His need for attention sickened, confused and above all terrified a mother who never liked people being too close to her in the first place. Many is the time that we saw her grimly huddled over a job done ineptly and in a slip-shod fashion only to be enraged by this monster boy who wants her to drop everything she loves and never have time to herself and never be allowed to be a person because of his lying demands on her attention. Add in the fact that his ass of a father hates him because he can’t ever obey quickly enough or sincerely enough to placate him and we’re stuck with:

Axiom 4a:

1) Mike is convinced that deep down, his mother and father don’t actually like him or want him around.

2) He’s fucking right to believe that.