How to light a garbage fire: the first of the parenting axioms

As we know, the Elly we're looking at right now has a sort of non-job as a glorified gofer for the public library that she's invested most of her identity in. Rather than be content with what she had before, the poor deluded sap thinks that her paid internship is this big career that she has to defend from all comers. The problem is that due to budget cuts, they're forced to do something they hate and wish they didn't have to do by depriving a pathetic charity case with an oaf husband and spoiled brats of the one ray of life in her bleak existence. Elly insists on not seeing this. The Elly who screamed about quitting motherhood still thinks that she lost her job because they didn't really like her or else they'd have found a way to let her keep her job. This points us to one of the quirks she has that makes raising children a traumatizing mess for all concerned:

Axiom 1i:

Elly never actually bothers asking why people do or say anything because she assumes sight unseen that the only answer is "Because they hate her and want to make her life worse."

It should be noted that this also covers why she thinks people who actually put in the work get ahead: she thinks that they're all cheating because she can't be asked to do things that bore her and doesn't want to admit that people might know things she doesn't. This leads us to another problem that makes her a less effective parent than she might otherwise be:

Axiom 1j:

Elly seems to be organically incapable of understanding any viewpoint not her own. When asked to see that people might know or have experienced something she has not, she comes to the conclusion that the other party is trying to deceive, confuse and humiliate her because that person is part of the conspiracy to ruin her she invented to keep from accepting the eternal humiliation of accepting personal responsibility for her actions.

Of course, it's not just Elly's irritating paranoia that makes her a terrible parent. We also have to deal with the reason why she's at pains to throw her kids out of the house because she finds their presence oppressive and terrible. As bad as Elly's work ethic is when she's unsupervised, having to look at a face not her own drives her batty because of

Axiom 1k:

Elly finds it even more difficult to concentrate than she usually does when someone's in the room.

The problem is that Axiom 1j tends to make her life worse because it leads to another problem:

Axiom 1l:

Elly seems to be burdened with the irritating notion that when she isn't looking at someone, that person simply freezes in place. When reality insists on falsifying that notion, we generally get angry screeching and blind panic. 

What we don't get is anything like publicly expressed self-awareness; we'll get to why that is next.