It seems to me that Lynn has a very odd vision of what a single parent is; the character used to demonstrate that might change but the basic characteristics are the same. We start off with the knowledge that the single parent's spouse is long gone and more or less unlamented by the Pattersons; it doesn't matter if we're talking about Pete Landry or Thérèse Caine, the other spouse is absent from the lives of his/her spouse and child. What this does to the person in question is turn him or her into a passive, needy jerk who fixates on someone inappropriate as being the be-all and end-all of his or her love life. It doesn't seem to matter what the other person demands, the Single Parent will do any horrible thing to keep the other coming back. Finally, we have it hammered home what a great parent s/he is despite visual evidence that he or she is made of fail. We see this now when Connie blew off Lawrence to chase the jazz unicorn and we see it again when Anthony threatens to cancel Christmas so he can steamroll his child into accepting his idiot girlfriend. Since Connie and Anthony both seem to be Lynn-as-single-parent, this raises some alarming concerns about how she behaved back in the day.

As I've said before, John and Elly seem to exist as exemplars of Lynn's passion-free ideal of marriage; the reason they were able to sit at Lizthony's reception and wish they could live their lives all over again was not to correct mistakes made but to remind themselves that love (or, for that matter, any other strong emotion) just screws everything up. This is why they reminded Liz that the be-all and end-all of human happiness was ending up with a best friend with bed privileges and it's why they're going to spend most of the Early Years making cutting remarks about the foolish way in which Phil, Ted and Connie behave. It's sort of a good thing that the more soap-operatic elements of the strip faded into the background after the disastrous fishing trip that took us into the Middle Years; that way, they were able to focus their instinct to cluck their tongues at people they disapprove of on their children. At least then, they had some cause to be critical because they were responsible for how Mike and Liz behaved. Sadly, the 1990s ushered in the era wherein Mike and Liz started thinking about dating; this led to Elly getting her nose out of joint because she was a homely wallflower and John not liking backtalk which meant that Mike and Liz were sent to Exile Farm. Worse, as the years mounted and the Pattersons grew more smug by the day, they said and thought things that would have scandalized their younger selves; as big a clod as the John who's about to tell Elly that since it's his money, he can buy what he wants with it is, I doubt that he'd say or do half the stuff the John who panicked about where his toy trains would go has.

As we all know, John and Elly Patterson lead fairly settled lives as a flawed-but-likable married couple; John, of course, likes to look at pretty women very much but he isn't really all that tempted to cheat on Elly. Since he has a warped sense of humor that Elly doesn't get, his comment about maintaining the one relationship being hard enough work for him doesn't exactly go over very well but we do know that he likes the stability of married life very much; what's more, he does seem to enjoy Elly's company despite their not wanting the same things all the time. His clear hatred of Ted for leading Connie on and subsequent cheering when Ted's wife Irene divorced him and left town says something interesting about him; what it says is that he doesn't much like bachelor life and can't get why anyone would prefer it. What's more, he sees a woman who simply wants to be happy have her hopes both dashed and mocked by someone who won't grow up; when Ted returned from Thunder Bay after being shown to the door by Greg, John couldn't have been happier because he saw an ungrateful idiot getting what was coming to him. This tells me that he'll probably think the same thing about Phil after Lynn alters history so as to make him the more successful skirt-chaser.

The odd thing about this current arc is that it doesn't actually resolve the issues raised. Connie will still be attracted to Phil despite getting the harsher brush-off that Lynn will no doubt write this next week and will always have some corner of her soul that finds him appealing. What's more, the Connie that boasted about being a great mother two years ago remembers that she loved Phil (and Ted) very much. She knows that her destiny is the one she and Greg built together but that doesn't mean that she's going to pretend that she didn't love all the other men in her life. This positive characteristic, this refusal to be stupid leaves her vulnerable to manipulation by her saboteur friend Elly. The ability Elly has to exploit a belief she finds unbelievable is something bordering on the ironic; Liz had to get the foolish notion that she didn't actually love people she'd loved from somewhere and the best possible source of that ridiculous idea has to be from her unimaginative drone of a mother. As we've seen, Elly's need to have something to feel miserable and anxious about drives her to both encourage and discourage Connie's romances to people she disapproves of; we'll see that in a few months' time when she misleads Connie into thinking that Phil had reconsidered what he said at the jazz club. About the only thing that part-way absolves our idiot friend is that Phil actually does reconsider what he's about to say; despite Elly's clear belief that he and most men are heartless cheaters who cheat, the image of a dejected woman at a jazz club troubles Phil's conscience and makes him want to make things right. Sadly for all, by the time he does, Connie and Ted will have split up and it'll be a case of too little, too late: Elly's need to meddle will have wrecked Connie's life again.

As I mentioned in the past, Connie, Liz and Elly tend to play-act at being the person that stands the best chance of attracting whatever hapless idiot male they're interested in now; they do this, of course, because it works. Let's jump a little bit ahead and see how this ends up making Ted look less of a jerk than the Pattersons think he is. I should think that he never had a clue who the real Connie Poirier is. He, as Pete Landry did before him, fell in love with the false image she projected and still sometimes thinks that the Suzy Homemaker she pretends to be is the real her; he also sometimes seems to think that she was about to pull a bait-and-switch on him and become sort of gloomy, back-biting mess his pal John married. The real sticking-point, though, is the one I mentioned yesterday; it seemed to him that Lawrence might have ended up getting caught in the crossfire when, as always, he had to end things. With the notion that he had to be cruel to be kind fixed in his brain, our boy endured the hatred of the Pattersons to serve his odd vision of the greater good. It pained him that Lawrence ended up growing cynical but it was better that he not live with false hope. He even did what Phil did and try to make things right but by the time he worked up the nerve, it was too late; Connie had hitched her star to the idiot-homophobe wagon that is Greg Thomas. It's odd to say this but, since we know how messed up Connie is and how unapologetic Ted is about now wanting to be tied down unless it's on his terms, he comes off looking like the better catch. The really odd thing about how the two of them is that at the end of the day, she dismisses him as "self-centered, rather pathetic momma's boy who might never really grow up"; at that point in her Liography, a sentence containing the words 'pot', 'kettle' and 'black' echoed through my mind. That's because she impresses me as not really having matured much, as still being the adolescent pain-in-the-ass who, blind to the hopes and fears of her parents, wants a proud man to admit that he wasted his life. This bottomless need for approval seems to conflict with the fixation that haunts Ted: his fear of Death. The traumatic death of his father left him with an exaggerated fear for his mother's health, a fear that kept him from committing himself lest she die alone and unloved. Once he was reminded that he was no longer young, though, he, unlike the Pattersons, put aside childish things and turned into a rather blandly respectable figure; I should say that the Doctor Ted that marveled at John's decision to scale back his practice regards his dalliance with Connie as another folly of his misspent thirties wherein two people who wanted different things made fools of themselves. Connie's opinion of things is, as I said, different.

One of the few things Lynn seems to get right about Connie's love life is Lawrence's emotional conflict. This is, of course, because she observed how reluctant Aaron was to accept the men she brought home owing to his amazingly average fear of change. The unwillingness of small children to warm to their parents' love interests owing to their fear that by doing so, they are either betraying the other parent or destroying any hope that Mommy and Daddy will get back together and they'll all live happily ever after is far too commonplace a phenomenon in our society not to be noticed. This new-ruin from the era in which we'd thought Lynn had rewritten history tells us Lawrence's side of the story; since she has him, she's not alone so having a MAAAANNNN isn't necessary. Also, since he is a child who understands as a child, he doesn't know the pressures that she faces or the longings that haunt her. The problem, of course, is that Connie is one of the most self-absorbed people on the face of the planet; she regards any obstacle to her fulfilling a goal as both a nasty shock and a crime against nature. We see this when she gets all pouty when he doesn't immediately warm to her boyfriend-du-jour, we'll see it when she treats Molly and Gayle like garbage because they don't warm to her and we'll really see it when she tells Lawrence to not talk nonsense about being gay and stands there like a shivering pillar of shit when her asshole husband throws him out to keep the house pure. The irony, of course, is that both of her suitors are far more interested in being Lawrence's father than they are in her husband; too bad that her behavior repulses them so much that they give up on winning him over to knowing what he's missing.

As we all know, Phil played a different role in the original version of history than he does now. Back in the first version of the Pattersons' past, he and Connie had a one-night stand that he more or less forgot about the next day. He didn't know Connie was coming to return his pipe nor that she'd saw what he thought was a pleasant way to spend a night as being far more than it was; when he said what he said about Lawrence, he had no idea that the point of her vacation was to see him and he had even less idea about how Lawrence was taking it. That's because Lawrence simply didn't factor into his thinking. We are thus left with an amiable dunce who didn't know that his presence had caused havoc; since he tried to patch things up with her and tried to bond with a very reluctant Lawrence, he was the lesser of two evils. In the new interpretation, however, he's started to take on a less pleasant coloration; that's because he's been corresponding with Connie without intending to marry her. It matters not that he told Elly over the phone that he is not the man her friend is looking for to fill the role of Mr Connie Poirier because he wasn't ready to settle down with just anyone; the rules of the Patterverse are quite clear. Since he and she went roadside, he's gotta man up and do the nine-to-five thing; Elly and Connie hold no truck with the idea that a man and woman can be friends without sharing a surname, the boy-girl pair of kids and all the rest. This means that he can't simply blow Connie off as if she were a passing acquaintance or treat Lawrence's injury so cavalierly; we're in for a bunch of filler material that's meant to present him as a rake-hell who doesn't want to be chained down to a life of suburban ennui. We can also expect him to make remarks about Lawrence's leg that suggest that Connie's priorities are dangerously misplaced. Since Lynn will intend to make him into a mustache-twirling baddie by doing so, he'll end up becoming a folk-hero like Mira or Therese.

As we're bearing witness to, this current arc shows us Connie at her lowest ebb, her least sympathetic. That's because we see a woman who built up an elaborate and essentially dishonest fantasy relationship based on casual sex and polite but essentially meaningless conversations faced with a dilemma: should she pursue the matter further and ignore the son who pines away from her for so long as it takes to get thoroughly humiliated or cut her losses, admit her folly and rush home while cursing herself for losing sight of what really matters? Since she chose the former option, we start to see that Connie has a tendency to put her needs ahead of those of her children when push comes to shove. She is thus a character with an obvious and well-defined flaw and, as such, joins such other heroes as Elly-the-ungrateful, John-the-entitled, Mike-the-envious, Liz-the-clingy and Anthony-the-filthy-abomination. As we all of us know, these people are not the nice, friendly bunch we thought they were when we only spent a minute or two thinking about the strip; they are, instead, a bunch of low-lives with crippling defects that hamper their ability to live their lives. This might sound a bit odd but I often ask why Lynn doesn't simply embrace their assiness and make it a selling-point. She could say "Look at my family of anti-heroes! They make you feel good 'cause you're not them!" This, of course, would mean that she herself spends more than thirty seconds thinking about her strip. Since she doesn't, she joins Inman and Ryan W from Seattle in thinking that the Pattersons are a swell bunch of guys.

As you know, most of the people who write letters that approve of the Pattersons' wacky adventures do so because they find the similarities between life in Milborough and reality reassuring. It validates their own existences when they see Elly slaving grimly away; what's more, they tell themselves that the more questionable behavior is not as real as the things they like. This is why we get letters that explain that the nastiness we see is only part of the story; even if that were true, the over-emphasis on negativity should be setting off alarm bells inside their heads. I can see something in the immediate future that they might have difficulty processing though: Connie's not coming straight home after hearing about Lawrence's broken leg. Most of them probably would assume that Connie would, in fact, abandon her pursuit of Phil and rush home to comfort her son; the idea that she would not do so so as to live out some screwy fantasy might not occur to them and, given that they're for the most part regular people who haven't had enough exposure to Patter-history to hate the Foobs, probably wouldn't appeal to them. We, after all, live in a world wherein Connie could simply hop the red-eye to Toronto and take charge of things; the idea that she won't because she regards her son's health and happiness as an obstacle to her own needs is going to alienate those who don't try to come up with an alibi. We could hear about strikes at the airport or a blizzard blocking the road or anything to force Connie to stay where she wants to. None of the more loyal fans would want, I think, to believe that she'd stay there if it were sunny and warm.

howtheduck seems to have noticed a pattern developing in the Sunday strips Lynn is using to replace the classics she used last year. As we know, the strip for 17 January 2010 contained recycled devices from older strips. As happened before (or will happen again depending on your point of view), an adult, usually John, sees a child building something in the snow, takes over and, after he's done, finds out that the child is inside where it's warm. The strip for 31 January 2010 has elements from a strip from 1991 that has Elly complain about gum left in the clothes, a sequence that has April running around cutting things with scissors and all the times that we've seen Patterson children take orders in a literal and humorous fashion. This means that we should probably check the Sunday strips to see how much classic material she uses; why she does so, of course, is easier to figure out. Her reasoning seems to be that if it worked before, it'll work again. It also allows her to 'fulfill' her promise of expanding the storyline before April when she goes to straight reprints; by showing us things that look familiar, she can tell people that she's establishing patterns of behavior in the Patterson household. (This, of course, assumes that she's thought that far ahead.)

Another problem raised by the current arc is that it reminds us that Elly's need for praise tends to run fairly deeply. Before we switch to Lawrence crying his eyes out in the vain hope that at least his mother might feel bad for him, we had to endure Elly taking credit for other people's accomplishments and expecting praise for stuff she was supposed to do anyway. This reveals that she was always an insecure and needy individual who craved praise and felt put out if she didn't get what she wanted. It also gives us a clue as to why she is always so steamed at Phil for winning all the time. She envied the praise he got for things he accomplished by dint of working towards a goal and didn't find the smiles and shrugging about how she tried her best but failed that she did get. This makes it sort of easy for her to inflate the minor victories that occur in her daily life into achievements she deems worthy of greater praise than they're actually worth. Since she still gets the patronizing reassurance she detests, her anger at Phil and all the other obstructions to the fawning over she thinks is her birthright mounts. It also makes it easy to see why, sooner or later, she tries to hijack celebrations for other people and turn them into her own personal ego boost.

I guess what really bothers me about the odd way that Elly handled this is her motive for doing so. What I'm taking away from this is that she was afraid of taking Lawrence to hospital to be checked over and (since she lives in a big city and not on a small town in the middle of nowhere) can't for the life of me figure out why this is. Since she grew up in one of Canada's largest cities and had access to fairly competent ambulance service growing up and since she moved to an even bigger city with equally ready access to emergency care, we can't chalk it up to mindlessly recapitulating Marian's teachings so real-world logic tells us that there must be something in her past that makes her fear the attention of the police. Knowing her, she probably confused being let off with a warning for parking next to a fire hydrant as being Canada's Most Wanted. What's even worse is that Elly seems to be trying to soak up all the sympathy in the room; it's as if she's a female version of the unsympathetic idiot protagonist in Weird Al's song "Why does this always happen to me?" No matter how horrible things were for others, the choad whined about the minor inconvenience it caused him as if HE were the greatest victim.

The real problem is, of course, that Lynn didn't think things through when she plotted out this arc. It might make sense for Old Man Sedgwick to drive Lawrence to the doctor's office if the Pattersons lived in a small, isolated town like Lynn Lake and they probably didn't have a choice in the matter at the time. It would also make sense to not contact Connie until after the fact if she were in Winnipeg and couldn't be reached. Lynn's error is that she failed to realize how silly this would look in a suburb of one of Canada's biggest cities.

The oddest thing about how Lawrence was taken to the hospital was not that they spent more time and energy consoling Elly than Lawrence; while that was plenty weird, it wasn’t as weird as how he was taken to the emergency ward. Instead having a paramedic elevate and immoblize his leg and putting ice on it to relieve the swelling before getting him on a stretcher and rushing him to hospital in an ambulance, Lynn had some guy in the neighborhood load him into his station wagon. What's more, I doubt that any member of the crowd of silhouettes and mutants watching had even thought to call 911. Further adding to the insanity, they seem to have given Elly emergency custody of Lawrence so he could be treated as Connie wasn't available until far later. If this were a dramatic film about small town life produced before 1960 or set before the Second World War, this would be somewhat compelling to watch; as a scene of suburban life in the tail-end of the twentieth century, it looks like an unnecessary absurdity, not to mention unleaded lawsuit fuel if Lawrence’s leg healed funny owing to his being loaded into a car in the not-at-all recommended way he was. In the real world, the attending physician would have greeted this mess with choice (and probably profane) words about the competence, intelligence, sanity and good-will of the anachronisms acting like characters from "Road to Avonlea"; it’s only Lynn’s preference of inserting media imagery into her strip to observing the real world and woeful ignorance of matters medical that has this sort of thing happen time and again. Each time it does, it makes the Pattersons look as stupid as someone who tries curing diarrhea with expired medicine and potentially damaging antibiotics. It was really dumb when they made a child who got water in her lungs and might have been suffering hypothermia stay home until they took a dog to the vet to confirm he was dead and it was even stupider when Anthony drove Liz away from a crime scene to discuss how much he hated being married to a woman who made him cut up his food before he ate it and didn’t understand that he was allowed to thought-bubble about the pallid twit he was whining to at will. Her lack of attention to this little detail makes her strip look less realistic than it ought to.

Now that we've returned to the point in the doomed and futile pursuit of Phil Richards wherein Lawrence broke his leg, it seems that we might profit from reminding ourselves how the characters react to this. By doing so, we can get a better handle on who they are and how they see the world:

• Connie: Her initial reaction to this was to sit in her hotel room and wonder if she should do the sensible, decent thing and return home. Since she stayed in Montreal and groused about how she wasn't going let Fate get in the way of her seeing Phil, it seems to me that she might have thought that Lawrence had done this on purpose to make her feel bad and ruin her chances to get a man; what's more, when she lamented her stupidity afterwards, she didn't focus on what had happened to her son but more on how she looked. This tells me that she regards Lawrence as a threat to her image more than anything else.
• Elly: While she started out doing her typical "Look-at-me-and-how-overburdened-I-am" bit, she soon showed actual concern for her charge's well-being and remorse for her oversight. It's too bad that Connie managed to convince her that it was someone else's fault; after someone she trusts tells her that it's the child's fault for getting hurt, she's well on the way to standing beside a river wondering why April is trying to make her look bad.
• Mike: We started this mess with his being more worried about his bike than his supposed friend and we plod onwards with him being all pouty and selfish about how lucky Lawrence is to get all this special treatment. It would seem that the roots of his rushing into a fire to save a manuscript without thinking about his wife and children are fairly deep.
• Phil: He regards at as a misfortune that this might happen but, since he has no real idea how much Connie has invested in her screwball fantasy, doesn't realize that telling her to not worry because the same Elly whose negligence made the accident a certainty can at least not do more damage.

As for Lawrence himself, his reaction to this is somewhat more understated; he knows that his mother is messed up in the head and has screwy priorities so he's learned to accept that he'll always be an ancillary priority to her feeding her monstrous ego and repulsive vanity.

It seems to me that Lynn's promised explanation of who it is that Connie met when she tried dropping off Phil's pipe will consist of solely of one strip that has a Thérèse look-alike speaking what Lynn thinks is French followed by a whole bunch of changing the subject. This is yet another of the many wasted opportunities involved in this arc. First off, we have the matter of where Phil actually lives to consider. Anyone who knows how to use the catalog will be able to find out that in the original version, he lived at 271 Rue de Fèves; the revised version has him at 114 Rue de Fèves. Now, I'm sure that Lynn doesn't actually realize that she made a mistake here and will, if questioned, grin and simper about how she only has thirty seconds to spend on each strip. Consider what would have happened if someone got the address wrong, though; what we would have seen if there were a real explanation is Connie trying to explain why she was dropping off a pipe to the trumpet player who lives down the street. Heck, even if she was at Phil's place, we'd still be dealing with a comedy of errors; we'd find out who proto-Thérèse was, why she was there and, best of all, that Phil had given up the pipe for lost and was using a new one. Lynn could have really rubbed it in by having That Girl tell Connie that it was unusable because it had been chewed on. It also bothers me that she had to drop Connie's cousin from the new-ruins to make her look more pathetic. If this woman were there, at least Connie would have some emotional support and someone to talk to about how she felt and whether she should admit defeat and tend to Lawrence. Now that her cousin has been edited out of history, the only person she has in her corner is the idiot who set her up to fail in the first place: Elly. At least she doesn't have to suffer the burden of wondering why she does foolish things for long with Elly around; once she gets home, she can blame everything on Phil because he didn't think that going roadside led to the altar.

As I said earlier, it's sort of obvious that the current debacle will be all Phil's fault. This is, of course, because his accusers don't have the honesty or courage to admit to their own failures as people. Let's list the charges that will be held against him and why they're not the case:

1. "It's his fault that Connie pursued him in the first place." Since Elly is shallow, stupid and narrow-minded and only sees the surface of things, she can't see that her needy, immature, self-absorbed chum mistook a one-night stand as an invitation to pursue a deeper relationship.
2. "Phil is leading Connie on.": Elly only vaguely seems to realize that Connie is fooling herself; since she can't see that Phil might be doing exactly nothing to encourage this, she assumes that Phil is sitting in his apartment thinking up new ways to trick Connie.
3. "It's Phil's fault she went to the wrong address":  howtheduck tells us that Connie probably went to the wrong house in the new-ruin that appeared on 25 January 2010. If this is the case, it will be Phil's fault for not telling Elly the truth and not her fault for getting the address wrong.
4. "It's Phil's fault that he has another girl": Phil has no idea that Connie expects him to spend his free time sitting by his phone and moaning "Why won't she call?" like the sort of doltish, jumped-up teenager she and Elly are. Since he has no idea that he and Connie are meant to be an item, his having a social life is a bad thing.
5. "It's Phil's fault that she drove all that way for nothing.": This, of course, denies that Connie has free will and flies in the face of the truth; he had no idea that she was on her way or why. All he did was extend an open invitation to be nice.
6. "Phil doesn't care about Connie because he's an evil man": This overarching assumption is dead wrong. One of the things he does when he moves to what will be called Milborough is to try to build a life with Connie because he feels bad about hurting her feelings. Sadly, she herself destroys any chance they might have had by trying to get him to play Popeye to Ted's Bluto.

The end result of all of this is that exactly nothing will be learned from this by people who need to learn it; Connie will not learn that the world rotates around her urges and Elly will not learn that her assumptions are, at best, faulty. Phil will learn something, though; he'll learn that he has to stop dating friends of Elly's to try to placate her.

As I mentioned yesterday, Elly seems not to remember the past as it actually happened. One example of this was when she complained about training Edgar and wistfully commented on how easy it was to train his father, Farley. When Liz reminded her that this was not at all true, Elly made some sort of pseudo-profound statement about how she glossed over the bad times because she was a mother. The plain truth is that she remembered things not as they actually happened but as she believes they should have. I can think of a few reasons that this might be:

• Lack of intellect: To lead off, it seems to me that Elly is quite simply not smart enough to get the point of most of the events that take place around her. Since she’s too dumb to know what’s going on, she can’t be expected to remember what really happened.
• Inattention: We also have to contend with her living in a self-induced fog because she simply cannot be bothered to spare what little intellect she has paying attention to details that don’t further grudges; this leads into the next problem. 
• Fear of complexity: As we’ve seen, she fears and hates life when things get too complex for her limited intellect to handle. The same woman who lamented that a stereo didn’t simply come with an on-off switch isn’t going to be able to cope with situations that require multi-layered thinking. The result is that she only remembers the most superficial detail of a phenomenon. As an example, it seems to me that Thérèse and her family wanted cash at the shower because it made more sense to kick money into an RESP than to give Françoise clothes and toys she’s outgrow; since Elly is a simpleton who puts hollow sentiment above real practicalities, she thought she was in the presence of mercenary creeps.
• Negativity: If there's a way for Elly to see something negative about something, she will find it; preferably, that imagined outcome will be catastrophically bad so she can achieve maximum martyrdom should it take place. It doesn't matter how unlikely the perceived disaster is, she focuses on it to the exclusion of all else.
• Biased Thinking: This leads into the next hindrance to clear thinking: Elly’s mind is loaded with biases against pretty much anything. Instead of actually taking the time to think through a problem, she finds the stereotype that best fits the situation and tells herself that that’s what’s really happening. An example of that was when April calmly told her she would be down for supper after she saved the file she was working on; I’m convinced that Elly remembers a profane, defiant tirade because that’s how Teenagers Today Are. Since her idiot husband is too dumb and lazy to ask questions, April got treated like crap for nothing.
• Narcissism: The next great obstacle to remembering things as they are is Elly’s horrible self-absorption and paranoid fixations. We’re dealing with a woman who thinks that there’s a vast conspiracy afoot to keep her miserable because she’s too awesome for this or any other world. We are, after all, talking about the same woman who insists that John should apologize forever and ever for something that happened in a dream and, unless I miss my guess, is currently clucking her tongue about those people in Haiti who think they have it tough right now, just try and get through her day, they’ll know what hardship really is. The black hole which is her vanity and persecution complex distorts everything she sees and hears so that it takes on a shape not consonant with objective reality.
• Vengefulness: Finally, Elly loves to nurse grudges as a means of having to defer the horrible, hateful, sinful act of conceding that she might actually be in error on an issue. Since she can’t admit that she can’t at the same time champion her parents values when they suit her and and condemn them when Phil profits from them, she spent years at odds with him because she’d convinced herself that he profited from an inequality that didn’t really exist.

This not only makes Elly a gullible simpleton who’ll be only too glad to help out callous exploiters who flatter her while they stab her in the back and turn her face to well-meaning types who use harsh language to express their generous impulses, it also explains why she wants to own her children’s horses. Since she remembers a boring, average life filled with ups and downs as a series of endless woes, she must be avenged for crimes that only take place in her fevered imaginings.

Since Connie sucks at being a friend, it seems odd that Elly describes the woman in such glowing terms when it seems obvious to anyone else that Annie had a much better claim on the title of "Best Friend Ever". Sadly, Annie is a victim of Elly's inability to perceive the world clearly. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to list what I think are the reasons for this:

• Rigidity of thinking: Elly has made no secret of the fact that she thinks that there is only one right way of doing things. Since, as an example, she was sat on as a child by Marian (owing to Marian being justifiably concerned that she needed more raising than Phil ever did), she thinks that Annie's more laissez-faire approach is wrong and the direct cause of their wild behavior during their teenaged years; since she's got a poor imagination, she doesn't realize that Richard and Christopher were acting out because of the tension at home. Also, since Connie more or less tyrannized any child she came into contact with, Elly thinks that an insane, narcissistic bully is a great parent. 
• Immaturity: As we'll see in the fullness of time, the rest of the Richards family are sort of disgusted that Elly never really grew up and stopped thinking the world rotated around her. Unlike Connie, Annie was less inclined to feed into her victimism. The last thing Elly wanted was another authority figure trying to get her to admit she was wrong.
• Raging Paranoia: Another reason that Connie is better than Annie is that, as I've said, Connie indulges Elly's fantasies of persecution. You'll never, for instance, see Annie try to tell her that her children are trying to steal her brain and reduce her into a mindless husk who can only grin and scrub toilets nor will she say that Elly is right to punish John for something that happened in a dream. What you will see is someone who tries to hold her accountable for her actions and lay a bummer personal responsibility trip on a plastic flower child.
• Moral Cowardice: When Annie finally admitted that Steve had been cheating on her for years, she initially wondered if she herself was somehow to blame; this admission of possible guilt alienated and revolted Elly and resulted in her avoiding her friend at all costs. What's more, Elly totally misunderstood why Anne put her marriage back together; it came as a shock that Anne, despite what Elly believed, neither forgave or forgot Steve. She instead insisted that he live up to his wedding vows and made her demand stick, a thing that is beyond Elly's meager intellect and will. Meanwhile, Connie bounced from one artificial crisis to the next and, since she blamed everyone but herself for the results of her own stupidity and selfishness, Elly was there to help clean up the mess.
• Faulty Memory: I'm going to go into this subject in depth soon enough but, as a teaser, will posit the idea that Elly remembers things not as they happened but how she believes they should have. As an example, she honestly remembers herself as being loving, firm, fair and tough when, as we've seen, she's exactly none of those things. Since she doesn't remember the past as it really happened, she thinks that Connie is a better friend than she actually is.

This inability to see the world as it is isn't just limited to her not being able to recognize who her friends are; it also means that she's a failure as a wife and mother who lives in a state of denial.

The current arc, in which Elly goes above and beyond for Connie, is an example of one of the odder phenomena in the strip: Elly's need to overextend herself granting favors to people who do not reciprocate. Elly is, as John said, a damned good sport taking care of Connie's responsibilities for her while she tries to parlay a one-night stand with a man five years younger than she is into a marriage. The problem, of course, is that Connie takes that generosity for granted and, as far as I know, has never done Elly a similar favor. The only reward she ever got from Connie was hollow flattery. This need to be generous to parasites who complicate her life is also why she allowed Kortney to rob her blind and why she let Mike camp out in her home and more or less steal it from here. All she got from those encounters was a big, phony grin and an inconvenienced teenaged daughter who was upset for no reason that Elly would admit to. You'd expect a person to treat people who are generous to her better but you'd be wrong. The most shining example of the swinish behavior I'm talking about is how she treats Anne. As we know, Anne (unlike Connie) was always in Elly's corner when she needed a friend to lean on. She took care of the kids when Elly was at work, watched over things, gave her helpful advice and all the other things a good friend does so what Elly did the instant she needed a pal must have hurt. It was sort of sickening to see Elly treat someone who always did her a good turn like an incontinent, radioactive leper with Tourette's because she was too stunned to understand what was going on and too fearful to learn; what was worse was watching her pick up after the fake disasters Connie spent her life whining about. Simply put, I'd rather not have a friend like Elly; I'd want one who was there when things got rough.

I think it's safe to say that the Deanna of the Early and Middle years was far less tolerant of Mike's antics and didn't sabotage herself to enable his self-absorbed, destructive stupidity. What she was was a rather average little girl with a soft-palate lisp who reacted to Mike's typical little boy behavior in the manner one would expect a typical little girl to. This differs from her motivation in the New-Ruins; from what I can piece together, she seems outraged that he stayed home on doctor's orders on the day of her going-away party and seems to have vowed revenge. Turning her into a little sociopath who believes that he hates her and must be punished because his mother kept him from infecting her and the other students is as wrong-headed as turning him into the Littlest Stalker With a Crush. I liked it better when he didn't actually know what he thought of her half the time and put more weight in not getting razzed by the guys for getting all lovey-dovey than he did trying to figure out what was going on inside her head. The example that comes most readily to mind was the Halloween dance of 1985. To begin with, Deanna was not speaking to him because he had made crude remarks about her appearance because it was more or less expected of him by his pals; try as he might to explain the fact of life that if he was visibly nice to any girl, the guys would never let him hear the end of it, she simply didn't want to hear it. What she did do was stride off with her nose in the air because she confused a hostile refusal to listen to reason with firmness of character. When the dance itself occurred, they tied for best costume and she didn't want to dance with him at first but did anyway; heck, she even kissed the little sap. After that, of course, she sort of vanished from the strip, seemingly never to return. Had they not met the way they did back in the middle 1990s, her place in the novel of Mike's life would have simply been a bit of color that reminds us that our hero's origins were normal as could be. If she hadn't had the car accident, she'd vaguely remember the dentist's goofball son, the boring stunts he pulled and wonder if he ever outgrew being a tool. She did, however, have the car accident and her behavior ever since has not been in her best interests; as I've said before, I'm convinced that she's either suffering from PTSD or mild brain damage. A woman in the possession of her faculties would not, for instance, have told Mike he should have waited until she managed to break her engagement before making any big plans. We can also ascribe her belief that she should make her overbearing-but-essentially-well-meaning mother think that she's willing to live together without benefit of marriage when nothing could be further from the truth to her missing key brain cells. We can even peg her opening the sewing school to her marbles still being in a ditch next to the 401.