1. Ad hominem attacks on her mother and teachers: Although she seems to have stopped saying that her mother abused her, Lynn is still angry at her and her teachers for daring to say that the defiant, nasty and self-absorbed child she used to be didn't know what was best for her.
2. Angry commentary about Alan and her classmates: Lynn seems to be possessed of the same ridiculous phantasm that haunted Charles Schulz. That's because she shares her late idol's need to waste his life away obsessing about childhood slights as well as his unhealthy belief that doing so is a moral good. To that end, she growls about how Alan was treated better despite being younger and how unfair that was.
3. Slamming her ex-husbands: Lynn clearly seems to regard the idea of divorce as being a nasty trick to play on a poor girl like her and doesn't mind saying so. If an ex-husband is defamed along the way, that's his problem.
4. Dismissive comments about criticism: Another thing that is someone else's problem is their dissatisfaction with her inability to respect personal boundaries that get in her way. The people who complain about how their avatars are depicted are thus lumped in with those who point out her poor command of English and dubious story-telling as needing to go away and stop telling her to make sense.
5. Boasting about her technique: Sometimes, Lynn is more inclined to boast about her skills and share her ridiculous ideas with her fans.
6. Ranting about how her children have disappointed her: The same woman who's proud of how she wasted her childhood being needlessly defiant acts as if it's the end of the world because her children do things that bother her.
7. Ranting about how terrible the people of Lynn Lake are: She doesn't make much of a secret of the fact that she didn't much like how the locals thought of her as hometown boy made good's Rod's wife or how they were less than patient with an arrogant egomaniac who whined piteously about how 'primitive' things were. 
8. Generalized pleas for sympathy: When Lynn tries to pretend that she's an ordinary housewife instead of a rich woman, watch out for sweeping generalizations that try to mask her inability to understand how people who aren't her live.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Deanna shares yet another psychological hang-up with Elly; both women seem to love the attention being a mother affords them but seem to regard paying attention to said children as a horror beyond mortal comprehension owing to the sacrifice of time to themselves involved. Elly’s insistence on her right to angrily swat aside offsprings who dared to interrupt her when she was in the midst of some annoying exercise in futility is echoed in Deanna’s panicky need to escape from the horrifying realization that Meredith and Robin aren’t simply dolls she can put away when she’s bored with them and the resultant need to run in blind terror from the mind-scarring abomination most observers who aren’t superannuated spoiled children call “a baby trying to bond with its mother.”

It also isn’t much of a stretch to have to realize that neither woman sees what children do as being especially important. From their perspective, the small, semi-human entities who, for reasons that they don’t want to think about, happen to infest their houses have copious amounts of free time that they’re wasting on such unproductive pursuits as playing, making friends and learning about the outside world when they could make themselves of use to the human race by being put to work isolating Mommy from the horrors of dealing with their younger siblings. The aggravating tendency that most of the characters have for wanting the attention that comes with a role without doing the hard work that gives life its meaning leads them to want other people who aren't doing anything they consider to be important to live their lives for them.

The need to be isolated from having to do something that takes effort marches hand in hand with the dread of being tyrannized by having to consider the needs of others. When, say, John thunders on mindlessly about how he HAD to spank Mike for questioning the self-serving gibberish Daddy spouted, he didn't see a bully paddling a kid for not immediately grovelling in abasement because his daddy said a whole bunch of hateful rubbish that said monstrous twit parent thought to be true. He saw himself being backed into a corner by a monster who wanted to overthrow him. The combination of the two trends is why we make all these unfunny jokes about Michael being Lizzie’s primary caregiver and why I’m worried that Meredith is eventually going to be treated like a pariah because the imbecile “adults” in her vicinity don’t want to admit that a nine-year old girl should not have been asked to be the sole person watching over the younger brother whose cremated remains will end up on the mantelpiece after he gets hit by a hovercar. My inner cynical jackhole can almost hear Deanna huffing and puffing “How dare you be distracted by something as silly as homework or some other child talking to you?” at a traumatized and heartsick child who feels bad enough, thank you!!

That is, of course, if she’s not pissed off at April for not deferring her plans to go to University so that she can put her time to use Deanna deems good by watching over the children who scare the crap out of her. The part of the Housening that really got me pissed off that wasn’t John being a shit, Elly wussing out, Mike being a dick or Liz being a spoiled brat was Deanna’s need to convert April into her maid so that she didn’t have to waste her time or have her will to live siphoned away by the horrid little parasites that want to eat her ability to find happiness. This is the most reprehensible thing that the spoiled, immature, flighty, entitled nitwit has ever done. By her insistence on making her children looking like April’s jailers and implanting in the mind of an ill-used teenager treated like a hindrance by hateful vermin the nightmarish image of being asked to wait until she’s the same age as Meredith and Robin to attend University so that she can continue to watch over them, Deanna Patterson has driven a wedge between three people who should be allies in the fight against entitled adults.

Given Deanna’s irritating belief that carrots can only be served as coins, it would seem that she has another commonality with Elly: the need to stress out about what her children eat. I should also think that since she has much the same sort of background Elly had in that she really wasn’t allowed to do all that much for herself, she’s just as good a cook. It seems to me that a lot of Elly’s problems stem from her blindly shoving ingredients into a pot without really considering how they’re going to taste or whether her family actually want to eat them. This is why we see strip after strip of Elly standing there looking like the world has come to an end because her children like what they like and hate what they hate no matter how sincere she is. She doesn’t seem to realize that they aren’t actually hating HER because they don’t like unpalatable sludge meant to trick children into eating things that they don’t like or that she isn’t doing herself a favour if she succeeds. No child appreciates having Mommy crow “Well, I fooled you into eating mushrooms and you didn’t die so you can’t refuse them any more” or whine “Well, I had to make a horrible sacrifice by accommodating you so you owe me.”

This, I should think, would leave Mike, Liz and April unprepared to deal with a real world in which people don’t use food as a passive-aggressive means of asserting control over them. It astonishes them to see people who don’t witlessly set out to make mealtime a tawdry horror that has to be sped along by shovelling food into one’s belly as quickly as possible. It could also explain why Mike likes hanging out at his friends’ houses; seeing the marvel with his own eyes always astonishes him. That being said, his need to think that his horrible childhood was what everyone experienced so that he will not be incapacitated by rage seems to be blinding him to Deanna’s whining that the food she pleads with Meredith and Robin to eat is something he hated when it was done to him. Since he has to think that he’s normal, he doesn’t see it as being wrong. 

As we all know, Elly doesn’t react well to change and doesn’t really understand how children behave. This results in her pointless angst when confronted with the rather mundane fact that Lizzie is developing her own personality. The same part of Elly that is traumatized by the rather boring fact that a child will not be content to sit quietly where ever she plunks her down like a doll or a cabbage or some other inert thing no matter how sincere Mommy is is, as we see so often, reduced to confused tears because Lizzie has betrayed Mommy’s trust by evolving beyond the cooing, helpless, easy-to-deal-with little lump that Elly wants her to be. This manifests itself not only in the fact that Elly tends to speak baby-talk to her but also as her sheer panty-soiling terror whenever Liz wants to have something Elly deems age-inappropriate. The cycle generally goes as follows:

1. Lizzie goes to class and notices that her female classmates are wearing something grown-up looking like, oh, say, earrings.
2. Said classmates tease Lizzie for not wearing them.
3. Lizzie, who already feels sort of isolated because she’s not too smart and because her parents seem to pay more attention to her ugly brother, wants them so she can at least fit in somewhere.
4. Lizzie pleads with Elly to get them.
5. Elly says that she’s not old enough and alludes to mysterious reasons that she will not disclose.
6. Elly bitches to John about the evils of the same peer pressure she knuckled under to when she was young.
7. Elly whines to Connie about how terrible it is that Lizzie is growing up too fast.
8. Elly buckles under because her backbone is made of Gummi candy.
9. When the deed is done, Elly’s reaction to the horrible prospect of her little baby growing up “too fast” (in English, that’s “at all”) is to whine so much that even the caterwauling Australian in the bodypaint who makes me want to punch him in the face when he wails about a collapsed relationship would tell her to chill out.
10. Lizzie wants something new to make her fit in because earrings are sooooooo yesterday.
11. Elly, whose memory can be compared favourably to a sieve owing to her forgetting doing the same thing to Marian, is paralysed by existential terror.

The reason I mention this is because Deanna is probably doing the same damned thing to Meredith for the same stupid reason. Like Elly, she doesn’t have a clue as to what her daughter is thinking or what pressures she’s subjected to. The difference is that unlike Elly who screams at child-care books because they tell her things that allude to her being the problem, Deanna has successfully convinced herself that she knows what she’s doing and damn her domineering mother for suggesting that she’s just quoting slogans. Another reason Mira can be damned is that she doesn’t see what the big freaking deal is with Meredith getting her ears pierced so long as she can make sure to avoid a nasty infection. Oh, wait. She’d be even more damned for siding with Deanna on this one because Mike has his head wedged up his arse and would sit there like a lump of dung creating his next horrible novel while his child's ears end up having to get lopped off because of the necrotising fasciitis he did nothing to prevent.

As we’re seeing in the current reprints, Elly has something of an ally in her struggle to destroy the incomprehensible need Mike and Lizzie have for the attention she believes to be an unfair demand on her time in their elementary school teachers. We’ve seen that Miss Campbell and Mrs Hardacre seem to be as transfixed by the notion of destroying Mike’s need to have someone pay him attention as Elly is of withholding it from him owing to her insane, counter-productive fear that doing so will make her into a babbling imbecile only fit to blither witlessly about the irrelevant concerns of her children. Unfortunately for her, the experiment succeeded and her children turned into the passive slugs that poor Aunt Bev had to babysit every summer because the weaklings she calls a brother and sister-in-law can’t even handle the fitful attempt at genuine rebellion Mike and Liz mounted.

The reason that I mentioned this is that I remember that by now, Meredith and Robin are in elementary school and, I should think, looking for the attention that the Delicate Genius is too zoned out to pay them and Deanna too frightened of the idea that they can move and think and speak without her willing it to happen to have given them even if she weren’t tired of supporting three children. My gut tells me that Deanna probably regards the teachers of the world as just more people like her horrible mother owing to their awful, awful suggestions that Meredith and Robin act up the way they do because they’re not in the ‘care’ of a grandmother who runs from them in fear, they have to contend with a dad whose mind is thousands of light-years away and a mother who barks “Sit down and stare into space until the awful, horrifying need you have for stimulation goes away forever.” This is owing, of course, to something Mira actually did wrong. Nothing in Deanna’s past suggests that she ever baby-sat or had any exposure to minors until she gave birth to them. It’s like watching Elly’s horrible failings as a pet-owner in that we have someone who has no idea what she’s doing making a destructive fool of herself proving it.

I think that it’s safe to say that Deanna is much like Elly in that she wants to not have to admit that children do not have the same level of impulse control or understanding of the world as she does. Most of the time, she stands there horrified, disappointed and angered by the fact that Meredith and Robin do not understand that she doesn’t want to deal with them until she’s had a chance to unwind from work. The reason, of course, is quite simple. If she has to admit to herself that children need attention and will move around even when it’s not convenient for her, that would mean that her mother is right to tell her that she cannot and should not expect them to sit quietly staring off into space like the mindless dummies she wishes they were. This differentiates her from Elly who seems incapable of understanding why they want her attention in the first place. In Elly’s case, she is simply unable to see what they could possibly want from her; all she does know is that she doesn’t have it to spare and even if she did, that would mean that she’d be nothing more than a worthless housewife mindlessly tending children and baking cookies when she knows that she can be more. Deanna, on the other hand, doesn’t want to admit that the mother she blames everything bad in her life on because she talked back to HER DADDY!!!!! could be right about anything so anyone who suggests that she might be is a bad person.

Now, I’d say it was pretty safe to say that Deanna clearly sees herself as being a better mother to Meredith and Robin than Mira ever was to her. Strip after endless strip is, after all, predicated on the notion that Deanna has to defend the new, better way of being a mother from the evil criticism of the domineering monster mother who used her evil family politics to dominate HER DADDY!!!!!! and make Deanna’s life a misery. There is a problem, however, with the time-not-presents orthodoxy that The Sainted Elly preaches: it doesn’t work out so good because neither she nor Deanna seem to be willing to spend any time with their children. What generally happens is that the two dimwits stand there scared out of their tiny, tiny minds because children evilly refuse to do what they’re supposed to: sit quietly where ever it is that Mommy plops them down and not do anything or think anything or want any sort of mental stimulation. I can readily see Deanna shrieking that she cannot be asked to give her children attention either. Simply put, Deanna is a worse parent to her children than Mira was to her. All Mira wanted was a tacky wedding without that gay guy angering God by stinking up the joint and a son-in-law who isn’t a sponge-headed man-child. What Deanna clearly wants is to have the evil, scary, baffling tendency of children to move around, speak and think on their own initiative to go away so that they can become mindless drones who only move when she wills it.

This desire, this longing to abolish the free will of her children seems to be why she idolizes another pair of failures who think themselves superior to their better antecedents. Granted, Jim and Marian did do something wrong by giving the world a petty, manipulative and tyrannical imbecile woman and her yawping man-child of a kid brother and somehow, Will and Carrie messed up big-time by blighting the world with a grinning gargoyle with a train fetish but they’re clearly better parents and people than their children. April, as a for instance, pretty much owes her life to Jim’s presence in it and it shows. One could say that Jim saw her as a way of raising Elly properly. It’s kind of too bad that the old boy popped his clogs before he could crow about how his way is better but you can’t have everything, right? 

One of the things he wasn't allowed to have was a daughter who actually believed that he and Marian did a good job. Oh, they tried their best but they were hampered by a double standard and thus made her life a misery. This means that Elly sees herself as trying to raise her children the way Marian could have raised her had she not been brainwashed by the patriarchy. She thus differs from Deanna who wants to raise her children the way Mira should have raised her had she not been sick with the impulse to interfere.

You ever notice that the Patterson children don’t really have much respect for other people’s property while obsessing over that which is their own? We all know that one of the more irritating little strips in the lead-up to the Settlepocalypse was the one in which Elizabeth whined about how horrible it was that April took her to task for simply bequeathing Jim’s harmonica to a thief acting out of sheer petty vengefulness because he’d had the foresight to flatter the dumb bitch. Lizardbreath’s reasoning appeared to be “Well, she gave it to me to do whatever I wanted and it made me feel good to do it so what’s her problem?” This, it seems to me, is the culmination of a life-time pattern of disregarding the value other people have in their personal property. The cause, of course, is it’s the way they were raised. They already know from personal experience that their parents are damned smug about having the ability to dispose of their children’s belongings as they see fit and get angry when told that they cannot so it’s not like they grew up in a house that respected the rights of others. What pushes them over the edge is what Elly says when they do get caught doing something stupid. What they get told is not that it’s not right to disrespect other people’s personal space or to wreck their stuff. What they get told is to not make their parents look bad. This leads them to the conclusion that the belongings and rights of others only have value in respect to their parents’ needs or whims. This establishes a logical chain from Elly only being upset that Lizzie witlessly destroyed a valuable musical instrument because she got yelled at to Lizzie whining about how unreasonable April was for expecting her to think about other people’s feelings.