It Takes a Long Time to Get Kids Anywhere
There are few For Better or For Worse strips to which I can relate anymore, but today’s was one of them. My kids can dress themselves, but every morning getting them to school or getting them to church seems like a majour ordeal in preparation and coordination. No matter how much time I give them to get ready, they always seem to need to have to be nagged every inch of the way, so they don’t use up that time doing whatever has distracted them.
This theme is one Lynn Johnston has done before in this strip and this strip, so it is not a new joke. It is, however, a consistent joke. The littlest Pattersons are pretty awful kids and time has not caused them to behave any better than they did a few years ago. These are the days of the hybrid, so sometimes we see the joke as it was originally presented and some days we see the newest variation on the joke. Even though today’s strip is a new one, and we know Lynn Johnston has done little-to-no work in the month of November, this extra time is not reflected in the art for the strip which is uniformly bad across the whole of it. For example, Deanna’s face is different in every single panel.
The interesting difference from the old strips and today’s is that Michael used to help get the kids ready, but now he doesn’t. I thought Lynn Johnston had moved past that “Mike is a nonparticipating father” stance after they moved to the new house and Mike had more time. However, after getting Mike in the old house and establishing him as a successful author, Lynn Johnston seems to have forgotten that one of the reasons Mike wanted to quit working at Portrait Magazine, was so he could spend more time with his kids. That’s the trouble with repeating jokes, is that sometimes the joke no longer makes sense in the new context.
This theme is one Lynn Johnston has done before in this strip and this strip, so it is not a new joke. It is, however, a consistent joke. The littlest Pattersons are pretty awful kids and time has not caused them to behave any better than they did a few years ago. These are the days of the hybrid, so sometimes we see the joke as it was originally presented and some days we see the newest variation on the joke. Even though today’s strip is a new one, and we know Lynn Johnston has done little-to-no work in the month of November, this extra time is not reflected in the art for the strip which is uniformly bad across the whole of it. For example, Deanna’s face is different in every single panel.
The interesting difference from the old strips and today’s is that Michael used to help get the kids ready, but now he doesn’t. I thought Lynn Johnston had moved past that “Mike is a nonparticipating father” stance after they moved to the new house and Mike had more time. However, after getting Mike in the old house and establishing him as a successful author, Lynn Johnston seems to have forgotten that one of the reasons Mike wanted to quit working at Portrait Magazine, was so he could spend more time with his kids. That’s the trouble with repeating jokes, is that sometimes the joke no longer makes sense in the new context.
posted by howard at 11:29 PM
6 Comments:
What initially astonished me is that the mere act of going two blocks down the street is to these children a rare treat. Then I remembered that the Patterson children don't really go anywhere or do anything as a general rule. They don't know how to behave because their mother doesn't have the patience and foresight to set ground rules. She's far too busy anticipating the trouble they'll get into in a later date to deal with what they're doing right now. Like Elly before her, she's borrowing trouble from the future because of a bad case of self-induced helplessness, a refusal to see that she can head off the not-at-all-inevitable disaster.
dreadedcandiru2,
What initially astonished me is that the mere act of going two blocks down the street is to these children a rare treat.
You have reminded me how Elly Patterson used to act with these kids back in the days when they lived in Toronto and there was a significant (relatively speaking) distance between them. In those days, Mira Sobinski was constantly over, but Elly, in contrast, only came over when something had gone wrong, i.e. Mike and Dee can’t handle a newborn Robin and 2-year-old Merrie, or Robin gets chronic ear infections. In that situation, the only time Elly ever baby-sat the kids was when Mike and Dee packed up the kids and drove them over to Milborough for baby-sitting. If they wanted baby-sitting in their own apartment in Toronto, Mira was their only option, because she would travel for nonemergency situations.
Since Mike and company have come to Milborough, thanks to your comment, I realize we have seen the same thing. Even when Mike and his family were living in the same house as Elly, the only time we saw Elly interact with the grandkids was in the emergency situation right after the fire had forced the family to leave. Babysitting was purely the province of April. Never Elly.
Now Elly lives down the road and today’s strip presents the idea that even down the street, the original idea was that Elly would baby-sit, once again, in her house. It’s nice to know that with such a short distance between the homes, Elly has finally gotten to the point where she will actually visit her grandkids to baby-sit them in their own house. Shocking. Practically Mira-like.
But, of course, better than Mira because Elly's not aware of what she's doing. Knowledge of one's self and one's surroundings leads one to be unsatisfied, to want for more than inertia and hand-wringing provides. There are a lot of people in the world who put their turst in unearned good fortune, who trust that faith and fate will provide so they do not have to. To them, worker bees like Mira are not the bedrock of society. They are, instead, anti-social monsters who aren't content with what they have.
dreadedcandiru2,
I have often wondered where this philosophy came from. The stories of the mothers of the bride-zilla probably originated with Romona Keveza, the bridal designer who designed Deanna's dress, since the Mike and Deanna marriage strips focused heavily on the idea that the dress was paid for by Elly and John and this somehow made their contribution to the wedding exceed that of Wilf and Mira's, who paid for everything else. I have seen dominating mothers of the bride before (and they pale in comparison to the bridezillas I have seen), but once the wedding was over (and by over, I mean they have tired of talking about it), the people I knew and liked before the wedding lost their -zilla ways.
Once the wedding was over, however, Mira continued her -zilla ways. The contrasts with Elly's behaviour seemed to arbitrarily chosen. For example the first Christmas after Merrie was born, Mira is evil for forcing Mike and Deanna to spend Christmas with her and Wilf, while Elly is good for the same reason. Then after that, every Christmas is spent exclusively over at Elly's with no comments about Mira's evil, except on different subjects. The most perplexing of the points about Mira's evil had to do with her wanting Deanna and Mike to live near her, wanting to buy things for the grandchildren, wanting to intercede when it was obvious Deanna and Mike were having problems, and wanting to spend time with her grandkids. In my mind, this is the good grandmother. The reason for my opinion is that I had 2 grandmothers and one of them was like Elly and the other was like Mira (camera in my house situation I guess), and the Mira grandmother was preferred by her grandkids on an order of magnitude more than the Elly grandmother.
Lynn Johnston did say in one of those interviews she preferred Rod's parents to her own; so I wonder if this attitude about proper grandparenting came from a contrast between Rod's parents to her own parents. For example, Lynn's parents may have been rotten parents (in Lynn's opinion), but they may have been lovely grandparents. If so, that might explain it, since Lynn has no grandparenting of her own on which to fall back. Lynn may have considered whatever her parents did with her kids to be the wrong thing to do, even if it wasn't.
We are, sadlu, forced to bear witness to Lynn's view of the world. Deanna is clearly meant to represent the part of Lynn that dealt with in-laws. Since she preferred the Johnstons to her own family, so does Deanna blindly love the Pattersons as much as she blindly hates her parents. The reason tha Mira is not more monstrous is that Lynn can't create convincing willains without scaring her fan-base.
I read this strip after going to Church and I kind of had to laugh. I sold raffle tickets in the vestibule today for the Columbiettes and everyone stopped over. Well this one lady that I really do not know but I grew up with her daughter stops to buy raffle tickets and she's got, who I can only assume is her granddaughter with her. So while grandma filled out her raffle tickets I talked with the little girl. She was sort of shy and very well behaved, she says to me, "I zipped up my coat all by myself."
Adrianne
PS: Welcome back, btw : )
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