Thanksgiving
My traditional Thanksgiving travel has been to leave on the Wednesday before and then return on the Sunday after. For those folks in Canada, who may read this, Thanksgiving in the United States is the most-traveled holiday in the U.S. What’s more is that the airlines seem to be aware of this and ruthlessly raise their rates for travel on those Wednesday through Sunday days.
After 9/11, one of the only good things to come out of it was that airline travel in the U.S. plummeted, and the airlines, which had, in prior years, never reduced the rates of air travel over Thanksgiving suddenly did. Each year since then, my family has enjoyed the Wednesday to Sunday traveling and the benefit of a low rate (provided we booked our travel early). That ended this year.
This year, we could not find a cheap rate at anytime traveling Wednesday through Sunday, and instead found ourselves having to travel on Monday and return on Friday to get a decent air travel rate. As my family got into planes which were completely full on Monday and Friday, I was quite amused to hear an airline steward express amazement at the number of people who were traveling on the day immediately after Thanksgiving. I agreed. It felt odd to me too. Nevertheless, you do what you have to do to visit family and not spend a small fortune. I feel for the poor families who had no option to leave on Monday and return on Friday possible to them.
Having spent the last week ignoring For Better or For Worse, I come back to find we have an Elizabeth week, or more specifically a ”talking to or being aware of Elizabeth” week. I remember when my kids were in the crawling stages, and our view as parents in these ages. We basically did not leave the kids out of our sight, unless there was another adult looking after the kids, or unless the kids were some place where they could not get into any trouble (like in a crib sleeping). I remember in particular, when my son was at that stage, and my wife suggested that I could leave him in the house unattended while I went outside to mow the yard, and my horrified reaction that she would even suggest such a thing.
So this week when we see Elly go into sewing mode, and is seemingly unaware of where Elizabeth is and where Mike is, and given the violent way their relationship has gone in the past, I wonder if I was overly attentive to my kid, or Elly Patterson was under attentive to her kids. I do not remember how I was in those days when I was crawling, but I do remember my younger sisters were always underfoot and never left alone by my mother. There was always a fear that they were going to find something to swallow, no matter how child-proofed the house was. I remember with my youngest sister in particular, my parents were constantly taking things out of her mouth, and she was constantly finding new things to put there. My sisters were never “in trouble”. Likewise, my son and daughter were never “in trouble” at that age. There is no malicious intent. However, they kept me hopping. The only time I felt like I could relax was when the kids were asleep or when I was playing with them directly or another adult was with them.
As usual, in today’s For Better or For Worse, the conversation between Michael and Elizabeth seems unnatural to me. I cannot imagine an older brother ever saying the things Michael says to Elizabeth. However, let me assume for the sake of argument, this is a conversation which Lynn Johnston overheard between Aaron and Katie Johnston, and Lynn has reproduced it, not knowing how unnatural it seems. If Aaron really said this to Katie, it takes on an air that Aaron actually questioned how it was that Katie was able to restrain herself from doing things which would get her into trouble. We have seen that little Michael was a holy terror, and perhaps little Aaron wondered why he could not stop himself from doing those things. If the conversation were real, it would show a boy at a very young age aware that he seemed to have no control over his actions. This is something, with a kid with Asperger’s Syndrome I can actually relate to. My son, when he got upset with something, could not let it go. Other kids might calm down after a few minutes, but he could go for hours. He literally did not know how to stop, unless someone gave him a stimulus to stop. I remember when he would cry as an infant, and there was nothing apparently wrong (i.e. diaper is dry, he doesn’t want food, he doesn’t want to be burped, etc.), if I were to walk him around the house and go from room to room, the visual stimulation would sometimes stop him. If I were to take today’s strip as a serious recounting of an actual event, then maybe little Aaron wasn’t a rotten kid, but maybe he was a kid with some serious problems, and he struggled to control himself and he was self-aware enough to question why his baby sister did not seem to have the same problem he did. If this is truly the case, then I feel sorry for little Aaron Johnston, that his mother looked at his overheard conversation with his little sister not as a cry for help, but as fodder for her comic strip.
After 9/11, one of the only good things to come out of it was that airline travel in the U.S. plummeted, and the airlines, which had, in prior years, never reduced the rates of air travel over Thanksgiving suddenly did. Each year since then, my family has enjoyed the Wednesday to Sunday traveling and the benefit of a low rate (provided we booked our travel early). That ended this year.
This year, we could not find a cheap rate at anytime traveling Wednesday through Sunday, and instead found ourselves having to travel on Monday and return on Friday to get a decent air travel rate. As my family got into planes which were completely full on Monday and Friday, I was quite amused to hear an airline steward express amazement at the number of people who were traveling on the day immediately after Thanksgiving. I agreed. It felt odd to me too. Nevertheless, you do what you have to do to visit family and not spend a small fortune. I feel for the poor families who had no option to leave on Monday and return on Friday possible to them.
Having spent the last week ignoring For Better or For Worse, I come back to find we have an Elizabeth week, or more specifically a ”talking to or being aware of Elizabeth” week. I remember when my kids were in the crawling stages, and our view as parents in these ages. We basically did not leave the kids out of our sight, unless there was another adult looking after the kids, or unless the kids were some place where they could not get into any trouble (like in a crib sleeping). I remember in particular, when my son was at that stage, and my wife suggested that I could leave him in the house unattended while I went outside to mow the yard, and my horrified reaction that she would even suggest such a thing.
So this week when we see Elly go into sewing mode, and is seemingly unaware of where Elizabeth is and where Mike is, and given the violent way their relationship has gone in the past, I wonder if I was overly attentive to my kid, or Elly Patterson was under attentive to her kids. I do not remember how I was in those days when I was crawling, but I do remember my younger sisters were always underfoot and never left alone by my mother. There was always a fear that they were going to find something to swallow, no matter how child-proofed the house was. I remember with my youngest sister in particular, my parents were constantly taking things out of her mouth, and she was constantly finding new things to put there. My sisters were never “in trouble”. Likewise, my son and daughter were never “in trouble” at that age. There is no malicious intent. However, they kept me hopping. The only time I felt like I could relax was when the kids were asleep or when I was playing with them directly or another adult was with them.
As usual, in today’s For Better or For Worse, the conversation between Michael and Elizabeth seems unnatural to me. I cannot imagine an older brother ever saying the things Michael says to Elizabeth. However, let me assume for the sake of argument, this is a conversation which Lynn Johnston overheard between Aaron and Katie Johnston, and Lynn has reproduced it, not knowing how unnatural it seems. If Aaron really said this to Katie, it takes on an air that Aaron actually questioned how it was that Katie was able to restrain herself from doing things which would get her into trouble. We have seen that little Michael was a holy terror, and perhaps little Aaron wondered why he could not stop himself from doing those things. If the conversation were real, it would show a boy at a very young age aware that he seemed to have no control over his actions. This is something, with a kid with Asperger’s Syndrome I can actually relate to. My son, when he got upset with something, could not let it go. Other kids might calm down after a few minutes, but he could go for hours. He literally did not know how to stop, unless someone gave him a stimulus to stop. I remember when he would cry as an infant, and there was nothing apparently wrong (i.e. diaper is dry, he doesn’t want food, he doesn’t want to be burped, etc.), if I were to walk him around the house and go from room to room, the visual stimulation would sometimes stop him. If I were to take today’s strip as a serious recounting of an actual event, then maybe little Aaron wasn’t a rotten kid, but maybe he was a kid with some serious problems, and he struggled to control himself and he was self-aware enough to question why his baby sister did not seem to have the same problem he did. If this is truly the case, then I feel sorry for little Aaron Johnston, that his mother looked at his overheard conversation with his little sister not as a cry for help, but as fodder for her comic strip.
posted by howard at 11:13 PM
12 Comments:
Her breezy conversion of a troubled little boy's fears of abandonment and cries for help into comic fodder started to get on my nerves when I got a closer look at her back story. She blithely ignored Aaoron's complaints that people thought he was Mike becuase she was too wrapped up in her fame to notice it had real-world consequences. Given the Patterson's collective self-pity is what animates their creator, she probably ascribes the rift between them to his ingratitude.
my shift keys are only intermittently functioning--please pardon the april-style posting.
i'd say under-attentive is the likely explanation for elly. like you, i did not leave my son unattended during his crawling stage. plus we had baby gates and childproofing--concepts that are apparently alien to the patterrents.
i often feel bad for aaron--and i can't blame him for living in vancouver and not following the strip on a daily basis.
That, indeed, is the problem with Elly: she simply couldn't be bothered paying too much attention to what her children were doing. That, you see, would cut down on the time she spent feeling sorry for herself. One of the most annoying features of the strip is watching Elly do as little as possible and moaning about the injustice of having to do even that.
aprilp_katje,
The lack of baby gates and childproofing in the strip were quite astonishing to me, since these strips are set in 1979 when such things did exist and Lynn Johnston was an actual parent during this time. Now, if the strip had been set in the 1960s, when I was a kid, I would have more understanding. Even then, my mother had a playpen where I could be dropped if she had to leave the room for some reason. We have not seen any of these kinds of things with Elly, which makes me wonder how Lynn Johnston took her responsibilities as a mother.
dreadedcandiru2,
I can see your position. One way of viewing the strip is that Elly is already lamenting the loss of her daughter in her "never get in trouble" stage, instead of enjoying her. In the month of November, for example, how many strips did we have of Elly playing with or spending time with Elizabeth or Michael? The one and only time was the "lemonade stand" strip and even then, it did not seem like Elly was enjoying herself. In contrast, both John and Michael are shown having fun with little Lizzie.
Enjoying things is not something Elly is really good at. To be carefree and at ease with her environment seems to go against the grain for our grave, grey-faced former protagonist. She seems to these tired eyes to be the sort of person who'd rather not smile because she thinks that laughter and whimsy are for the weak-minded and silly. It's the Englishness in her, the worship of solemnity. I can say this with some confidence because she and I have much the same background and had to deal with the same cultural norms.
dreadedcandiru2,
Englishness. There is certainly evidence of that in the strip. It makes me wonder why Elly would then marry a man who seems to thrive on making silly puns about everything, if she could never enjoy them.
So she could have the warped pleasure of not enjoying them. You'll notice the Pattersons are by and large, how shall I put this, enthusiastic about the prospect of being miserable, at their most ecstatic when they're moaning in despair.
dreadedcandiru2,
I would love to tell you that your assumption about the Pattersons is not one which occurred in the old strips, but the punchline of today's strip shows your point is correct. Even back in 1979, Elly Patterson worried about the days when Elizabeth would get in trouble, instead of enjoying the years when she wasn't.
However, I don't know if the characteristic is necessarily Englishness. It could simply be familiarity breeding contempt. For example, my wife rarely laughs at anything I say, even when she is surrounded by people who did. He background is Italian and not English, but her other background is being around me for years and years.
That's true. Elly doesn't have to be of any particular ethnicity to be the way she is. All that's required is the love of all that free sympathy she gets for bearing up well under the pain. It's so much better to arrange things so that she gets martyred than to wait for it to happen on its own.
dreadedcandiru2
The odd part about this is that the first 2 years of a baby’s life are pretty rough on the parent, where the years from 2 – 12 are by and large considered to be a better time from the parents’ perspective, because the child has a certain degree of independence (i.e. potty-trained, sleeps through the night, and can feed themselves). The time when the kid can “get into trouble” does not require the nearly constant parental attention and a parent might be able to relax and do a little sewing. For Elly / Lynn to think differently implies that little Michael / Aaron must have really been awful, for Elly / Lynn to prefer the years when she had to feed, diaper, and get up in the night with him.
It's also the time that she's most answerable for the child's behavior. Before two and after twelve, people don't blame her for what the kid does. She loved hearing passers-by say things like 'Well, s/he's too young to know better' or 'You tried your best'. 'What is wrong with you that you let them do that', on the other hand, not so much.
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