Goodbye Hugs
When you are a little kid, good-byes are a sad, but great time, because there is no stigma involved with a kid hugging someone, as there can be when people grow up.
One of the nicer parts of the little Francie sequence of strips is that little Francie hugs and gets hugged a lot. She hugs Anthony to protect her from Liz. She hugs on Thérèse to get her sympathy. And of course, she hugs on Liz when Thérèse leaves.
In today’s For Better or For Worse, little Robin hugs his crib good-bye. It is, once again, something I have never seen a kid do. However, it made me wonder how long it has been since Robin hugged someone (and not just had his arms around someone who happened to be carrying him). This proved to be a fascinating exercise. As I was going backward in time through the archives, I noticed a number of hugs between the characters for almost any reason. Mike and Deanna even hugged each other.
But that Robin or Merrie hug which was a hug and not a carry eluded me until I got to March 20, 2007 and April hugged Robin as a part of playing with him. This lack of hugs with Merrie and Robin, as it turns out, is a side-effect of Lynn Johnston playing the two kids as rotten brats almost every time they make an appearance together. You don’t get a real feel for this until you go back in those archives and look at every single Robin and Merrie appearance. Then it really sinks in. Robin and Merrie’s relationship with adults is mostly being guided by the shoulders after having done something rotten.
As for sentimentality over inanimate objects, I remember very well when I had to say good-bye to my first car, a 1984 Toyota Celica hatchback with a rear window defrost and windshield wiper. It was the first and only car I have ever owned new. It carried me through my entire single life and through many years of my married life and finally met a tragic end when it developed a severe transmission fluid leak on the ride to work which cause it to catch on fire (nothing majour). I was genuinely sad to see that car go. I had had some great times in it.
My crib I could have cared less about.
One of the nicer parts of the little Francie sequence of strips is that little Francie hugs and gets hugged a lot. She hugs Anthony to protect her from Liz. She hugs on Thérèse to get her sympathy. And of course, she hugs on Liz when Thérèse leaves.
In today’s For Better or For Worse, little Robin hugs his crib good-bye. It is, once again, something I have never seen a kid do. However, it made me wonder how long it has been since Robin hugged someone (and not just had his arms around someone who happened to be carrying him). This proved to be a fascinating exercise. As I was going backward in time through the archives, I noticed a number of hugs between the characters for almost any reason. Mike and Deanna even hugged each other.
But that Robin or Merrie hug which was a hug and not a carry eluded me until I got to March 20, 2007 and April hugged Robin as a part of playing with him. This lack of hugs with Merrie and Robin, as it turns out, is a side-effect of Lynn Johnston playing the two kids as rotten brats almost every time they make an appearance together. You don’t get a real feel for this until you go back in those archives and look at every single Robin and Merrie appearance. Then it really sinks in. Robin and Merrie’s relationship with adults is mostly being guided by the shoulders after having done something rotten.
As for sentimentality over inanimate objects, I remember very well when I had to say good-bye to my first car, a 1984 Toyota Celica hatchback with a rear window defrost and windshield wiper. It was the first and only car I have ever owned new. It carried me through my entire single life and through many years of my married life and finally met a tragic end when it developed a severe transmission fluid leak on the ride to work which cause it to catch on fire (nothing majour). I was genuinely sad to see that car go. I had had some great times in it.
My crib I could have cared less about.
posted by howard at 11:03 PM
18 Comments:
Strange how they can't see that the same reason he and Meredith act out is the same reason he hugged an inanimate object. They, for some reason, simlpy cannot be bothred to show their child affection of any sort. They may tell themselves that they don't want their children to get soft but it seems to me that they simply don't care what their children think. They all seem to have the lunatic notion that by doing so, they'd have to surrender their authority as adults and somehow be on the same level socially as their kids. We may praise Thérèse to the skies for displaying good parenting skills by calling her by name and addressing her concerns in an age-appropriate manner; Lynn thinks she dropped the ball.
Guess this means Dee has decided she is done having babies. Notice how the only people in FOOB who have something other than one boy and one girl are considered odd or unfortunate. (Anne Nichols has a cheating husband; poor Beatrice Alfarero is widowed and a foreigner; Elly and John are saddled with April.)
Whereas the successful, normal people have one boy, one girl. (Gordon, Mike, John and Elly before they were cursed with April.) Just wait--Lizthony will have a son.
One of the things that really bugs about Lynn is how she can't seem to envision any kind of “happiness” in life that doesn't closely mirror her own living situation. (The quotes because I’m not sure Lynn has ever really been happy.) And it's gotten worse as she's aged.
I suspect this “one boy, one girl, then you’re done” stuff is part of Lynn’s bad attitude about children. You’re obligated to have one of each; then you quit and say good riddance to babymaking.
One really gets the sense that Dee had kids not out of a real honest desire to have kids, but because she had decided she hates her mother, and to avoid being like her mother, she had to have kids early instead of late. It seems that little thought went into whether she really wanted kids at all. Mike and Dee certainly treat them as little nuisances all the time.
qnjones:
I myself find the 'one boy, one girl and no more' motif strange. It's as if she thinks that all the quality people have to do is provide replacements for themselves. John's family may seem like an exception but since his younger brother has left Canada for good, it's as if he no longer matters. Damn. I just described April's future. She's meant to leave Canada for good too. Remember how John dropped hints in his retcons about her studying overseas? Odds are, she'll stay gone and restore balance to the Patterson family.
dreadedcandiru2,
We may praise Thérèse to the skies for displaying good parenting skills by calling her by name and addressing her concerns in an age-appropriate manner; Lynn thinks she dropped the ball.
The difficult thing about looking at Deanna and Mike’s parenting style and judging its inadequacies is trying to interpret whether or not Lynn Johnston intends them to be good examples or bad example, or simply “flawed, but trying” examples. The matter is confused when Lynn mixes in the reprint strips where the main point of them quite obviously is not “Elly is a good mom” but “Elly is a put-upon mom.”
We know that Meredith and Robin are intended to be in imitation of Mike and Lizzie and they are rarely shown behaving well; but do we know for sure that the point is “Mike and Deanna are put-upon parents”, as it was for 1979 Elly? One of the big differences in Lynn’s story-telling style between 1979 and today is that Elly is intended to be praised for her parenting. She puts the “grand” in grandma and things like that. Back in the old days, the idea that Elly was a barely-competent mom was often used for humour, particularly when she was compared to super-mom Anne Nichols.
What I can’t tell is which attitude is supposed to be carried on to Mike and Deanna. After all, I can look at Robin getting all emotional over the loss of his crib, and see there are some issues at work there, even though Deanna is so oblivious she just wants to take a picture of it. Is this a “Deanna is a good mom” moment or is this “Laugh at Deanna and how oblivious she is”? With Lynn Johnston’s writing, it is very difficult to tell.
As for the 'one boy, one girl and no more' motif, with Meredith and Robin matching to Michael and Lizzie; I think it is more of this idea that Lynn Johnston has about how she wants to end the strip at the same place where it started – a young couple with two bratty kids in a Toronto suburb.
qnjones,
One really gets the sense that Dee had kids not out of a real honest desire to have kids, but because she had decided she hates her mother, and to avoid being like her mother, she had to have kids early instead of late.
My initial impression was that Deanna had Meredith in order to tie Michael to a 9-5 job, and to keep him from gallivanting around the country doing stories with Josef Weeder. However, after I saw the similarity between the Live Behind the Lines and the September, 2007 story about how Michael was unexpected (by the father), I have since revised that expectation to be Deanna = Elly.
It seems that little thought went into whether she really wanted kids at all. Mike and Dee certainly treat them as little nuisances all the time.
My impression of Deanna’s desire to be a mother was forever coloured by this strip, where she is running at breakneck speed away from it.
As for the 'one boy, one girl and no more' motif, with Meredith and Robin matching to Michael and Lizzie; I think it is more of this idea that Lynn Johnston has about how she wants to end the strip at the same place where it started – a young couple with two bratty kids in a Toronto suburb.
Ah, yes. Lynn's 'circle of life' motif. I think sometimes that we're too close to the strip to see this. I'd say that most people knew that all along. It seems obvious in retropsect that Liz and Anthony's pseudo-romance was simply a nice litlle wrap-up to the saga of John and Elly Patterson and usher in the era of Mike and Deanna, the new flawed-but-trying parents. This autumn, we may expect to see Elly and the rest moved to the "Who's Who" section of the webpage.
The desire to mirror John and Elly only explains why Mike and Dee have one boy and one girl. So, why are so many of the other families like that too? I really think that is what Lynn views as normal. Anything else is abnormal.
I never really figured Dee got pregnant to kill Mike's plans because it must have happened on their honeymoon, and before Mike and Weed got started talking about their plan. But I do think there is no other interpretation of the strip than that Dee did it on purpose, and that she did it to make sure her vision of family was fulfilled. Whereas Elly might possibly have simply made a mistake or had a birth control error.
And it has been made clear that extra children = punishment. Look at the fate of poor April, who was actively unwanted by Elly. And read the bio of that moron Anne Nichols. Lynn clearly means you to think of her as an idiot who dug her own grave. She kept falling pregnant by a man who was a cheating jerk, with apparently no clue as to how to prevent it. And, as some of you have pointed out, extra children get banished. I had no idea John had a younger brother!
It gets to the point where it's almost offensive. There are normal, happy families out there where the parents want more than 2 kids, and where the kids are all of the same gender.
qnjones:
It gets to the point where it's almost offensive. There are normal, happy families out there where the parents want more than 2 kids, and where the kids are all of the same gender.
I know it may sound strange that I defend her here but I don't really think she does it to hurt anyone's feelings. The woman I see in the interviews comes across as being too otherworldly, for lack of a better term, to know how the world really works. She's so isolated from the mainstream that she thinks that she's normal.
Lynn Johnston seems to write purely from her own life experiences or at least her interpretation of them. In her interviews she seems very friendly, but then she will drop off some line like, “I was married to John Patterson for over 30 years” which displays a mental incongruity but also a vulnerability to say something like that to a newspaper reporter. She seems to be unable to move out of her own life experiences in her writing. Her kids are grown up and she had planned to retire and that’s the way she wants to write John and Elly, regardless of April’s current status as 16-year-old.
No, I don't really think she does it to hurt anyone either. I just think her mental math is very simple: "What Lynn did = perfect." She can't imagine people being happy any other way. It's a very self-centered kind of dismissiveness. I doubt she puts any thought into it. But, it can be a tad offputting just the same.
I found it ENRAGING in Phil and Georgia's bios that they tried to have children but couldn't, for some unspecified reason, and that Georgia practically forced Phil to move to Quebec and live in the city. I always felt Phil was one of the few truly "diverse" characters, in that he didn't marry until he was in his 30s, and he never had kids, was devoted to his music, and lived in the city (not Milborough). Now Lynn has retconned him so that he wanted kids, and wanted to stay in Milborough. GAH! IMHO, that totally gutted the character. "Ooh, he WANTED to be a suburban dad, but that eeeeevil Georgia prevented it!" is how it reads now. And I truly do think that Lynn believes Phil will read as "a bad, weird person" if she didn't throw those retcons in.
I hate that there has never been a happy single, childless person in this strip. Even Wheelchair Teacher had to get married and have a baby eventually. Even Candace got paired up for life before age 22. Ted MacCaulay is a caricature to be pitied. Even Lawrence has a ball-and-chain. It's infuriating. THERE IS LIFE WITHOUT SPOUSE AND/OR CHILDREN FOR MANY, MANY PEOPLE. Sheesh.
Even Warren is not immune to Lynn's obsessive need to pair people off. The poor mope has spent the last year under the mistaken impression that Liz didn't drop the "Let's Be Friends" bomb on him. Of course, when he does figure that out, he'l do what Paul did when his time came: find a love interest that won't (unwittingly) jerk him around.
qnjones
I hate that there has never been a happy single, childless person in this strip.
Well, maybe Julia… ; )
Personally, I like the fact that many families choose to have no more than two children. I have now become truly concerned about our rapidly depleting natural resources.
When I got married I thought that the population explosion was more of a problem in poor countries, and I admired families with lots of children. I foolishly thought that those choosing to have small families were selfish. I now realize that we - the people living in rich countries - are placing a far greater burden on our planet.
I do hope my children understand this.
Anon NYC
qnjones,
And I truly do think that Lynn believes Phil will read as "a bad, weird person" if she didn't throw those retcons in.
Phil’s treatment has been a mystery to me for awhile. He was a majour character in the storylines and was just sent away. At the time, I remember that he and John were almost like friends, and John has been pretty much friendless ever since, with the female friendships of Elly’s dominating the adult storylines. I suppose that could be the reason, with Lynn wanting the Elly storylines to be the main focus and not things involving John and other men, like Phil.
Yeah. Lynn claims Elly is her least favorite character, but this has to be a lie (or another self-delusion). If she did not like doing Elly, there would be far fewer strips focused on her. And she would not have been elevated to near-sainthood. People would be just as happy (or happier) to see her draw strips about Mike, Liz, and April, and back off on Elly. Now that she is retired, it's not like she's doing anything interesting anyway.
I can't help but compare Liz to Phil. The younger sibling first drawn as independent, different, a wanderer, then *wham* Lynn forces them to a "must have a spouse/children/mortgage" existence.
DebJyn
DebJyn,
In the case of Liz, the subjugation of her life in Mtigwaki to her life in Milborough has been admitted by Lynn Johnston to imitate the choice she made to move her family from the small town of Lynn Lake (which she hated) to Corbeil, which is by the reasonably large city of North Bay. Of course the independent, different, wanderer you describe was in real life, Rod Johnston, the flying dentist. Since the stories are similar in nature, I would have to wonder if forcing Rod to come to Corbeil informed both the Liz and Phil stories.
Dang. So you're saying that the Phil stories and the Liz stories were all about convincing Rod that what Lynn forced on him was right and good? Or, in the case of Liz, is it a case of Lynn recognizing that forcing a certain lifestyle on Rod was part of what drove him away?
The more I learn about Lynn's biography, the more I conclude that Lynn knew about Rod's affair way before April 2007--that she drew the Liz/Paul/Susan storyline with the knowledge that Rod was probably going to leave her. The parallels are just too uncanny.
qnjones,
I cannot really speak for the Phil story. Lynn had an interview where she talked about Liz and the reason for her going back to Milborough, which she specifically said was a parallel to her desire to get out of Lynn Lake. As for Lynn and Rod, Lynn had an interview where she was talking about how Anthony and Liz's romance was taken from hers and Rod's i.e. their first date was going to someone's wedding and that they had a date where they each made up a list of attributes they were looking for in a spouse. In that interview, Lynn pointed out that her list and Rod's matched exactly except for one point - that was living in the country vs. living near a city. The compromise position according to Lynn was that Rod said he would take on Aaron, whose behaviour was not so good, if Lynn would take on living in Lynn Lake. How that compromise managed to change to get them to Corbeil, I do not know exactly. Lynn has said in a few interviews that she did not like living in Lynn Lake; so clearly she prevailed.
As for forcing a certain lifestyle on Rod to drive him away, no one has said, and I obviously do not know. If you are going to draw conclusions from the Liz/Paul/Susan storyline, then that would seem to be the reason. However, cheating in relationships has been a theme in this strip for years, well before Liz/Paul/Susan. Case in point was the Sunday strip Lynn reprinted last year where Elly had a dream John was cheating on her. That strip was done in 1979, back when Lynn was living in Lynn Lake and not in Corbeil.
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