For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for November 25, 2020

losing your touch in parenting, aren’t you, El?

Losing your confide-ability Elly?

Not sure that is the case here. After about 5th grade my Dad and I were at fairly constant odds. Mom on the other hand I got along with great. I had long learned that I was not going to win against her and it was not worth trying even if I was too old for corner standing. My oldest sister, 18 months younger than me, had constant struggles with Mom until about the Middle of Jr. HS when things more or less settled in to a truce. It took Dad and I almost 40 years to reach a steady state of truce.

So Liz and Elly might be a case of personalities that don’t gell.

The second child to find somebody else to confine in

Sometimes it’s easier for a girl that age to talk to someone other than her mother. My mother never actually told me anything. When I was 12, she handed me a box and told me to read the pamphlet. I learned more talking with friends, and on my own than any other way.

She can’t tell mom all that stuff…She has to LIVE with her!

Oh fer Chrisssakes..

My oldest is that way. Doesn’t bother me but it does her mother.

As they say, like mother like daughter. Panel 3 and 4 seems to imply that the mother has mood swings as well.

Teenage girls will talk to anyone BUT their mother. In my own experience, anyway.

Vanessa Baxter syndrome: always wanting to “fix” things that don’t need fixing (or even attention).

So Elly finds this out while pounding away at her typewriter and is sad??? Do I hear the strains of “The Cat’s In The Cradle” from the woman’s perspective playing in the background? Wake up woman – apparently you have chosen your priorities – you snooze and you lose!

But she did come to you, and she told you about her day.

I’d rather it be a teacher than a student who might give the wrong advice

Suck it up,El.

Okay, I would feel bad for her, but I know from experience that anything you tell a family member will come back to bite you in the butt when they need leverage sometime in the future. Yes, even Mom.

Anything I told or asked my mother in confidence went straight to my dad within minutes. Her excuse? “We don’t keep secrets from each other.” Living with those two was a nightmare!

the teacher opened the door now she can continue the talk with her daughter about all the changes she will be going through as she starts to enter womanhood.

Life never seems to go the way that a sanctimonious ex-hippie wants it to go.

Maybe Ellie ought to talk with Miss Edwards . . .

You should know by now that outsiders are always easier for kids to talk to, nothing new about this.

Looks like Elizabeth is not the only one suffering from depression.

Is that a “typewriter” she is using?

I remember a comic strip in Mad Magazine years ago where a group of teens is hanging out and one talks about how he had a wonderful conversation with an adult the other day who, unlike his parents, actually listened to him and gave him some really good advice. Another boy says he just had a similar experience. Some one asks who and they point at each other and say, “His father.” followed by, in utter disbelief, “MY FATHER?!?!”

Well, this is humor, so we’re just going to laugh at Ellie’s reaction. When our daughter was growing up, my wife and I always reacted to these situations like Ellie does in panel 3, but we didn’t do panel 4. We were genuinely glad that she had other people to mentor and guide her, and that she was comfortable enough talking to us to keep us in that loop (and, at 26, she still does).

That hits really hard, daughter cannot talk with mom.

That wailing is understandable. All teens prefer someone else to confide in instead of parents.

aw

It may have been three possibilities:

1.) The teacher pulled Elizabeth aside, so she opened up at a time when Elly was not present.

2.) Elly has had a reputation for getting angry and huffy over every little thing. She is not the most approachable parent.

3.) Elly grew up in the 1950s, which was the most prosperous time in North American history. She is bitter that she and John are struggling to make ends meet and are in relative poverty to her parents. She has projected some of that bitterness onto the children.