"We were so drunk, I was afraid Mike would be born a dimwit: A Proposal
As you know, Mike cannot handle adversity remotely like a normal person does. If the person that makes the mistake of pushing one of his many triggers is someone he can overpower physically or mentally (like Liz or Elly), he goes from "slug-like oik" to "Exploding Horror Freak Boy" in about a millisecond. If the person who crossed the broken-headed freak isn't, we get whining nonsense about gumballs splattered on windshields and being a rung on someone's ladder and whining about the cruelty of the statement "How is it fair that you get to do what you want while I sit on folded hands like someone who doesn't have needs?"
This tells me that there is perhaps something organically wrong with Mike's brain that cannot be corrected by pleading, threatening, lecturing or violence. Knowing Elly the way I do, it might well be that the only time that her fear of sex and hatred of intimacy goes away is when her blood alcohol level is dangerously elevated. A lot of people might make the 'joke' that if Mike, Liz and April were named after how Elly felt when they were conceived, they'd all be named "Drunken Stupor" but, well, it ain't so funny when you start to think that maybe that's both a distressing fact and a horrible problem. If Mike is a sufferer of foetal alcohol syndrome, that's something that has to be answered for. I would start by punching John in the face just on general principle.
This tells me that there is perhaps something organically wrong with Mike's brain that cannot be corrected by pleading, threatening, lecturing or violence. Knowing Elly the way I do, it might well be that the only time that her fear of sex and hatred of intimacy goes away is when her blood alcohol level is dangerously elevated. A lot of people might make the 'joke' that if Mike, Liz and April were named after how Elly felt when they were conceived, they'd all be named "Drunken Stupor" but, well, it ain't so funny when you start to think that maybe that's both a distressing fact and a horrible problem. If Mike is a sufferer of foetal alcohol syndrome, that's something that has to be answered for. I would start by punching John in the face just on general principle.