Imaginary friends: Send help!
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I am in the local park and my daughter, E, is swinging from the monkey bars and looking over at me intently, shouting “Mayhem! Mayhem! Watch me!”
Mayhem is a mouse. A very confused mouse who doesn’t know the difference between night and day or up and down and E takes great pleasure in explaining how the world works to him. Mayhem is also me. Are you following?
I don’t know when it started exactly , but it feels like forever ago that E began developing these imaginary characters that my wife and I have to ‘play’ so that she can interact with them in different ways throughout the day.
As well as Mayhem, who speaks in a squeaky voice, there’s the Easter Bunny who is a kind of Dickensian Cockney, Miss Kitty who is Japanese (really try not to do this one in public), Father Christmas (deep ho ho ho vibes), Doc McStuffins (the cartoon kid from her favourite TV show) who is a high pitched American, and Madame Pastaroonie - an old Italian Nona obsessed with pasta and pizza.
We have to dip in and out of these roles and their associated accents and mannerisms countless times a day
Writing this makes me realise how mad it is. We have to dip in and out of these roles and their associated accents and mannerisms countless times a day. It’s wild, fun and occasionally embarrassing - like when I have to be Mayhem in the playground and squeak “Oh wow that’s amazing” at her in front of all the other parents.
The other day at the school gates she was calling me ‘Doc’ and I was having to talk to her about my magic stethoscope in my terrible American accent.
“You might be wondering why my daughter is calling me Doc” I say with a nervous laugh to the surrounding parents. No one makes eye contact, except one Mum who takes out her Air Pods and says,
“What?”
“Oh sorry it’s just my kid is calling me Doc and I thought I should explain. She’s a cartoon character, a doctor of toys in fact, and ….” I trail off.
The woman looks baffled but flashes a quick patronising smile to signal the end of this bizarre interaction. Meanwhile I’m thinking, people must be confused enough that E has got two Mums, now you’re telling them one is also a small American cartoon child called Doc? Whatever next?!
I used to have an imaginary friend called Mr Ted who I believed existed so strongly that I once made my Mum drive all the way back to Waitrose because I’d left him in the frozen food aisle.
I was such a different child to E, cripplingly shy compared to her outrageously brilliant confidence. Mr Ted was someone I whispered with in private and played with secretly, but E’s imaginary friends are incredibly performative (thankfully I’m down with this because I got an A in A-Level Theatre Studies and am basically Olivia Coleman).
I wonder if with E it’s just another way to get even more attention from her parents - first she shows her Mums something and then she gets to show this motley cast of characters it as well, and she is lavished with praise and interest by us all. More than that though I think it’s her exploring storytelling and letting her imagination run amok, so as much as having to suddenly be The Easter Bunny at the bus stop can make me cringe, I’ll play along until, as happened with poor old Mr Ted, these characters disappear as quickly as they were conceived.
I wanted to ask you reader, if imaginary characters make an appearance in your life with your children at all? Who do you have to pretend to be? Or do your kids have imaginary friends? Did you have imaginary friends? Do you still?! Please tell all - I’d love to know I’m not alone in this madness! It should be easy to comment below - just click in the box !
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HAH. Your article really made me laugh as we are in a really similar boat, although we don't have quite as many characters to keep up with as you, which I think is amazing on your part.
Our 4 1/2 year old amazing Son (of two mums) is OBSESSED with Dinosaurs. OB.SESS.ED.
I'm extremely thankful for this, as for one, I'm getting a re-educations in all things Jurassic and Prehistoric, which is pretty mind bendingly brilliant. But also ever since he could more-or-less talk, he's had a friend called Spiney. (His favourite dinosaur is a Spinosaurus, of course.) Spiney comes everywhere with us, and seems to have been everywhere and done everything (a bit like someone who gets on your tits at a dinner party) but he's often a great comfort to our Son. And we explain loads of tricky things through Spiney. So, actually, it seems to take the pressure off, somehow!
My wife is also absolutely great at doing voices for any animals we pass in the car on a long journey, (horses, sheep etc..) which actually makes the car rides so much more bearable and enjoyable when we are always constantly hearing what the horses have to say as they chat to our boy about where we are going. He's been known to chat to a horse we pass in the car (my wife sounding a bit like Scooby-do) for weeks.
So I say, bring on the imaginary friends and the voices and the kid in you and your wife and your daughter.
We have so little time to engage with our kids when they're little. It's so much fun and it really won't last very long.
My kid is obsessed with superheros - they talk to the characters all the time and my husband and I also alternate various personas during the day - with change of voice & mannerism - inside and outside our home. What I love is that we get to be any gender (we're cis, I'm queer, he's not, very heteronormative on the outside) and I'm pretty sure, beyond the education we are giving them, we get to thank recent tv shows for that (Miraculous Ladybug has non binary characters, Spidey & his amazing friends swaps genders...).