Because I Said So by Camille Peri; Kate Moses

Author:Camille Peri; Kate Moses [Moses, Camille Peri; Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Child Rearing, Motherhood, General, Parenting, Family Relationships, Family & Relationships, Mothers, Family, &NEW
ISBN: 9780060598792
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Invisible Worlds

N o r a O k j a K e l l e r

When my older daughter was three, she started visiting the “invisible world.” Slipping into a seam of air, she’d enter this imaginary country where she was proclaimed queen.

“There are so many children there, Mama,” my then only child would tell me, “so many friends.”

Playing the ultimate hostess, she often invited these friends into her world and insisted that I treat them as family. “Don’t forget to brush Asha’s, Annie’s, and Sarala’s hair too,” she’d say when I braided her hair. Or: “Aki just loves the way you read Goodnight Moon,” she’d gush. “Will you read it to her again?”

On those days, I would hear my daughter tromping through the rooms of the house, providing the ambassadors from the invisible world with informational tours: “This is the bedroom, where dreams come from. . . . This is the bathroom, where doots comes from. . . . This is the refrigerator, where milk comes from.”

And always when they reached the kitchen, I would have to supply my daughter and her entourage with snacks—pouring not just one glass of milk, but three or four; offering cookies not just to the only child I could see, but to a gang of unseen ones as well.

“I’m like the Old Woman in the Shoe!” I wailed to my mother, only half-joking as I described the way my daughter talked to and about her invisible friends.

Instead of chuckling over my daughter’s imagination, my mother scolded me: “I told you not to have so many kids!”

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N o r a O k j a K e l l e r

“But, but,” I stammered, thinking my mother misunderstood.

“They’re not real kids!”

“So?” she scoffed. “The work is real, isn’t it? Tell her to send them all home!”

But I was reluctant to take my mother’s advice. Perhaps because I spend so much of my own time exploring the alternate universes provided by books, I wanted to indulge my own child, to nurture her own creations. “You go right on playing with your pretend friends,” I told my daughter.

“Don’t call them pretend!” my daughter chastised. “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not real.” And with little murmurs and coos, she turned to soothe her slighted friends’ hurt feelings.

Five years later, my second daughter turned three. “Mama!”

she yelled after an afternoon of playing in her older sister’s bedroom. “I went to the invisible world carnival! And somebody came back with me!”

I squinted and nodded to the air next to her shoulder. “Hello,”

I said, ready to handle a new batch of imaginary playmates. “Nice to meet you.”

My daughter laughed. “No, silly. My friend is here,” she said, pointing behind her. “W is shy.”

W, the invisible friend, just happens to love ice cream bars and Popsicles, Gummy Bears, and chocolate chip cookies—my little girl’s favorite snacks. She also likes to color on walls and tables, doorways and couches; the walls of our house are adorned with hip-height, prehistoric-like paintings of stick people with bulbous heads.

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