Personal Essay: The Enemy Within
My son’s imaginary friends aren’t all that friendly.
by Karen Dempsey
July 6, 2009
"My brother always punches me in the nose," Brennan said, his voice edged with frustration as he followed me into the house, dragging his backpack behind him.
I turned to look at him, perplexed. "Your brother?" I asked. "You mean — Liddy?"
"No," he said. "My brother. Will."
"Will Kaufmann?" I asked, thinking he meant a preschool friend.
"No!" he blew out an exasperated breath. "My brother Will!"
It took me another minute or two to absorb that Will was Brennan's new imaginary big brother. Over the course of the afternoon, I learned that Will possessed bunk beds, an August first birthday, on which he'd turn the enviable age of seven, and — the thing
that Brennan spoke of most — a bullying nature that led him to punch Brennan in the nose or even, when Will was really misbehaving, "in the butt."
Will's appearance caught me by surprise. It had been years since Brennan had insisted on an extra bagel or pillow for his imaginary friend Diego. Even three-and-a-half-year-old Liddy had stopped cuddling her invisible cat. I thought we'd left the imaginary
friend stage behind. But more than that, I didn't know what to make of Will's aggressive personality. Brennan's past imaginary friends had been, well, friendly.
Moments of quiet play, alone, ended badly with protests and pleading.In the days that followed, Brennan woke in the mornings arguing with Will ("Stop doing that!"), and then wandered out into the living room only to provoke a similar confrontation with Liddy. He complained that Will refused to stay buckled in his booster
seat ("My brother's not being safe!") after committing the same offense several times himself. Moments of quiet play, alone, ended badly with protests and pleading ("Stop it, Will!" and "I am not too young!"). Big brother Will was not much fun to have around.
One day, I was chaperoning Brennan's preschool class on a field trip when I heard him talking to one of his classmates. "My brother always punches me," Brennan complained. "He's six." Jonathan, who knew our family make-up, raised his eyebrows and looked
at me. I cringed, remembering the teasing Brennan had taken from some kids for bringing a "baby fork" in his lunch a few weeks before. What would another five-year-old think of this imaginary brother?
But Jonathan hesitated only seconds before saying, "I have a girl. She's make-believe too. And she's seven."
"Yours is older than mine," Brennan observed. They were silent for a moment as we bumped along.
"Look!" Jonathan called out, tapping the bus window. "It's my fake brother — I mean, sister! She's running alongside the bus!"
Brennan frowned and shook his head dismissively, disapproving, I thought, of a sibling so poorly imagined that Jonathan couldn't even keep track of its gender.
"Imaginary friends are the sign of a creative kid," Brennan's teacher told me at the end of the school day.
But I wondered if there were more to it than that. Brennan had also spent much of that field trip asking me to carry him in my arms. And Will's appearance coincided with the onset of heartbreaking tantrums — several episodes a day of Brennan running away,
slamming doors, weeping, or hurling himself onto the floor. Getting him back and forth to school, to and from a friend's house, into or out of the tub — every transition was fraught with potential for fury and inconsolable crying.
"Brennan's imaginary brother's putting a lot of pressure on him," Brennan's teacher said to me at preschool pickup one day. She mentioned that Will's behavior might have mimicked some of what Brennan was witnessing among his friends, as a number of his classmates
were testing boundaries at school, demonstrating new aggression in confrontations that Brennan only watched from a distance.
©2009 Karen Dempsey and Babble
About the Author
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Karen Dempsey's essays have appeared in Brain, Child magazine and The Buffalo News. She is writing a memoir about parenting a child with chronic medical needs. Read more of her work at kdempsey.com.
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