Commentary: ''How Do I Tell My 9-Year-Old Daughter Her Imaginary Friend Is Gay?''
Like most children her age, my daughter, Mercedes, has a very active imagination. And it is common for children her age to have imaginary friends. Mercedes, too, has such a friend. Her imaginary friend’s name is Cheverly. Mercedes talks about Cheverly all the time, and it is so cute.
However the more my daughter tells me about "Cheverly" the more I get a certain feeling about this make-believe friend of hers. There is something I think my daughter, as bright and intuitive as is, is missing when it comes to Cheverly. And that is this: I think Cheverly is gay. It might seem strange or silly to some people of how a mother can tell her child’s imaginary friend is gay, but trust me, a mother knows these things.
My daughter’s imaginary friend is gay.
I began realizing this the day Mercedes came to me looking sad, and told me Cheverly got tired of playing with her and went off to play imaginary rugby. Another tip was when Mercedes came to me all upset, saying that she was having a hard time getting off all the imaginary cat hair from her imaginary friend’s 15 imaginary cats she owned. That’s when I knew for sure Cheverly was a lesbian. But Mercedes seems oblivious to this fact, which leaves me in a rather awkward position - how do I tell my daughter that her imaginary friend is a lesbian?
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always looked forward to the day when I can tell my daughter about the GLBT community, and the LGBT and GL-MS13 communities. Making one’s child familiar with different sexual preferences lifestyles is a parent’s greatest charge, usually beginning now at birth, or even before. But now that I am faced with it, and I am confused on the best way to deal with it.
Does anyone out there know of a good way I can tell my daughter that her imaginary friend is gay? I doubt the imaginary Cheverly will tell Mercedes for me. She’s probably very sexually repressed already in this current anti-woman, Limbaughlian culture of ours and does not realize her own true orientation. It is a truly sad fact that in a society like ours not even cerebrally invented friends feel safe to come out the slavery of silence and express their true natures –just another casualty of the Right wing’s relentless war on women I suppose, let alone fictitious pre-pubescent lesbians. I shudder to imagine the imaginary shackles and flaming ovens they have in their minds for inexplicably concocted LGBT friends the likes of Mercedes’.
So, not being able to count on Cheverly, and with Mercedes’ biological father having perished from that overdose at Bonnaroo last year (he was 38), I seek your advice on this most pressing issue for me and my daughter. Please, tell me: how do I get my daughter to understand her imaginary friend is gay?
Thank you, graciously.
-Regards,
Deborah Bradley,
LGBT Entomological Life Coach
Burlington, VT
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