At least they all fit in one carseat

My 3 year old daughter, M., has imaginary friends. Well, sort of. She actually becomes her own imaginary friends. One moment I will be talking to my own sweet daughter and the next, she is correcting me "I'm Jo Jo." She becomes 3 or 4 different people now - Jo Jo, Kathleen, Julie ... I think I'm leaving someone out. Each person has their own family members. When she is Kathleen, her father and I are both known as "House" and her baby brother becomes "Album." As Jo Jo's mother, I am known as "Ada" and her brother is "Budgy Wudgy". She can keep them all straight for hours, it is quite eerie. She will tell me before breakfast she is Julie and 3 hours later I will call her brother by his given name and she will correct me "Actually, House, that is Album."

All these people first showed up when our summer babysitter, to whom our daughter had become very attached, moved away. A few days later, she was insisting we call her Julie. The connection did not dawn on me until I began to wonder where she came up with the name, since I couldn't think of anyone we knew named Julie. She watches the TV show Caillou in the morning, and Caillou has a babysitter named Julie. By becoming Julie, she was replacing the babysitter she missed so much. I thought it was a healthy way to grieve and indulged her fantasy play.

Then the other people appeared, and I began to notice that whenever she did something to be especially proud of, like drawing a beautiful picture, finishing all of her meal, or getting dressed by herself, she would attribute the feat to one of her other personas. In her eyes, Julie, Kathleen (the name of a teacher at her school) and Jo Jo (a TV character I don't particularly like) were all older, smarter and better than my daughter.

Yesterday, she said something interesting that made me very sad. She told me, near tears, that she didn't want to be a grownup. I asked her why and her exact words - at barely 3 years old - were "I want to stay a child." My heart broke. What was so terrible about being a grown up - about being like me that she was in tears over it? I realized that this is the purpose for the infallible Julie, the fearless Jo Jo, the multi-talented Kathleen: they are performing all the major accomplishments so that M. does not have to be the one growing up.