Rejection, real and imagined

It's official: Cletus the Former Fetus has imaginary acquaintances. I'm not sure that I can call them imaginary friends, as they seem to not always be super nice. A few days ago, Cletus ran up to me with a concerned look on her face, her half-eaten snack dangling from an outstretched hand. "Mama, they said no!" she cried.

"Who said no?" I asked, looking around the room. I had briefly been in the bathroom; maybe one of our friends had come by in the meantime and let themselves in through the back door, as we tend to do out here in The Sticks.

"The Dora friends said no!" she said, pointing back over her shoulder at her playroom. "They said I couldn't eat my snack!"

I followed her back into the playroom, asking "Who are the Dora friends?". I thought maybe she had been playing with her Dora and Diego dolls, or her Dora-themed Memory game, or her ridiculous purse that is designed to look like a giant head-of-Dora. But she had not; the room was devoid of any evidence of Dora-related play.

Cletus continued to stare at her snack, hesitant. I told her she could tell the Dora friends that her mama gave her the green-light on the fruit roll-up. Cletus smiled and announced into the air: "My mama said YES!" And then she took a bite. Apparently the Dora friends, mysterious bullies though they be, still cleave to my authority.

Aren't, like, actual kids mean enough, with their pushing and their toy-stealing and their name-calling? It seems really unjust that my child's fake playmates are trying to keep her down as well.

I think the Dora friends' repressive regime must be somehow related to Cletus' current obsession with being told "no". These days, whenever the husband or I tell her she can't do something, or ask her to stop french-kissing the dog, or refuse to let her eat a bowl of juice for dinner, she squints her eyes and puckers up her mouth and wails, "You said NO to meeeeeeeeeeee!" On particularly choice occasions, when only one parent plays the role of the offender while the other has the misfortune of simply being in the same room, Cletus turns to the onlooker and cries, "Daaaaaaddy, Mommy said NO to meeeeeeeee!"

We're in a real limit-pushing phase right now, so Cletus is hearing us say "no" a lot. Which results in a near-constant transition from plaintive ass-kissing (batting her eyelashes and rubbing my arm while cooing "Mama, can I watch a little bit of TV?") to tortured whining (resting her forehead on the floor while sobbing "But I WANT to watch a little bit of TVeeeeeeee!"). A Dr. Toddler and Mr. Hyde. And I fear the end result will be a gang of imaginary friends that do nothing but send my kid to timeout, over and over, all day long.