^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com September 19, 2014}

My son has an imaginary friend. I have long waited for this to happen.

His imaginary friend is Wonder Woman. I guess this makes sense, since he’s still in his Superman phase.

He spent one afternoon talking about how he was going to save Wonder Woman, and then by evening he was talking up a storm to her. At dinner time he wouldn’t eat until I made Wonder Woman an invisible peanut butter sandwich. When we went for a walk in the park, he told me to sit down and not move. Then he walked around to the other side of the fountain where I couldn’t see him so he could talk to Wonder Woman in private. On our way back home, she alternated between flying above us and holding his hand.

Honestly, it’s all sweet enough to rot my teeth.

I’ve been looking forward to the arrival of imaginary friends for quite a while specifically because I knew it would be this cute. It also leads me to the confession – and this is a tough one to make – that I didn’t have an imaginary friend growing up.

Well, I did, but he was an imaginary imaginary friend.

See, I noticed that other kids had imaginary friends that they talked to and played with, but for some reason I never had my own. It didn’t occur to me that I could just imagine one – for some reason I thought they were like some sort of wayward spirit that chose their kid or something. Eventually, I got sick and tired of not having an imaginary friend, so I decided to make one up. I created Zero, a robot who lived on the moon.

There were two problems with Zero. First, he lived on the moon and didn’t have a spaceship that would allow him to visit Earth. So I had to go see him, and explaining to a kid on the playground that I do have an imaginary friend but he’s not on this planet so he can’t play right now is kind of like a college student saying that he totally has a hot girlfriend but she lives in Canada.

Second, I constantly referred to Zero as my imaginary friend. You can’t imagine how much of a wrench that throws into games of pretend on the playground. Calling out that you know it’s all just make-believe is like constantly laughing and looking at the camera during a taping of Saturday Night Live – you can get away with it, but only if you’re Jimmy Fallon.

So that’s my shameful secret – my creativity was apparently so broken that I had to create an imaginary imaginary friend. Luckily, my son won’t have that problem because he’s got Wonder Woman. Maybe someday I’ll dig Zero out of my past and let him play with Wonder Woman.

Then again, I never did get around to building him a spaceship, and you wouldn’t believe the price of airfare for a round trip to the moon.

_{Featured Image: DC Comics}