My Daughter's "Imaginary" Friend

About nineteen years ago, my husband moved us back to the old farm he had grown up on, into the very house he was raised in. It was a small old farmhouse, built by the people of the community back when the original farmhouse had burned down in the late 1940s. There were only three bedrooms, a small living room, a large kitchen, a large laundry/pantry room, and one tiny bathroom. Sound carried really well in this house.

Our oldest daughter was five years old at the time and hardly talked to anyone outside the house. Set any type of animal around her, though, and she would just babble away, looking like some modern-day Snow White. She did this with the pet dogs and cats, the wild deer and rabbits, the chickens, turkeys, and cows. Any animal that came within chatting distance of her, she would strike up a conversation with them.

It was summer when we moved in, and everything went along normally for almost a year when spring rolled around and we noticed the change. She had just turned six the month before and her voice had gotten louder and more sure. She still didn't talk much to outsiders, but suddenly, she was talking all the time inside the house. Especially when in the bathroom.

For two years she got to where she was spending more and more time in the single bathroom we had. Always wanting to bathe or shower. Her dad and I would hear her laughing her heart out, just chattering away. Every now and then we would hear a good-sized splash, and she would just squeal like she had a squad of mermaids in the water with her.

I would go in there to check on her to see what she was doing, she would just send me on my way. She would tell me that Kermie and her were okay. I asked her who Kermie was and she pointed towards the bathtub faucet and said, "That's Kermie E. Hops, Mama. Can't you see him?" Then for some reason, maybe because I wasn't even thinking about a frog, I don't know, but I did not even see that little bitty frog.

My husband, of course, was worried our daughter was seeing things, imagining things, and maybe even showing signs of schizophrenia. I, on the other hand, was more curious as to what her new-found imaginary friend looked like. Then, I was worried as to why she suddenly had an imaginary friend. No matter how I tried to talk to her, I would not receive what I thought at the time a direct answer.

It seemed her new friend's name was Kermie E. Hops. He lived in the bathtub. She even told me why her dad and I could never see him when we looked for him. Quite simply put, Kermie did not like us and did not want to talk to us or to see us, yet.

Well, things continued this way for another year. Then came the spring of the next year when she was eight years old. You could still hear her playing with her friend in the shower because now she'd decided she was too old for baths. She still spent long periods of time in the bathroom, sounding like she was talking to herself ("Mama, I have to take my Barbies' swimming. Kermie wants to play with them too.) By this time I had mentioned her Imaginary Friend to her pediatrician, who reassured me that when she no longer needed her friend, she'd stop talking to him.

Then one night, in the middle of July of that same year, I was taking my shower. All of a sudden I felt something hit my back, then heard a smack on the stall wall. Next, a light tap on my shoulder, and another smack on the stall wall. I turned completely by this point, freaked, knowing I was alone in the shower but wondering who the heck had joined me. That's when suddenly a little creature about the size of a quarter landed on my nose. I don't think I ever screamed so loud. I may have urinated, it was hard to tell with the hot water already pouring down my body. I seriously fell out of the tub, right onto the bathroom floor.

I was never so embarrassed as when my husband and daughter both came running into the bathroom to see what was wrong. There I was, lying on the floor, tangled in the shower curtain with a little spotted green water frog on my face. A frog of all things. To make matters worse, my daughter pipes up as her dad starts to help me up, "Look, Mama, it's Kermie!! He wanted to say 'Hi'."

Looking back, we probably should have thought of a frog in the tub. After all, we did live in the country, she named her friend Kermie, and there wasn't so much as a spider web ever in the bathroom. The reason we probably did not was we were working too hard to fix the house, run the farm, and had daily jobs to attend to. That's not including the hectic crazy life of a new baby in the house, thinking my oldest daughter would never lose her imaginary friend and have real friends, and other parental responsibilities.

Kermie's been gone from our bathroom now for a little over eleven years. We had several years with him gracing our tub, keeping us company. How he survived the first four years with us living there, I'll never know. Once I knew he lived in our tub, I stopped using hard corrosive bleach. I started scrubbing with vinegar and baking soda, to keep him from getting sick from chemicals. Sadly, the vinegar brought more fruit flies, but Kermie seemed to thrive on those little suckers. He grew and quadrupled in size over the next few years, till one day, we didn't see him anymore. We missed him in our bathroom, he'd become such a fixture. My husband assumed he'd passed on, because how long does a frog live anyway.

Well that year passed into the next year, and I was sitting outside on the concrete slab porch. I kept noticing something poking its head out looking at me in a hole between the slab and the ground. So thinking it was a snake, I prepared to fight a copperhead, only to see a familiar little body hopping out. Only he wasn't so little. I swear he'd grown to the size of a walnut in its hull still, but I know it was him. Not only were his spots the same as when he was a young frog, but he hopped right up to me like he remembered who I was, and jumped up onto my bare knee.

For a few years after that, we would not only see Kermie hopping around the porch, but we would see smaller tree frogs once again in our bathroom and we'd like to think they were Kermie's offspring coming to visit in a safe haven.