Security blanket in North Vaisa
This short post is about the imaginary friends, and the entire imaginary world, that Tallulah, our three-year-old daughter, has created while we have been travelling. Several weeks ago, I wrote about how we are all clinging to some emotional security blankets, Tallulah’s imaginary world has become her most important.
Tallulah first mentioned North Vaisa when we were in Morocco, about five weeks ago. As we wandered (semi-anxiously) through the medina in Fes, she talked about a place where she likes to go with her (real) friend, Clara, and Clara’s mother Susan.
We have no idea where the name, North Vaisa, comes from, but we learned early on that you can walk there from from New Jersey in about two hours (i.e., no need to fly or get on a boat), and that it is composed mainly of playgrounds.
The most important feature of North Vaisa playgrounds is the “pizza slide,” which is both made of pizza (very messy, Lu says), and serves pizza to kids who slide down it. She came up with this idea when we were in the Sahara, and I think she was dreading having to eat more couscous and Moroccan salads.
On our first night in Tunisia (after a stressful day of transition), Tallulah expounded for nearly an hour about North Vaisa over dinner. She talked about it as a kid’s paradise, where you can run and play and go on rides, like Montjuic park in barcelona. Mostly she went there with her real friends from New Jersey (Clara, KayKay, Sammy) and from summer camp (Valantin, Julia, James Carlock). While they were there, the kids were mostly unsupervised, but they got plenty of pizza and ice cream. She provided a lot of detail around the types of rides, and the varieties of ice cream. From that dinner forward, North Vaisa has been a frequent topic of conversation.
Lately, she has introduced a cast of imaginary friends in North Vaisa, led by someone named Rose. Rose is usually Lu’s age, but some times she is “all grown up, like seven.” Rose is brave and confident, and her name is usually invoked when we are starting a new and potentially scary activity. For example, when we did a steep and pathless hike in Turkey last week (with Lu on my shoulders), she told me several times that Rose had done a hike just like this in North Vaisa.
More broadly, Tallulah now enters many situations with “my friends in North Vaisa have been here before.” Tallulah said she liked the main church in Positano a lot, because it “reminds me of the church in North Vaisa.” She knew that the walk from the marina in Capri up to the town square would be long, because her friends in North Vaisa had just done the walk. When we did the hot-air balloon trip in Capadoccia, Turkey, she said several times that she “could see North Vaisa from up here.”
Tomorrow morning we fly back to the U.S. for a few weeks, spending time at our cabin in the Catskills, and with grandparents in Nashville. It will be intresting to see whether North Vaisa survives as a security blanket for Tallulah. Maybe she will start telling everyone about her “friends in Turkey and Morocco” instead.
Coco said,
October 21, 2008 @ 12:51 pm
I am officially in love with LuLu. Please send more details about North Vaisa. (maybe they are here and i just haven’t read them)