I was folding linens when I first found out my children don’t think I’m funny. I was by the hall closet, overhearing them asking my husband for a bedtime story. This was after I’d already read them Where the Wild Things Are, a book they used to love so much the pages were starting to pull from their binding. He reminded them of this. A good husband. And they told him, “You’d tell it better.” And so he did. A better father.

The thing I noticed that was peculiar about my husband’s telling was that the characters are all out of sorts. Max doesn’t sail away from his room in the usual boat. A bald boy named Harold shows up, paddling past in an ill-drawn dinghy, clutching a purple crayon. As my husband tells it, they sail off together but lose their way. They float for what feels like days, until they happen upon an island they come to know as Neverland, where a ragtag gang of boys their age pulls them in. They were Lost Boys all along. Go figure.

It became a bad habit. I’d read them their story, kiss their sweaty foreheads, try not to step on Lincoln Logs on the way out. I’d tread downstairs, begin to soak the pots and pans, and then I’d stand in the hall, at the bottom of the staircase, listening to them beg my husband for a better story. It was a small betrayal. Night after night, he’d pluck a character from one book and drop it into another. The mismatched-ness made them laugh. It’s unexpected; it’s not right. That’s what makes it fun. Little Red Riding Hood turning up at her grandmother’s house only to find, not Grandma, not the Wolf, no, but Sleeping Beauty instead.

And my kids are in fits over it.

It hurts in an unexpected way, like doing yoga for the first time in a long while and realizing you can’t bend the way you thought you could; a new soreness.