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My Kid's Bedtime Stories Are Cooler Than Your Kid's Bedtime Stories

Because I am a religious non-believer—or a non-religious non-believer—or a non-believer in religion—there’s very little I hold sacred. Hardly anything, actually. About the only thing that’s absolutely sacrosanct is my daughter’s bedtime story. This is because we have a twist on the usual bedtime-story routine that I flatter myself is ours and ours alone. I’m rather proud of it.

It began some years ago. We were traveling and accidentally forgot her storybooks. She was inconsolable at the thought of having to go to sleep without a bedtime story, so I improvised—something about a raccoon who’s freezing his ass off in the woods, but who finds a nice warm attic with fluffy blankets where he can curl up and sleep safely.

It was half-assed, plotless and derivative. (I swiped the idea from “Miss Suzy,” an oldie but goodie illustrated by the late great Arnold Lobel.) But she liked it. The next night, after a trip to Borders to score another copy of “Goodnight Moon” or something, she asked for the raccoon story again. This time, I expanded upon it. The raccoon woke up hungry and set off to find a snack. And our nightly tradition of what she calls “The Imaginating Story” was born.

Since then, every night before bedtime, we dutifully trudge through a book story (which we do purely pro forma so that I can fulfill my Responsible Parent’s obligation to read to the kid for 15 minutes day) and then, with a sigh of relief, we charge into The Imaginating Story.

These aren’t just stories. These are sagas. I’ll come up with a character, and we follow that character through whatever adventures I can dream up. Each night brings another episode in an epic that can go on for months or years at a stretch.

We’ve done several of them. The “Zaidy Yussel” series was one of my favorites, a story cycle about the adventures of my great-grandfather in Russia, where he was born, outwitting Baba Yaga, the famous witch from Russian folklore, and then continued on once he came to this country. He goes camping, gets kidnapped by the Osage Indians, becomes an Indian brave (maybe a little subconscious nod to Mel Brooks’ Yiddish-speaking Indians from “Blazing Saddles”), escapes, gets picked up by a boatful of riverboat gamblers, jumped ship, and painstakingly makes his way back up the Mississippi from Memphis.

We moved on to the story of The Greatest Thief in the World—that was a fun one—and then on to the story of Samira, a little girl from a fishing village on the Caspian Sea, and her quest to rescue her father and brother, who were picked up by pirates, who sold them to slave traders who shlepped them across the Mediterranean to Genoa (where vampires had taken over and Samira had to defeat them).

I’d like to say I have the discipline to plan out the stories in advance, but I usually think up the next installment on the spur of the moment. I frequently feel like a first year teacher who’s only one step ahead of her students and who frantically bones up on physics or biology the night before each lesson. But somehow, wing and a prayer, it works. I like the challenge. I also like the flexibility that the Imaginating Story format gives me. I can use it for practical matters.

When our dog finally gave up the ghost (with some assistance), it was, understandably, pretty traumatic. The vile beast’s presence in our family predated the daughter’s. He was a constant in her life. So for the next few months, we recounted his adventures as a puppy at the farm where he was born—saving foals from coyotes, baby chicks from rats, and falling in love with a fox and deciding whether to run off with her into the woods or stay at the farm. It helped her say good-bye to the old boy, who, his tendencies toward drooling, shedding, and chewing up book-bindings notwithstanding, was a good dog and deserved a good sendoff.

Making up stories helps me empower her, too. Our current story, which has been going on for nigh on to a year now, is about Stella Finkelkraut, who lives in the town of Waukepetonsett next to her best friend, Tubbs Teitelbaum. Stella wants a pet—as did my daughter when we began it—so her dad takes her to Animackity’s Animal Emporium, where she discovers the secret back room of the shop. That’s where Mr. Animackity keeps the magical animals: dragons, vampires, phoenixes, griffins, basilisks, sea serpents, etc. And thus begins Stella Finkelkraut’s adventures in the World Behind, the magical world that exists just behind our own.

Stella and Tubbs have, thus far, traveled to Arimaspea, restored Good King Romolan to his throne, saved a family of sasquatches, survived shipwrecks, ridden dragons, and defeated a whole host of evil magicians, marauding bands of trolls, cloaked assassins, dangerous beasts, and unfortunate circumstances with a combination of pluck, brains, and the kind of winsome eccentricity that characterizes her audience, my daughter.

One reason I keep the Imaginating Stories going is because children’s literature is, largely, dreck. Buying kids’ books is one of the most goddamn depressing tasks a conscientious parent can undertake. With rare exceptions, kids’ books fall into two categories: pablum or the kind of snarky nastiness that kids’ book authors employ as an attempt to be hip and contemporary. It’s either baby shit or Bratz dolls. There’s very little soul—almost nothing truly funny, empowering, or genuine. There’s very little that actually captures the whimsy, the wonder, the magic of childhood.

Maybe I’m being too hard on children’s book writers. Maybe it’s analogous to clothes-buying. You can get them off the rack, but tailor-made always fits better, and I’m creating stories tailored expressly for my daughter—bespoke stories, if you will.  

For whatever reason, she likes them better than the book stories. When bedtime is later than usual, forcing us to forego either the book story or the Imaginating Story, she invariably chooses the latter. And when I’m traveling, I set aside a chunk of every evening to call her so that we don’t miss even one night’s worth of on-the-spot fantasy.

I hope there’s some benefit there for my daughter. I hope she’s learning the magic and the wonder of creating one’s own stories. I hope she’s learning the power of imagination, and how to speak and think extemporaneously. And I hope that, once I’m dead, she’ll remember that her daddy, his myriad failings as a father and as a human being aside, loved her enough to put some effort into creating something that was uniquely hers—done for her alone.

As good as I think the Imaginating Story is for my daughter, I confess I like it too. It’s been an exercise in storytelling, in crafting a narrative. It’s like folk music. Much as Bob Dylan takes old tunes and passages from a zillion different sources and put his own twist on them, I’ve lifted shamelessly from other sources. Some of Zaidy Yussel’s adventures, for example, sound a lot like Brer Rabbit’s. Stella Finkelkraut once landed on an island more than a little reminiscent of the island of Krakatoa in William Pene du Bois’ magnificent “The Twenty-One Balloons.” And our saga about River’s adventures on the farm as a puppy owes a big debt to Thornton Burgess’s shamefully forgotten “Mother West Wind” stories.

It’s fun, too. I’ve always loved it when characters from one story show up in another, and I get to do that a lot. Baba Yaga, from the Zaidy Yussel stories, recently made a cameo appearance in the Stella Finkelkraut saga—she mentioned a little boy she’d known almost a hundred years ago. “Hey!” my daughter interrupted excitedly, “she’s talking about my ancestor!”

And Fenric Volk, the friendly werewolf who helped Samira get across the Black Sea, is about to make a reappearance in the Stella Finkelkraut story as well. I love doing this. Moving characters from story to story creates a sort of trans-story world—a world that belongs exclusively to me and my daughter.

But there’s something else there, too. For years, I’ve been working on a Serious Novel based on the life of my hero, Joseph Pulitzer. I’d like to think I’ll finish it some day. But having a full time job, two rambunctious kids, and a house, mortgage and car payments does seem to sap both one’s energy and ambition. The Imaginating Story, in its own way, has become my Serious Novel. Much as Mr. Holland never finished his symphony—the lives of his students became his opus—my daughter’s imagination may just become my own opus. It makes the idea of never finishing the Serious Novel a little easier to bear.