Why I Keep Breaking the Fairy Tales
My daughter was in Grade One when it started.
Her class was doing a fractured fairy tales unit and she came home and wanted to do her own versions using the Little Lightkeepers. So we sat down together and wrote Ginny. The gingerbread girl who runs because being seen feels the same as being eaten. The one who doesn't need to be found — she just needs to feel safe.
We wrote it as a script. We learned it together. And somewhere in the middle of working it out I realised — this is how they learn. Not from being told what to do. From watching characters they love get put in messy situations and find their way through.
That was the beginning. It hasn't stopped since.
The thing about fairy tales is that the original endings are a bit brutal when you look at them closely. The chaos-maker gets punished. The one who takes what isn't hers gets chased away scared. The slow one wins but only because the fast one failed.
I kept thinking about the kids who see themselves in the wrong character. The child who IS the chaos sometimes. The one who takes up too much space and knows it and doesn't know how to stop. The one who moves too fast or needs too much quiet or wanders into the wrong room and falls asleep.
Those kids deserve to see what happens next. Not punishment. Not being chased away. Something truer than that.
In our Three Little Pigs, Chloe the Cloud blows the houses down. She is not evil. She just has so much inside her that sometimes it comes out all at once and she cannot stop it. And afterwards she stands in the wreckage and waits to find out if she is still welcome.
She is. They invite her in. Board games and warm fairy fizz.
One of my kids watched that and said "that's like me when I get really mad." And I thought — yes. That is exactly the point.
In our Goldilocks, Snowflake wanders into rooms that are too loud and too busy for her particular heart. She runs when they come home. But while she is running she finds a quiet snowy glade and some paints and she finds her thing. The thing that makes her heart feel like — yes. This is me.
She didn't need to be fixed. She just needed to find her own room.
The characters grow through these stories in ways they cannot in a straight narrative. They get put in situations that are uncomfortable and messy and real. They misunderstand each other. They take things without asking. They run away. They guard things too tightly because they are lonely.
And then they find their way back to each other.
Always safe. Always feelings first. Always with the understanding that being messy and wonderful and figuring it out as you go is not a flaw.
That's just life. In Twinkleblossom Wood and everywhere else.
We keep making these because my daughter started something in Grade One that turned out to be bigger than either of us knew. New stories are coming. New characters getting into new kinds of trouble and finding their way home.
Come and find the one that sounds like your child.