I am a Mermaid

I wanted to be a lot of things growing up as a child. It all stemmed upon what I was doing at the time or what I was surrounded by. Doing dance classes made me want to become a dancer, watching ice-skating, a skater. My dad was an electric engineer and as a kid I thought that meant he drove fire trucks for a living, so I wanted to be an engineer too. A soccer player, vet, and some others were mixed in the bunch. Those were all realistic things that I could grow up to be, but one thing I wanted to be more then anything was a mermaid.

 I had been swimming since I didn’t know how to walk. Maybe that’s why I still trip upstairs but can swim like a fish. I can vividly remember the smell of chlorine and the lady who had swim classes in her back yard. She literally yelled and looked like an intimidating red piece of rawhide from always being under the Arizona sun. She always wore a cap and dark glasses and would yell, “BREATHE” and then stick your head under the water as she moved your hands in freestyle motion. I quickly learned that when she bellowed, you better breathe or you would almost die waiting for the next breath. If only I was a mermaid, I could breathe underwater and never need to come up to BREATHE.

So I knew I could swim, but I knew I would never have fins. Blame it on The Little Mermaid who became a human, I thought I could become a mermaid. I had Ariel everywhere, bed sheets, dolls, shoes, and even a backpack. If I wasn’t going to be her, at least I could sport her everywhere I went. I remember playing in the bathtub with the Ariel Barbie and just wishing more then anything I could swim and talk with Flounder and do amazing twirls out of the water.

I played in the water, doing what people may think is the worm (in my mind swimming like a mermaid), in a kiddy pool that had 6 inches of water. I would sing the famous song from the movie and try and move my hair like her. When we finally got a real pool it was as if I was really living under the sea. When I invited my friends over that’s what we played, Mermaids. We dove, sang and pretended to talk under water.

Soon though somewhere down the road we learned that there was no school, or degree achieved that you could become a certified mermaid. To this day, when I first dive into a pool, I pretend that I am, just what I wanted to be my entire life, a mermaid