When I was a toddler I wanted to be a mermaid so badly that I slept with a can of Chicken of the Sea tuna. My mother never made me feel weird for doing so. I had seen Charo dressed up as a mermaid on some 1970's variety show, thought she was beautiful, and wanted to look just like her.I believe my obsession with mermaids ended after my mom read "The Little Mermaid" to me. Now, this was not the sanitized 1990's Disney version of the story. In the original, the mermaid must kill the prince or she will die and turn into sea foam. She cannot kill him, and so sea foam she becomes.
The other day I was at Dog Beach in Del Mar, just a few miles down the road from Carlsbad beach, where my sisters and I scattered our mother's ashes. It was the first time I saw the Pacific Ocean since we scattered her ashes in June. I felt so close to her, watching the sea foam lap at my feet.
I looked up the original passage of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" about the sea foam, and I felt as if the relationship I had with my mother had come full circle:
"The sun rose up from the waters. Its beams fell, warm and kindly, upon the chill sea foam, and the little mermaid did not feel the hand of death. In the bright sunlight overhead, she saw hundreds of fair ethereal beings. They were so transparent that through them she could see the ship's white sails and the red clouds in the sky. Their voices were sheer music, but so spirit-like that no human ear could detect the sound, just as no eye on earth could see their forms. Without wings, they floated as light as the air itself. The little mermaid discovered that she was shaped like them, and that she was gradually rising up out of the foam."
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