The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid was my lethal text. It possessed me one day as I lay in bed reading Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales during one of my frequent absences from school. If I recall it was in the fall or winter of 1959. I was eight years old. I had been in bed for days recovering from measles, and reading one children's classic after another. Alice In Wonderland. Huckleberry Finn. Black Beauty.

Where did all these books come from? They just arrived in a stack on my night table and I read them, one by one. My mother hovered around the house, bringing me drinks and meals. I was a bookworm. The shades in my bedroom were drawn to shield my eyes from harsh rays of sunlight. Looking back, it's as if someone planned this intensive immersion in juvenile literature. What for?

I got through The Ugly Ducking, The Princess and the Pea unfazed ...  but The Little Mermaid left me shattered. My mother found me weeping in my bed and asked what was wrong. She cursed the Brothers Grimm but it wasn't their fault. Wrong author. It was those Scandinavians, my mother's indirect Viking ancestors who made her daughter cry all afternoon.

I took the Little Mermaid to heart as only an 8 year old girl can. I was her, she was me. Hers was the story of my life told to me by an evil witch. There was no escaping her fate. I knew it would all come true and in the end I would turn to foam because I was that little Mermaid.

I would meet my prince and save his life at the expense of my own. I would always live in the sea. I would never have a human soul or master the human tongue. I was an underwater creature capable of superhuman courage but ultimately doomed. No one would ever understand me because I hailed from a watery world that predated civilization. I had known my prince in prehistoric times but he had forgotten and taken on the new degenerate ways. He had a destiny to play out on land where I would always be a freak, incapable of speech, never at home with his circle of friends and hangers on. I hated life at court. I wanted the freedom of the ocean.

We had married in a secret ceremony but the witch had stolen our written vows and baked them in a poisoned cake. We were prisoners of her spell.

That was the problem in a nutshell that nothing could crack.

I would spend my life repeating the fairy tale in scene after scene, always failing at the last minute to reverse the plot. The deck would always be stacked against me. The prince would always be entranced, bewitched, beguiled and clueless.

I would reap my reward eventually but only after a few centuries of toiling upward.

All this was revealed to me that day in bed at age 8. My mother probably complained to the psychiatrists who were the ones sending me the books. Who else could it be? Books don't just walk into your room-- not a whole library of them.

They were programming me with books but on that day it backfired.


This event at age  8 is one of the few memories I have carried from childhood. When I look back, there are other memories wrapped in unanswered questions and weird blanks.

A few months earlier, in July 1959, our family spent a month in Toronto so that my brother and I could attend a "summer school" - while I have vivid recollections of arriving in Toronto and staying in Mississauga at the home of relatives who (conveniently) were traveling to the UK all that month, the summer.school I attended daily has always been a total blank. We never talked about it. For me it ended with a visit to a doctor who told my mother I "might" have got my period early (age 8 is awfully early).

Now I think I had a sexual encounter somewhere - either at the summer school or my room in the basement where I slept alone. But with whom? I have no idea.

I have finally reinterpreted this event as the story of a little mernaid who meets her lover too early, isn't ready for a relationship in the real world, fails to communicate who she is to the prince (who is already living a public life on land) and ends up returning to the sea to live out the rest of her life as a damaged creature- but at least she acquires a human soul through her own efforts. She makes her own mistakes and sometimes suffers consequences, but at least she is not forced into a life she wouldn't have chosen and was never suited for.


True Love only gets you so far. Then you're on your own again in an aftermath of failed hope, endlessly picking up the pieces and trying to remember what puzzle they came from.