When will I become a Mermaid?
When we finally moved into a home with a bathtub, I was relieved. If I wanted to become a mermaid, I wouldn’t be able to do it without a bathtub, or at least that’s what the book “Becoming a Mermaid in 5 Easy Steps” told me.
We moved into the Bathtub House as I called it in my mind around my 7th birthday and it was the perfect timing for it because I was tall enough that my legs would be able to turn into the most beautiful fins. It was also the pinnacle of my obsession with becoming a mermaid, so all in all, the arrival of the bathtub in my life was absolute perfection.
Suddenly, I became the kind of person who was obsessed with taking baths. Before this, my mum would have to force me to take a bath or at least a shower. And I would perfunctorily clean myself as if it were an enormous chore, which it was.
But now as soon as I came home after school, I would rush to the bathroom dropping my cumbersome clothes on the way, and plop myself into the bathtub, waiting for my mother to come in and start up the taps. She was mystified by my sudden interest in being clean but chalked it up to another weird thing that her child was undertaking. Thankfully, I didn’t have any brothers or sisters who could come into the bath with me, so I spent as long as I could in the bathtub waiting for my fins to sprout. I wasn’t the most patient of people out there…
