The beauty of mermaids

Once upon a time, there was a woman who worked very hard yet still doubted she could do it. Some days it took all of her strength to draw breath and place one foot in front of the other.

When she was younger, the woman had known a very bad man who broke her into tiny little pieces and made her give up something very precious, yet she picked herself up. She spent a year running from the man and the decision. She ran over the land and swam across the sea, but when she returned the bad man was waiting for her, right where she'd left him, in her old life. When the woman had almost succeeded in destroying her body, when she was a mere shadow of her former self, she met a wolf. He was a sly and cunning wolf who tricked the woman by dressing as a knight in shining armour. He protected her from the world and all its evils by building a fortress around her. Around this fortress he dug a moat. The moat kept friends and foes out alike, and the beauty (and peril) of the moat was that it was invisible. Nobody knew it was there, but it was. By the time their cubs were born, the knight's armour had lost its shine and it began to tarnish. The wolf had to constantly buff his armour to keep his true identity safe.

One day, the woman began a new journey and she met a shimmer of mermaids. The woman gazed longingly at the mermaids, awe-struck. She held back and admired their spirit, strength, courage, beauty, skill, love, and she was intimidated. She saw the mermaids as all-powerful and could not comprehend how she would ever be good enough to swim with them. She thought that her tail might be too damaged or her scales not shiny enough. When she finally accepted the mermaids' help and was admitted to the inner sanctum of the shimmer, she could see that their strength and power and beauty and courage and wisdom was not due to their perfection, but rather their imperfections.

The mermaids helped the woman build a raft and she asked them for a map. They didn't have one, but showed her that she had had her own map and compass all along, and they taught her how to use them. The woman was scared of the water, so she kept the raft and the map and the compass locked away. One day the wolf's armour was so tarnished that it fell to pieces. He could no longer disguise his claws or his big teeth or his snarl, so the woman unlocked the raft and the map and the compass. She loaded her cubs and her possessions onto the raft, then held her breath as she launched herself into unknown waters. The wolf was persistent and tried to catch the woman and the cubs, but whenever the waters got choppy or the wolf tried to sink the raft, the shimmer of mermaids were by the woman's side.

When the woman got to what she thought was her destination, she looked around and realised that she too was now a mermaid, part of the shimmer. Her fellow mermaids revealed themselves to her with a knowing smile, a kind word, a dose of tough love, a hug of encouragement, whatever she needed. The shimmer was ferocious and protective, so devoted and loyal that the woman felt she had been saved. A mermaid guide asked her what she planned to do next and the woman realised that she hadn't reached her destination at all. She also realised that the bad man and the wolf had peeled the layers of her self back and that she no longer knew who she was or what she wanted.

The woman came to see that when the other mermaids were not being mermaids, they were something else equally as important. She could see that she had spent such a long time running from the bad man and the wolf, and trying to be a mermaid, that she'd forgotten that she was also a woman. Some days she was a mermaid: she battled the storms and the waves and enjoyed moments of serenity and breathtaking beauty. Some days she wondered why she had wanted to be a mermaid at all, and she could see why some mermaids no longer wanted to be mermaids. Sometimes the waves were relentless and just too high to withstand, sometimes the water was cold and dry land looked safer and more appealing, sometimes it was exhausting to be constantly fighting the tide.

Unlike other stories, this is not the end. The woman is a mermaid, but she is also a woman. The strands of the story are not tied together neatly, the woman is not rescued, and she isn't waiting for anyone else to rescue her. The wolf is a shadow that dips in and out of the woman's life, but she no longer lives in a fortress surrounded by an invisible but powerful moat. The woman will be a mermaid for a very long time, she will meet other women on their quest to join the shimmer and, when she is battle-weary from fighting the waves that threaten to dash her against the rocks, she will put out a siren call and the shimmer will swim in her direction. That's the beauty of mermaids.