I learned the bird women description of sirens when I was very young and the mermaids thing confused the hell out of me when I first encountered it.

When I was in maybe fourth grade I drew a picture of a siren. It was it complicated image for me at the time with a whole background and an off-center composition and a label declaring what she was all in full Crayola colored pencil color. My siren was singing on a rock with her hands clutched in front of her and a feather between her fingers. She was all brown but for her head, like a bald eagle. I really loved that drawing and was very proud of it.

And then I lost it on the way home from school one day. I don’t know how that happened exactly because I don’t remember how I was carrying my things, but I was devastated when I went to show it off to someone and it was gone. I was determined to get it back and decided to go searching the streets after dinner.

My family thought this was a waste of time and did not bother to help me do it. So I retraced my path to school and from school and to the friends house that I went to after school on my own. I had this hope that the siren I had drawn would lead me to find the paper.

I didn’t find it the first night after losing it so I decided to go back out the next night. On the third night of looking for a piece of copy paper in the streets, I saw a small square of white among the bricks on the road leading up to my friends house. I ran over to it, unfolded the paper that had been pressed firmly into fours by passing cars and stained around those folds and found my siren.

I was so happy to see her again and so afraid I would lose her on the way back that I stuck the drawing inside my shirt. When I came home my dad thought I had come back empty-handed again but showed him the drawing. I think he was actually impressed that I’d found it, and was maybe actually impressed that I had been so dedicated to it. In retrospect, I think he should have helped me look for it because I was probably like an 8 year old wandering around in the middle of the streets looking at the pavement trying to find a piece of paper. And, you know, be supportive of the things that are clearly important to your child, like artwork? If they’re wandering the streets after school everyday, maybe that’s a thing they’re invested in.

After all that, rather than just let me be excited and appreciate what I had and what I’d done, I was asked why I had drawn the siren incorrectly and why she was a bird lady and not a mermaid. I cherished that drawing because of the unlikelihood that it would have ever come back to me and I always preferred the bird lady interpretation to what was just essentially a mermaid, which I also loved but felt strongly were a different thing, but I never showed it to anybody else because nobody else seemed to understand how hard I’d worked on the feathers and how incredible it was that I had gotten it back and were just focused on telling me that it was the wrong creature.

I literally just looked something up about it 2 weeks ago and discovered that my siren had been legitimate after years of thinking of them as bird people and really wanting to draw more of them but not telling a single soul because they were ‘wrong.’ So the odyssey post is strangely timely.

I think I’ll paint one.