My preschool teacher once asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

We were sitting in a circle, barely old enough to know that growing up meant being like mom and dad and we raised our hands one by one and said what we aspired to become.

The boy next to me said that he wanted to be Batman.

He puffed up his chest and was so proud of himself and I thought it sounded great, as if he could really become that.

The teacher looked down at me and asked,

"Angela, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

I didn't have to think hard about my answer, and being 4, it made great sense to me.

"I want to be a mermaid!"

The girl next to me snapped her finger as if I had taken the hidden answer she was looking for.

The teacher looked at me and said, "Mermaids don't exist. Pick something else."

She said it with such solidity, the way adults said things that left no room for argument or imagination.

I am sure the look on my face did not betray the horror I felt. I was four, how was I supposed to know that mermaids weren't real? My whole life, all 1,460 days of it, was a lie.

"But...I want to be a mermaid."

I could hear the sound of crashing waves, like plates hitting linoleum floor and my four year old dream of wiggling freely through water bursting before I knew the alphabet by heart.

She stared me down, "I said, 'pick something else.'"

"But Johnny wanted to be Batman and I wanna be a mermaid!"

The next ten minutes were filled with sobbing, shakey four year old gasps as I tried to regain my place in a world without mermaids. Those ten minutes were also filled with a 70 year old nun dragging a weeping child down the hall to the principal's office by the arm because she "refused to participate in class activities".

That was the day I learned two pearls of truth. The first being, mermaids don't exist, and despite how badly I wanted to be one, I couldn't.

The second is, if you're four years old and crying in the principal's office over the phone to your Italian mother, she will most definitely come down to the school to pick you up. Just the same as she will threaten bodily harm to the nun that told her toddler that mermaids aren't actually real.