Okay, she was adopted. But she's not a fish.

On a recent rainy Sunday, Husband was working and the rest of us decided to have a Movie Morning. A Movie Morning is when Mommy can’t think of anything Mother-of-the-Yearish to do, so she decides to bond with the children via the Disney Channel, which requires more effort than you might think.
The movie playing that morning, as described in the on-screen blurb, was about a boy who starts turning into a fish on his 13th birthday. That seemed a bit quirky, but innocuous enough, and it does seem that children transform themselves as they enter the teen years.
Okay, but listen. It turns out the boy was adopted, and his birth mother is a mermaid who abandoned him on a shrimp boat when he was a baby. The shrimp boat captain and his wife found him and raised him. His only remarkable feature was his tremendous propensity for swimming.
Now that he’s 13, his true heritage is beginning to, um, swim to the surface. Every time he touches water, he grows scales and fins. Seriously. This causes him to lose some popularity points at school.
Then he begins to see his “real mom” whenever he happens by the harbor. She is swimming around waiting for him, gracefully flopping her silvery tail. You see, it’s time for him to join her and fully transform into a “merman.”
Eventually his adoptive parents understand that a merman’s got to do what a merman’s got to do, and they let him go. The plan is for him to spend a year with his “real mom” swimming around the ocean. Then, somehow, he’ll be prepared to come back ashore and be part-human again.
The Diva and I were riveted: me out of horror and the Diva, I think, out of sheer perplexity and perhaps some slight concern regarding her love of the water. But I couldn’t turn it off because I was afraid it would be like saying to my adopted daughter WE ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT GOING TO WATCH A MOVIE ABOUT SOME ADOPTED KID.
Now, I’m all for openness and candor when discussing with my children the fact that they were adopted. And thank you, Disney, for helping all of your viewers understand that children who were adopted are so weird and unnatural that they very likely will morph into different species as they age. My children, for example, were hatched underneath the fluorescent lights of an incubator. Our goal is to teach them to fly the coop before they’re 18 so we can avoid paying for college.
Of course my children have birth mothers, and I’m eternally grateful to those women for entrusting me with these gifts of life.
But am I not their real mother? Who feeds them Cheez-Its for breakfast? Who lets them skip brushing their teeth at night? Who taught them the words to “McDonald’s is your kind of place/hamburgers in your face”?
And who will be there when they turn 13? It will be me. I don’t think they’ll grow fins and scales, but if they do, they won’t be swimming out to sea without me. We’ll just move to the Caribbean, I guess, and live on a houseboat and I’ll learn how to SCUBA dive, and together we’ll brave whatever the tide brings in.