Sophia wanted to be a mermaid before she wanted almost anything else. Not a swimmer, not a girl who liked to float. A mermaid. She watched The Little Mermaid so many times I could recite the songs from another room without ever meaning to learn them.

She swam competitively for years, face in the water, breathing on a count. Now she rows for her university. Hours on the water most days, out before the rest of the city is up. She spent all those years moving under the surface. Now she moves across the top of it.

Then Aria arrived, my brother’s daughter, eleven years behind her, wanting the same thing. Nine now. She goes into the water like she’s been invited, straight in, no testing the temperature with one foot first. Dives, comes up laughing, goes back down. Whatever is happening under there is better than whatever is happening up here and she wants all of it.

I painted Aria when she was smaller. Bent over the surface with her hair pulled up and loose strands falling forward, looking down at something I didn’t paint in. I gave her a tail the color of oceans I’ve actually stood in front of, not cartoon teal, blue going green going blue again, the color of water that’s actually cold. I didn’t give her a face. I couldn’t get it right, and then I understood why. She wasn’t supposed to be looking back at me.

It took me a while to see that the girl in the painting could have been either of them.

The tail is only the equipment. What they want is what the water does to you: no weight, no edges, every direction available at once. Nobody actually wants to be a fish. They want to move the way a fish moves.

Mine was always a bird. Not the feathers. The flight.

I’ve been drawing and painting as long as I can remember, mostly on paper, long before either of them existed. When Sophia was five or six I signed her up for an art class with Katayoon, and it turned out Katayoon taught adults too. I was home with her every day and I wanted to keep making things. So I took it. Fifteen years later I still go.

That’s where I get what they get in the water. It’s the only thing that gets me out of my own head. Nothing holding me down, no right direction, nothing waiting on the other side of it. I can put a color down and be wrong and go somewhere else with it. It’s why there’s a painting of a girl with a tail at all. I wasn’t only painting her. I was doing the same thing she was.

Nobody arranged it. Both of them went for the water before anybody taught them to swim.

Tell me what does it for you. Water, a canvas, a road, a kitchen at six in the morning. I want to know what yours is.

My teacher is Katayoon Moghaddam-Soroush, @katayoonarts, who taught my daughter before she taught me and who has become one of my dearest friends. She runs classes, workshops, and camps on Long Island for all ages. If you’ve ever wanted to pick up a brush, find her.