Most days, it feels like I’m just moving through my life quietly — making decisions, undoing old ones, beginning again where I need to. It can feel internal, almost invisible, like something happening beneath the surface.
But it isn’t happening alone.
There’s a small pair of eyes in the room. Not watching in the way adults watch, not analysing or judging — just absorbing. The way children do, without effort or agenda. She doesn’t ask questions about my choices or my process. She simply lives alongside it.
And slowly, I’ve begun to realise that what feels like my private becoming is also the landscape she’s growing up inside.
She doesn’t hear the strategy behind my decisions. She notices the shape of the days. The way I start again when something doesn’t work. The way I hold myself when plans shift. She sees effort before outcome, choice before certainty.
Even at her age, she’s learning something subtle but steady:
a life isn’t something you’re handed fully formed.
It’s something you assemble, piece by piece, often while you’re still figuring it out.
There are things she can sense without having words for them yet. The moments where I choose differently than I once did. The places where old patterns end — not dramatically, but firmly. She’s watching me walk away from what doesn’t feel right anymore, even when it costs comfort or approval.
I don’t explain this to her. I don’t need to. She feels the shift.
She also sees my humanity. The days I’m tired. The moments I lose patience. The times I don’t know what comes next. And just as importantly, she sees me repair — steady myself, apologise when needed, try again. She’s learning that love doesn’t require perfection, only presence. That mistakes don’t end the story; they bend it.
Life hasn’t stayed in its original shape for us. Some things we thought were solid changed. Some certainties dissolved. She’s been there for all of it — not shielded from the truth but held inside it.
And she’s watching something else too: how safety can be rebuilt. How home can take new forms. How a woman can change course without falling apart.
She doesn’t know she’s collecting these moments. But she is. Quietly. Storing them somewhere deep. One day, they’ll surface — in friendships, in love, in the way she meets uncertainty when it arrives.
These aren’t instructions I’m giving her. They’re not lessons I’ve planned.
They’re simply the byproduct of becoming myself in her presence.
Because children don’t learn from what we tell them. They learn from how we live. And the life I’m building — imperfect, nonlinear, deeply human — may be something she stands on one day.
Not because I showed her how.
But because she saw me trying.
Rhi xx
