My twelve-year-old wandered into the kitchen while I was chopping vegetables. Watched me for a beat. Then said, almost to herself: You seem more relaxed. Like, in general. Compared to a few years ago.

She could see it from two feet away. I'd been too close to notice.

This is the season finale and the real version of how I got here. Not the one that opens with wisdom. The one that starts in a bathtub in September 2021, with a seven-year-old who just wanted to sleep, and a mother who couldn't stop, and a husband who heard the crying and said kids forget.

She didn't remember the bathtub. She noticed me in the kitchen at four o'clock.

That was all the evidence I needed.

Season 2 is coming—and it starts closer to home than you think.

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I was nine years old when I asked for a ring at a Pow Wow—a little play thing, probably 50 cents, sitting in a foam slot in a plain box. It caught the light just enough to make me feel like a princess. I asked for it the way children ask before they've learned to shrink their wants down to something more acceptable. She said yes.

That night, my mother made me give it back.

I didn't know it then, but something got written into my body that lived there for decades. This episode is about what gets handed to us before we have words for it, and what becomes possible for our children when we finally decide to look at it.

Subscribe to Substack for weekly show notes and free meditations: https://substack.com/@theunhurriedmama

This podcast has a book coming. If you want to be the first to read it, the early reader form is waiting for you: https://tinyurl.com/pmeydthm

You know the girl you were before the world got loud? Before you learned to make yourself smaller, to move at everyone else’s pace, to be so good at the showing up that you forgot—she was still in there. Waiting. Unhurried.

She didn’t go anywhere. She just went silent the way we do when no one comes. And she has been holding a place for you this whole time.

This is a letter to her. And an invitation to write one of your own. She just needs to know you remembered.

She kept the door open for you.

Subscribe to Substack for weekly show notes and free meditations: https://substack.com/@theunhurriedmama