A healer I work with occasionally asked me to address my inner child as “my little girl.” It’s softer, she said. More familiar.

By now, many of us understand the concept of the inner child—the part of us that holds old wounds, shapes how we move through the world, determines the love and validation we seek, and the gaps we try to fill. Tending to the unmet needs of that child is often the portal to the deepest kind of healing we can experience as adults.

My work is alongside children in the formation of those very wounds. My hope is to soften them—to create space for self-awareness and integration, rather than empty chasms sealed off by time and pain. No one moves through childhood without wounds; it’s impossible. They are no one’s fault. They are simply a byproduct of leaving the flawless plenitude of the womb and entering a world full of humans, each carrying their own stories and pain.

I think of this often at school. What stories are these children already beginning to carry? How do they see themselves? What needs are they asking to be met—especially through behaviors that appear disruptive or clingy? How can we help them grow emotional literacy and tools to navigate the hard things—not to avoid them, but to make sense of them? How can we honor who they are and how they exist in the world?

Essentially, how do we raise children who know themselves well enough that, when the sticky parts arise, they can meet those parts with love, compassion, and gentleness? So those parts become portals to their healing, too.

This idea of the inner child—my little girl in particular—has been heavy on my mind since last weekend. I canceled our camping trip at the last minute, following what felt like a wave of negative feedback on Friday. In truth, I may have latched onto that feedback to justify something I didn’t want to admit: that I was already mentally and physically depleted. That the idea of hauling gear into the woods to set up camp in the mud—especially as a single parent—felt like more than I could manage. Especially when my own girls are less than resilient in inclement weather these days.

There was also the familiar weight of feeling responsible for everyone’s experience, mixed with the disappointment of not being able to control the weather when I’d dreamed of a sunny weekend romping in the creek. And the potluck was unraveling—several families who’d signed up to bring food were waffling on coming at all.

None of it was huge on its own, but together it became heavy. The task of making a group decision while feeling unclear and overwhelmed tipped me over the edge, and canceling the trip felt like the simplest, most relieving choice. I had talked with the teachers, received their support, and felt good about my decision…

Until family after family messaged me to ask if they could still go. A deluge of texts reactivated all the anxiety I’d tried to quiet. Of course, I should have expected this. I wanted people to camp if they wanted to—I just didn’t want to feel responsible for it. And I didn’t want to go myself.

That’s a hard thing to admit when you’ve built your life and work around being a physically and emotionally resilient outdoor wanderer.

By Saturday afternoon, the messages kept coming. I found myself obsessively checking the weather, hoping for a downpour that would justify my decision, make me feel less guilty—less like I’d failed the community. But the skies cleared after a heavy morning rain. Families went out. More messages came. And I spiraled.

A friend offered reassurance: You made the best decision you could. It’s okay to choose rest. They were all things I knew to be true, and yet, none of them soothed me.

Because the part of me that was activated wasn’t rational. She was young. Tender. Emotional. She was the version of me who cried when she got 99% on a test because it wasn’t perfect. The one terrified of disappointing anyone, even a little, as if it meant she wasn’t allowed to exist. She felt responsible for other people’s happiness. And each message that hinted someone might be disappointed sent her into panic.

She didn’t need to be reassured she wasn’t wrong. She needed to feel the fear of being wrong—and let it move through her.

So I went into my closet and cried. For a long time.

Despite being a seemingly emotive person, crying is hard for me. I struggle to let go of control long enough to fully feel. I don’t want to make too much noise or disrupt anyone. I don’t want to be seen in my pain. But the closet under the stairs, dark and small, became a cocoon—safe enough to let the tears come. To give my little girl the space she needed. I howled and heaved and offered that girl just what she needed— my full attention, my willingness to sit with her, even in her fear that she was wrong, my love, my time. It wasn’t conditional; it was me showing up fully to be with her in that experience.

I still felt sensitive afterward, but I also felt settled, clearer.

As I sat with these feelings in my closet sanctuary, I found myself thinking about my own children—especially my eldest daughter—and how our most challenging relationships often become our greatest teachers. I kept thinking about the suggestion to call the inner child my little girl. I thought about my own little girls—my babies. Specifically Melby, who already seems to carry her own imprint of perfectionism and anxiety, intensity and fear.

Another thing that’s hard to admit as an educator—someone who has built a life around working with young children—is that my own children trigger the hell out of me. Especially Melby. She is a mirror of me in so many ways, and sometimes it’s so painful to look at that reflection.

And yet: she, too, is a portal to my healing. She is my little girl. A reflection of the wounded one inside me, and a living embodiment I can now love and tend and nurture into something more whole than I once was. When those more challenging parts show up in her—most often in direct reflection of ways in which I struggle too—how can I meet her with supreme kindness?

How can I say to her not that 99% is enough, but that even 1% is enough, as long as she is showing up fully as herself? That all I ask is authenticity. There is nothing to prove. I don’t want to convince her she’s enough; I want to assure her that being herself is all that’s required.

I want to repeat it again and again until she feels it in her bones and it ripples back through time, through her previously unborn body, into the little girl within me—so I feel it, too.

Being yourself is all that’s required.

As the year comes to a close, my deepest hope is that you’ve felt that here. That your children have felt seen and welcome, just as you are. That you have, as well.

On a walk shortly after my tears, Mary Oliver’s words came to me again, as they so often do: “You do not have to be good/ You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting,/ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”

You do not have to be good.

The further I go on the journey of forest school, the clearer and more simple it all becomes: our work is simply to be ourselves—and, as educators, to create an environment in which it’s simplest for children to do just that. When we know ourselves, we can love. We can learn. We can grow. We can create boundaries. We can expand and stretch and connect and become.

Everything else is extra.

For all of your selves, for all of the comfort and discomfort and learning of this space, for this beautiful year together, for our animal bodies ever reminding us where we came from, for all the little ones—both those at school and those inside you, dear readers—I am so deeply grateful. Thank you, thank you.