The Strength We Borrow Until It Becomes Our Own

There was a time in my life when I didn’t know what it felt like to be held. 
Not truly. Not without condition. 
I longed for a presence I had never really known — a kind of strength I had only imagined. 

And then, Anne-Maree arrived. 

When Emilia and I returned to the Waikato from Tasman in 2023, I was in a deep unravelling. 
Transition upon transition. My system stretched thin. My capacity low. 
And in the midst of that, I called in someone who could hold the kind of space I couldn’t yet hold for myself. 

I knew I was calling in something sacred — I called her our Earth Mother Gypsy Queen. 

What materialised was Anne-Maree — a woman and educator with a sage-like stillness, a softness wrapped in strength, a presence that felt like everything I had longed for and never quite had. 

She became a pillar. 
Not just in Emilia’s day-to-day care, but for me. 

Her presence offered a kind of containment I didn’t know how to ask for. 
She held the grounded maternal energy I had been trying so hard to cultivate but hadn’t yet embodied. 
She gave without overextending. She radiated without performing. 
She simply was — and in her being, I learned. 

When she announced she would be leaving her role in Emilia’s class to take on another role within the school, I was surprised by what came up. 

An old version of me would’ve panicked — scrambled to hold together the structure that had helped hold me. 

But this time, something was different. 
This time, I didn’t wobble. 
Because her strength had done its job — it had mirrored back the one I was building in myself. 

She had modelled what I didn’t know I could be. 
And now… I am becoming it. 

I felt grief, yes. Gratitude, absolutely. 
But not collapse. 
Not fear. 

Because I’m not in the same place I was when she arrived in or lives. 

Back then, I was still unravelling. 
Still rebuilding. 
Still learning how to come home to my body. 
Still navigating early motherhood without losing myself inside it. 

She stepped in during a time I didn’t even realise how much I needed someone like her. 
And now, as she steps out — I realise I have become the kind of presence I once looked for in others. 

This is the power of embodied examples. 

They don’t tell us what to do. 
They don’t rush us to be where we’re not. 
They simply live in their truth, and by doing so, invite us into our own. 

Anne-Maree didn’t teach me strength. 
She modelled it. 
And in being near her, I remembered the version of me that had always existed beneath the noise — the one who could be the steady one, the safe one, the pillar. 

We don’t become strong by force. 
We become strong by being seen in our softness and loved anyway. 

That is what she offered. 
And that is what I now offer to myself — and to Emilia. 

So here I am. 
Holding the very container I used to seek. 
Not perfectly. Not without faltering. 
But with presence. With trust. With a steadiness that’s slowly become my own. 

And if you’re in a season where you’re still leaning, still looking for the ones who show you what’s possible, let me tell you: 

That doesn’t make you weak. 
That makes you wise. 

Let yourself be held. 
Let yourself borrow the strength of another, just long enough to remember your own. 
And when the scaffolding falls away, when the pillar steps back, you’ll realise you are still standing — and maybe, just maybe, becoming that pillar too. 

Rhian xx