Today I was watching a video on YouTube. It was nothing dramatic. Nothing particularly extraordinary. Just a mum and her little daughter preparing her backpack for her first day of primary school. And I got emotional. Really emotional.

At first I didn’t even completely understand why. I was watching them choosing where to put things, sticking name labels on pencils, decorating her diary, talking about school, friends, teachers and what her first day was going to be like. Just a mum preparing her daughter for school. But there was something in the way she was doing it that completely melted me.

At one point, the mum wrote a little message inside her daughter’s diary so that when she opened it at school, she would remember that her mum was with her and that she loved her. She drew hearts and told her that even when she was there without her, she could look at that message and remember how loved she was. And I thought: fuck. This is love. Not the huge cinematic version of love. Not declarations. Not drama. Not intensity. This. A stupid little message inside a school diary. “I’m not physically there, but you can carry the certainty that I love you with you.”

Then they started talking about personal space. The little girl said that she likes having her own space and doesn’t like people being constantly on top of her. And her mum told her that her space matters. Everyone has their own space. Other people have to respect hers, and she has to respect theirs. The little girl said something incredibly simple: if someone wants to be with her and she doesn’t want to, she can leave. It’s her life. She decides. And her mum reinforced it.

Later, the mum explained something else to her. She told her that sometimes when you set boundaries or say no, people might call you rude or unfriendly simply because they don’t like hearing your no. And she told her that she has to learn, from childhood, to say no and to expect that no to be respected. And again I thought: fuck. This is love too. Teaching a child that her no matters is love. Teaching her that her body and her space belong to her is love. Teaching her that other people’s boundaries matter too is love.

Then they started practising for the first day of school. Her mum pretended to be the teacher and asked her questions. They practised introducing herself, talking about what she likes and what she wants to do. Then her mum asked her: “How are you going to make a new friend?” The little girl said that if she saw somebody feeling sad, she would give them her hand and tell them, “I’m here with you. You don’t have to cry.” Then her mum asked how she would approach somebody she didn’t know. And together they talked about being kind. And smiling. A smile. Such a tiny fucking thing.

And for some reason, that was the moment something really clicked inside my head. Because I wasn’t just watching a mother telling her daughter that she loved her. I was watching love teaching. I was watching a child being taught how to approach the world. How to approach another human being. How to be kind. How to recognise her own boundaries. How to respect somebody else. How to say no. How to understand that her no matters. How to walk into a room full of people she doesn’t know and think: smile, be kind, introduce yourself. And behind all of that was this incredibly simple message: you are loved. You are safe with me. Your feelings matter. Your space matters. Your voice matters. Now go and meet the world.

And suddenly I understood something I have been reading about for years. Something I have talked about in therapy. Something I thought I already understood. What we experience as children shapes what we recognise later. But I think, until today, part of that idea was still theoretical to me. Today I saw it. I watched it happening.

Because before we ever fall in love as adults, before we have partners, before we know anything about romantic relationships, somebody is already teaching us what love looks like. Not necessarily by explaining it, but by showing us. In thousands of tiny moments that probably seem completely insignificant at the time. A hand. A smile. A boundary being respected. A parent listening. A little message hidden inside a school diary. Someone saying: “No means no.” Someone saying: “Your space belongs to you.” Someone saying: “I won’t be there, but I’m still with you.”

And if you grow up with those things, you have seen them before. You have a reference. It doesn’t mean you will never have a bad relationship. It doesn’t mean you will automatically know how to navigate every human being you meet. Life is obviously much more complicated than that. But somewhere inside you there is an example. You have seen what care can look like.

And while I was watching that video, I realised that part of what was making me so emotional was that I was watching something I didn’t have as a child. My reference for love was different. And when the first examples you are given are not healthy ones, sometimes you grow up recognising things as normal that aren’t healthy at all. Sometimes things feel familiar, and we mistake familiar for normal. Sometimes we even mistake familiar for love.

And I thought about my adult relationships. I thought about things I accepted. Things I tried to understand instead of walking away from. Things I normalised. Times when I needed fifty pieces of evidence before allowing myself to believe that something wasn’t right. And suddenly I wondered how much of adulthood, for some of us, is actually about learning for the first time what other people were shown as children.

Maybe some of us have to learn later that love doesn’t require fear. That affection and control are not the same thing. That somebody wanting access to you doesn’t mean you owe them access. That your boundaries are not cruelty. That saying no does not make you a bad person. That being loved should not require becoming smaller. That care can actually be quiet. That sometimes love looks incredibly fucking boring. It looks like somebody putting a sticker on a pencil.

And maybe that is exactly why the video affected me so much. Because I could see this little girl building a reference in real time. She probably wasn’t thinking about any of this. She was excited about her backpack, her stickers, her pencils, her first day of school. She was just being a child. But I was watching as an adult. And I could see something she probably couldn’t see yet. She was learning what love looks like.

There is another part of this that made me laugh a little afterwards, because I know how I can look from the outside. I have pink hair. I swear constantly. I’m fiercely independent. I can have a very strong “I don’t give a fuck” attitude. I’ve built quite a good armour around myself over the years. I can look tough. And then apparently all you need to completely destroy me is a YouTube video of a mum putting stickers on her daughter’s school supplies.

Because underneath the armour, I am ridiculously sensitive. I feel things deeply. Tiny gestures get me. Kindness gets me. Tenderness gets me. Seeing someone being genuinely cared for gets me. And maybe the armour and the sensitivity aren’t opposites at all. Maybe sometimes we build armour precisely because there is something incredibly soft underneath it.

I don’t feel sad that I watched that video. Actually, I’m glad I did. Because there was something beautiful about realising that even if nobody showed you something when you were five, it doesn’t mean you can never learn it. You can learn what love looks like later. You can change your references. You can discover that something you once thought was normal isn’t normal at all. You can learn boundaries at 20, 30, 40, 46. You can learn that your no matters. You can learn that you don’t have to disappear inside another person to love them. You can learn that being cared for doesn’t have to hurt.

Maybe we don’t get to choose the first definition of love we are given. But perhaps, eventually, we get to rewrite it. And today, completely unexpectedly, a mum and a little girl preparing a backpack for the first day of school reminded me of that.