At a campground in the northern United States with signs posted at every entrance suggesting bear spray for a walk to the bathroom, I was taught a little something about energetic integrity.

My children found other children of all ages willing to join their hastily gathered roving band of warriors. They procured sticks from the woods and called them staffs. They wrapped those staffs with parachute cord which imbued them with legendary powers. They called empty campsites their bases and jousted with each other while the others circled to wait their turn.

As they picked up more compatriots they could be heard across the campground. Alliances were formed and boy-girl teams were created which even my most persuasive arguments about inclusivity failed to alter.

The thing about campgrounds is that you often meet the children but not the parents. There’s a shared agreement that if my child is in your site you (mostly) get supervisory powers.

I was enjoying making dinner in relative quiet when one of the younger girls broke away from the group and plopped down on the picnic bench next to me. The majority of the makeshift band was over the hill to find more suitable sticks and she had evidently decided on a solo quest for information.

She proceeded to ask 897 questions about the Indian curry I was making. She needed to know about the tofu, the spices, the size of the onion dice I had chosen, the coconut milk and why it wasn’t really drinking milk, the amount of time rice took, and how this was different than the homemade pizza she had for dinner. She interspersed these questions with declarative statements such as “you’re not the boss of me” and “I’m not going to the woods because I got a boo boo here,” pointing at the tiny band aid wrapped around her index finger.

Knowing my boys had been looking forward to playing with their friends all day, I had anticipated a bit of quiet. So her presence, her questions, and her tone grated on a nerve I didn’t know was irritable.

Had she been an adult, I likely would have made a polite excuse and retreated to the trailer but a strange stubbornness arose. So I answered her questions with no pretense, no work to think about how my answers would be taken, no thought of how my demeanor might affect others.

This sounds mean and maybe it was, but I treated it like a hostile deposition: answer only the question you’re asked.

“What is that?”

“Tofu.”

“Is it cheese?”

“No.”

“What’s that wet stuff on it?”

“Soybean juice.”

This went against my instinct to make all moments teachable; to overexplain in the hope to pass along a little wisdom and encourage curiosity. I didn’t have it that night and not for this person. You know how sometimes a human being puts a thumb on the part of you that says “trigger?” Well, this five-year-old found it and it only took her about a minute. Even her toddler voice grated because she sounded just like she’d been smoking for a lifetime, that gravelly I-have-a-chest-cold kind of tone.

Her willingness to obliviously exist inside my bubble of personal space ended up being a very curious thing because there was a tremendous weight lifted when I didn’t care. Like, really didn’t care. Wanted her to go away. Didn’t care if her parents came to retrieve her or yell at me – I was kind of prepared for it really, just take her away. So this is what it feels like not to carry the burden of caring what others thought.

For the first time since I was a young teenager the kettlebell of how I seemed was not weighing down my hands. There was nothing pretend and there was no carefulness. It was only me, and that version of me had little energy for anything. It was freeing and it was sad. Why did I let the line in front of me grow so long?

This girl rubbed me the absolute wrong way but in doing so, found the most fundamental ‘me’ there was. So kudos and a thank you to that recently turned five-year-old for showing me what freedom really felt like.

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