8 Is Great - Like Anya
- Agnieszka Wolsoncroft
- Aug 2
- 7 min read
by Agnieszka Wolsoncroft
It was 5.30 on Monday morning when she appeared.
We heard her before we saw her – the small, certain footsteps of a child who knows exactly where she is going. She walked into the dining room wearing her tiara.
She had worn it the night before too, at the family dinner on Sunday, when she sat at the restaurant table with the people who love her and watched me carry in the cake I had made – number 8 in special cream, with ANYA written in pink frosting along the bottom and a little heart beside it. She had blown the candles out and opened presents and been celebrated in the way she deserves, fully and with great joy.
And then on Monday morning, at 5.30am, she put the tiara back on.
Because it was still her birthday. Obviously.
We had prepared the dining room for her – the rainbow balloon shaped like the number 8, the Happy Birthday banner strung across the window, her birthday morning waiting for her exactly as planned. She stood in the doorway and took it all in. Then she looked up at me with that smile. The one that rearranges the furniture of your heart.
“Is it really all for me?”
It really, truly is. All of it, every single bit.
A year ago, Anya was seven and putting letters together into words. This week, she finished reading a whole book by herself.
Let me say that again, because I want you to feel what that means.
She arrived in Australia at just over six years old not knowing how to write or speak a single word of English. Not one word. She came from “the big house with many children” – that is what we call the orphanage in Thailand, gently and matter-of-factly, because that is what it was – and she stepped into a life that was entirely new, in a language she didn’t have yet, in a country she had never seen.
And now she reads books, by herself and for the joy of it.
I have always believed that people – children especially – grow toward the light when you give them enough of it. Anya is my proof.
I want to tell you about this past year, because it was a big one. And because Anya deserves to have it written down somewhere, properly, where the people who have been following her story can read it and smile.
She saw snow for the first time. In Poland, in January, on the same trip we flew to say goodbye to my father. She stepped off the plane into the cold and her eyes went wide and she said “Mummy! Is that really snow?” – and then she was jumping, actually jumping, to catch snowflakes, lips already purple with cold, laughing anyway. That image lives in me permanently.
She met Bluey in person. If you are familiar with an eight-year-old (or a child of a similar age), you understand exactly what this means. She stood next to that enormous blue dog with her whole face lit up, clutching her Bluey toy, and the smile she smiled in that moment is the smile I want framed somewhere in our house forever.
She saw her favourite princesses in Disney on Ice. The Gruffalo on stage. The Wiggles live. She was in Bali for the first time, where she made friends at the kids’ club from five different countries and came home having learned Balinese phrases and painted batik. She is, it turns out, a natural traveller – curious about everything, afraid of almost nothing.
At Christmas, she stood behind a cake stall for Vinnies and sold gingerbread she had decorated herself. Her own limited edition. She took this responsibility completely seriously and was extremely proud of every single sale.
She is in martial arts, where she is quite often the smallest person in the room and consistently one of the most determined. In a few weeks she will receive a stripe on her green belt. She started swimming from zero and is already at level three. She colours with the focus of someone who understands that choosing the right colours matters.
She draws us pictures. The family, butterflies, rainbows, flowers, Bluey. For Mother’s Day I received a handmade card that I will never, ever throw away.
Not every day was easy. But every day had something great in it.
There is one more thing I want to tell you about, because it is small and it is everything.
In the big house with many children, the girls all had their hair cut short. Just by the ears, in a neat little bow. Practical, easy to manage, almost like a uniform.
Anya’s dream – one of the first things she told us, in the careful English she was learning word by word – was to have long hair.
So we let it grow. With the occasional trim to keep it strong and healthy, we let it grow. And it has. Dark and thick and all the way past her shoulders now, and she is so proud of it that sometimes she just runs her fingers through it in a way that makes my chest ache with something I don’t have a clean word for.
It is such a small thing. And to her it is the whole world.
This is what adoption taught me, slowly and completely: the things that look small from the outside are very often enormous on the inside. A choice of hair length or a cake with your name on it. Someone asking “what do you want?” and then quietly, patiently, making it happen.
We go for walks, sometimes the three of us, other times just me and Anya. We love the beach, watching crabs scuttle sideways out of rock pools and back again before you can get too close. We watch the moon – when it is full and heavy and low, and when it wakes up skinny and new and barely there. We love when the sky turns pink and orange at sunset and at dawn, and Anya always, always notices.
We walk around Lake Joondalup and watch the pelicans, the black swans, the white egrets lifting off into the wide Australian sky. We watch the ospreys by the ocean. We spot kangaroos on the plains. We watch the kookaburras laugh in the garden.
I am the one who points things out. I always have been – it is something I have carried since childhood, this need to stop and really look, to notice what is happening in the sky or on the water or just beyond the path. “Look, Anya. Look at the colour of that banksia.” “Mummy, where? Where?” And then she sees it, and her whole face changes. That is the part I love most. Not just the noticing, but the passing on.
I think of Ms Krauczunas sometimes when this happens – a teacher who held both my arms and said: “Promise me.” Someone who pointed something out in me before I had fully seen it myself. That is what I am trying to do for Anya. Not just show her the pelicans and the pink sky. Show her that the world is worth looking at. That noticing is a skill. That beauty is everywhere, if you are willing to stop. (If you'd like to read the story where I make a promise to Ms Krauczunas, read The Things We Almost Give Up On)
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Thanksgiving. Appreciation. Gratitude.
Watching Anya this past year has been one of the greatest lessons in the TAG Method I have ever received, and I didn’t plan it that way.
Thanksgiving (Action):
She shows up. Every day, in every room, she shows up fully. Fore martial arts when she is the smallest. Swimming when she is starting from zero. Reading when the words were only just becoming possible. She doesn’t wait until she is ready. She just begins. This, I have decided, is Thanksgiving in its purest form: the act of turning up, regardless.
Appreciation (Awareness):
I point. She looks. “Mummy, where? Where?” And then her face changes – that particular brightening that happens when a child really sees something for the first time. I have always been a noticer. It is one of the things I am most deliberately passing on. Appreciation is not a complicated practice. It is simply the habit of stopping long enough to let the world in. The moon, the crabs, the pelicans, the pink sky at six in the morning. It is all there. It just needs someone to say: look.
Gratitude (Feeling):
There is a particular feeling that arrives when you watch someone you love become more themselves. When the hair grows long. When the book gets finished. When the stripe goes on the belt. When she stands behind the cake stall taking her gingerbread very seriously. That feeling – warm, full, quietly extraordinary – is gratitude. And it doesn’t require a grand occasion. It lives in the ordinary Tuesday. In the tiara before breakfast. In the cake with your name on it and a little heart beside it.
Happy birthday, Anya. You are resilient and strong and determined and full of wonder and we love you more than any number of buttercream cakes could possibly say.
But we keep making them anyway. Because you deserve to know: it is really, truly, all for you.
With love and gratitude,
Agnieszka
If Anya’s story resonates with you – if there is a child in your life whose sparks you want to nurture, or a quality in yourself you are trying to grow back – the 7-Day TAG Gratitude Reset is a gentle place to begin. It starts with exactly one act of noticing.
Come back in a fortnight – I’ll be writing about ordinary days. The Saturday morning when your favourite pancake vendor isn’t at the market and you end up with doughnuts instead. The evening you are so tired you are almost falling asleep over the plate, but it’s spaghetti bolognese so you absolutely cannot. The rainy afternoon that sends you to the books and opens up a whole new world. About the quiet strength that lives inside the days that don’t look like much from the outside. I think you’ll recognise yourself in it. See you then.
A New Chapter Began
I launched Hidden In Plain Sight - A Moment of TAG on Substack.
Every second Sunday, I'll be sharing a reflection inspired by the TAG Method: Thanksgiving, Appreciation and Gratitude.
The first words we explored were: Visibility and Wonder. Next week: Presence.
I'd love you to join me.
Read more about gratitude and the TAG Method: GRATITUDE & THE TAG METHOD
If you'd like to read my previous posts, click here:
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