A little girl stands in front of a mirror, turning her dress so the mud stain on the hem catches the light instead of hiding from it. Her mother kneels beside her, not to scrub the stain out, but to trace it with one finger and ask what adventure made it. The girl smiles, uncertain at first, then wide open.
Somewhere else, a boy who has never spoken a full sentence lifts his hands and shapes them into a heart. No one taught him the gesture. He simply found it, the way some children find their own language when the ordinary one doesn’t fit.
What do you tell a child who is convinced she has to be flawless to be loved? What do you tell a boy who has never had the words, but has always had the meaning?
Meet Miriam Koopman
Miriam Koopman is the founder and author behind Bunnies in the Clover, the children’s book and music project built around Luna, a small bunny who discovers that a “happiness spot” of mud on her dress is not a flaw to fix, but proof of a life fully lived. Koopman works full time as a healthcare support worker in the Netherlands, caring for people with intellectual disabilities, and writes Luna’s stories in the hours around that work. She did not build this world to launch a brand. She built it to keep a promise.
Where the Story Began
Koopman grew up in the Netherlands in what looked, from the outside, like an ordinary family. Her mother was gentle and devoted, but carried invisible wounds from surviving sexual abuse before Koopman was born. Those wounds never fully healed.
When Koopman was seven, she watched her mother run upstairs holding a pair of scissors during a severe mental health crisis. She did not understand what was happening. She only understood that the safety she had always assumed was gone. She and her siblings were separated and sent to relatives, told not to speak of what had happened, and she learned early to hide her feelings behind a smile.
Years later, her mother died by suicide. In early adulthood, Koopman found herself in an abusive relationship while living in England. She eventually came home with nothing but a suitcase and her dog, and started over.
Then she became pregnant with her daughter, Emily. At the gender reveal, she learned she was having a girl, and one thought arrived alongside the joy: this child’s story would be different. Koopman studied psychopathology at NTI and moved into healthcare support work, drawn to people who communicate in ways the world often overlooks. Every experience, the silence she was taught as a child, the patience she learned in care work, was quietly building toward something she hadn’t named yet.
A World Built on Happiness Spots
That something became Luna. “I wanted Emily to grow up believing she was already enough, that she would never have to earn love by being perfect,” Koopman says. That single sentence is the architecture of everything she has made since.
Luna’s stories are not built around obstacles to overcome. They’re built around the idea that imperfection was never the problem in the first place. A stain on a dress. A friend who can’t speak. These aren’t flaws to fix inside the story, they’re the whole point of it.
That second theme came directly from her work. Koopman supports a young man who cannot speak and communicates through a small number of gestures, most often a heart shape he makes with his hands. “That beautiful, silent expression of love inspired my second book,” she says, referring to Luna the Bunny and the Heart in the Sand, which centers on a squirrel who cannot hear or speak. The lesson, delivered gently enough for a five-year-old and true enough for an adult, is that friendship was never built on words to begin with.
Koopman has no background in publishing, music, or animation. She taught herself simple animation to build Luna’s first music video by hand. It found its way onto Roku TV, Amazon Fire TV, a local television station in Texas, and international radio, eventually reaching the number one spot on a Beirut chart alongside Dutch pop icon Gerard Joling. A listener in Russia was moved enough to handcraft a bunny and mail it to her.
Ask her how she competes in a crowded industry and she doesn’t talk about output or trends. “My inspiration comes from my family, my work in healthcare, nature and the people I meet along the way,” she says. Everything else, she treats as noise.
The Koopman Playbook: 5 Lessons
Let the stain stay in the story. Imperfection isn’t the obstacle to a good ending, it’s often the most honest part of it.
Borrow your strength from the room you’re already in. Koopman’s biggest creative ideas came from her healthcare work, not from studying the market.
Teach yourself the next skill only when the story needs it. She learned animation not to build a career, but to give one song somewhere to live.
Treat silence as a language, not a limitation. The boy who speaks only in gestures shaped an entire book, and a way of seeing people.
Make the promise before you make the plan. The commitment to her daughter came first. The books, the songs, the recognition followed.
Coming Full Circle
The girl in front of the mirror, the boy with the heart-shaped hands, they were never hypothetical to Miriam Koopman. They were the reason she started, long before either of them existed in her stories.
She did not set out to build an audience. She set out to make sure one specific child, her own, would never have to earn her place in the world. Everything else, the radio stations, the hardcover editions, the strangers who craft handmade bunnies and mail them across oceans, arrived because that promise turned out to be one a lot of people needed kept for them too.
Some people build empires. Miriam Koopman built a bunny with a stain on her dress, and somehow that turned out to be the more radical thing to make.
Miriam Koopman is the founder and author of Bunnies in the Clover and creator of Luna’s World, based in Nieuwkoop, South Holland, Netherlands. She writes children’s books and music that help young readers embrace their authentic selves, alongside her work as a healthcare support worker supporting people with intellectual disabilities.
