When Real Life Outshines Little Miss Sunshine

We’ve just unpacked the car from our August road trip—bags, laundry, trash, and the stuff Skylar didn’t want at school that came back home. Skylar is in Nashville, celebrating her 21st birthday, and we’re here.

How did we get from playdates and birthday parties with family to birthdays celebrated with friends—and without us?

It’s a milestone that hits me hard in the gut. I’ve only ever known Skylar one way: as my child. And now, at 21, she’s stepping into her own adulthood and paving her own way—the reality of parenting grown-up kids is that you have to learn a new role, too.

Act I: A Brief Adventure in Child Acting

Skylar has always had a spark. Maybe it was all those Little Einstein DVDs I had her watch, or taking her to Broadway Mommy and Me classes before she could even say “mama.” Or maybe it was coming up with her name because Alex and I met on an airplane. She was destined to dream big.

At the age of three, she auditioned for a childhood acting manager. She couldn’t yet read, but she memorized every word I said (with inflections so she knew how to say the line). At auditions, she pretended to read like a pro, not realizing she was debuting her acting skills. When she didn’t have to pretend to read or say those lines, she asked if she could sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Three months later, we met the manager again and we signed with her. Soon after, she sent us to audition for a child agent in New York. That’s when I realized: a manager was just the beginning.

We packed snacks, not glossy headshots. We took a car, train, subway, taxi, and finally walked the last blocks—five forms of transportation for a chance at a dream we weren’t even sure she even cared about.

Act II: The Agent Showdown

Skylar walked into a room I could barely make out from my position in the hall, but there were cubicles upon cubicles, and another Dad waiting for his son, along with me.

The agent returned with Skylar and shook her head.
“She couldn’t even answer a basic question. You’re daughter’s stupid,” she said.

“What was the question?” I asked, a bit confused. Skylar can answer questions.

“How did you get here?”

“What kind of a question was that?” I asked. “How do you expect a preschooler to explain five modes of transportation? What a stupid question to ask.”

I took Skylar’s hand and tried not to make a scene, for Skylar’s sake.

When I asked Skylar afterward if she wanted to do it again or just have a playdate, I was so relieved when she said, “Have a playdate.”

Act III: Mama Bear Unleashed

So I called the manager, and I went from being a perfectly respectable mother to someone yelling into the phone—and if I’m honest, I was enjoying it.

We had been yelling at each other until it escalated.

“The agent called your daughter stupid,” the manager snapped at me.

“You’re the stupid one,” I snapped back. “What kind of manager doesn’t tell a client to bring a headshot? My daughter would rather have a playdate than have anything to do with you or any of these agents. Rip up our contract.”

“I already have,” she yelled.

And that was that. Our brief adventure in child acting ended, not with a callback, but with me realizing my true role: not stage mom, not manager, but protector.

Act IV: Parenting Talent Is Its Own Fiction

That day taught me something I hadn’t known yet: when talent shows up early, parenting gets more complicated.

Skylar remembered things I had long forgotten. She sang the National Anthem at my cousin’s wedding at five. She mastered how to ride, dance, and sing in Heelys in just three weeks so she could step in as the understudy. She wanted things other kids her age didn’t usually like—performing, singing, and standing in the spotlight.

And I had to learn, again and again, how to keep her safe without dimming her light. How to rein her in just enough so she wasn’t eaten by wolves, but not so much that she lost her spark.

Sometimes I think of my grandma raising my dad. He was dribbling a basketball while taking out the trash at five, already excelling by high school, and by college, he was the Kangaroo Kid. When talent shines early, it’s dazzling. It pushes everyone around it to grow, just as parenting grown-up kids later on pushes us in new ways we never expected.

Act V: Passing the Torch

But now, at 21, I’m facing a different kind of letting go.

I don’t need to protect Skylar anymore. That’s her job now. I’ve passed the torch. It’s hers to carry, hers to wield.

My role was to be her voice when she couldn’t answer, her shield when someone called her stupid, her defender when the world expected too much too soon. But how do I meet her now—as the woman she has become, not the child I’ve always known?

That’s the stranger-than-fiction part of parenting grown-up kids: you raise a child until one day you’re invited to meet them again, as an adult.

Act VI: The Gift of 21 Years

Raising Skylar has been the greatest gift of my life—not because she was destined for the stage, but because her talent kept teaching me.

Every line she memorized, every song she sang, every moment she outpaced what I thought she could do—those became my teaching moments, too.

And that’s why it’s so hard to let go at 21. Because the truth is, the umbilical cord is never really cut. Not at birth, not now. We’re always connected. We’re always growing alongside one another.

And maybe it’s no surprise that I’d be writing this today—on Skylar’s actual 21st birthday. The milestone and the story arrived together, reminding me that life has its own way of circling back, of asking us to pause and see just how far we’ve come.

Stranger than fiction? Maybe. But it’s the truest story I know: a mother’s love, stretched and strengthened by 21 years of raising a daughter whose light keeps showing me how to shine.

Raising Skylar was my greatest role—and the only one I never had to audition for.