Tomorrow Isn't Promised: Lessons from a Museum, a Mountain, and a Sixteen-Year-Old's GoPro

I was scrolling through Facebook last week when two images stopped me cold.

The first: Vice President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush in their bedroom at Walker's Point in Kennebunkport, Maine, summer of 1987. They're still in bed at 6 a.m., surrounded by a joyful pile of six grandchildren tumbling in for morning cuddles. The chaos is palpable—kids climbing, laughing, creating the kind of beautiful mess that only grandparents' beds seem to invite. The photo was taken by their personal photographer David Valdez, who later said this "warm and fuzzy moment" helped humanize Bush before his 1988 presidential run. But what struck me wasn't the political optics. It was the fullness. The presence. The life being lived in real time.

The second image: A young Barack Obama with his mother, Ann Dunham. She had been just eighteen when Barack was born in 1961—a white woman from Kansas who had fallen in love with a brilliant Kenyan student, defying every social convention of her time. When Barack's father left to pursue his dreams at Harvard, Ann didn't crumble. She moved young Barry between Honolulu and Jakarta, Indonesia, waking him at four-thirty every morning to study English before school because she believed education was the great equalizer. She dragged him to Indonesian markets, introduced him to struggling villagers, and taught him that privilege wasn't about wealth—it was about using whatever platform you had to lift others up.

Ann Dunham died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at just fifty-two years old, never living to see her son become a U.S. Senator, let alone President. But every speech he gave, every policy he championed, every moment he chose compassion over cynicism carried her fingerprints.

Two images. Two competing truths that hit me simultaneously: I want that chaos of grandchildren someday and What if I die before I see who they become?

Vice President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush with their grandchildren at Walker's Point, Kennebunkport, Maine, 1987. Photo via Chronicles Through Lenses / David Valdez, The White House.

A young Barack Obama with his mother, Ann Dunham—the woman who shaped a future president with 4:30 a.m. English lessons and a belief that every child is capable of anything. Photo via Chronicles Through Lenses. 

The Day My Son Edited Me Out

It was Sunday, February 1. Sam is less than one month past his sixteenth birthday, and I know my window of time with him is gently closing. We were at Jay Peak in Vermont—his biggest mountain yet, a mile from the Canadian border with a 2,100-foot vertical drop and a summit elevation of nearly 4,000 feet.

Riding a ski lift and skiing through quiet glades without any other skiers around gives me time to reflect -- on my children, on life, on random photos seen on Facebook. On this trip to Jay, I thoughts about how Sam and Calli are what I call my "bookends"—Calli, my oldest, and Sam, my youngest, the alpha and omega of my hands-on parenting experience. I thought about Calli turning 30 on Groundhog's Day and Sam's approaching departure. I mused about how I have this expanded reflective space now that I didn't have when all five kids were home. More time to pause. More time to wonder. More time to feel the slow, inevitable editing process that comes with raising humans who no longer need you the way they once did.

Two weeks earlier, while skiing at a smaller mountain in Virginia, Sam had stopped next to a bright orange "Experts Only" sign and posed for a photo. He had about eight total days of skiing under his belt across last ski season and this one. I wondered: Does he actually have what it takes? Will he be able to problem-solve if he falls and his pole ends up ten feet away up the slope? 

But today at Jay Peak felt different. Sam had been gaining confidence on the mountain all morning. In his reflections aloud that he felt great on the mountain, he earned my confidence—not because I decided to give it to him, but because he'd built it, one run at a time.

Sam at the "Experts Only" sign—eight days into his skiing career and already chasing black diamonds. You never know what they're capable of until you let them try.

On one of our runs later in the day at Jay, he was stopped and waiting for me while I caught up. He looked at me and said, matter-of-factly: "I'm going to have to edit you out with all these stops."

He meant his GoPro footage. He was recording his runs and didn't want all the stops and rests in his video. He wanted speed. Flow. The mountain without interruption.

But I'm a word person. When someone says "I'm editing you out," I instantly search for any possible symbolism or deeper meaning in the words. The punch came hard because it was a thought I hadn't had before, delivered so casually: We are not living the same lives, and my life's recordings are going to look very different than yours.

I didn't need time to sit with it. I understood immediately. Sam wasn't trying to hurt me. He certainly wasn't being poetic or figurative. He was stating a technical fact about video editing. But the deeper truth landed anyway: I was being edited out. Not just from the footage, but from the frame of his life in the way I used to occupy it. And that's exactly as it should be—which doesn't make it hurt any less.

The Trails We Take

Earlier that morning on our first lift ride up, I'd voiced all my anxieties to Sam. What if I got lost? What if I ended up on a black diamond I couldn't handle? Two days earlier, my brother Peter and I had accidentally stumbled onto a black diamond at Bolton Valley, and even though I'd skied blacks many times before, I hadn't done one on a Vermont-sized mountain in over a decade. At fifty-nine, I'm a lot more afraid of getting injured than I used to be. What if I got hurt and couldn't drive us home?

Sam sat there quietly. Said nothing.

When the lift reached mid-mountain, I asked him to confirm he wouldn't leave me.

"OK," he said.

But later, after the "editing you out" comment, we rode the lift up again. I asked him why he was so quiet.

Nothing.

"Are you mad?"

"Yes. I just feel like this is a waste since I can't ski by myself and go fast and do my own thing."

Another punch. But different from the first one. This time I knew exactly what he meant. I wouldn't have wanted to be limited either by my dad when he was almost sixty, trying to go slowly while I was entering my prime years. Sam couldn't wait for me. I was slowing down as he was speeding up. The generational handoff was happening in real time, on a mountain in Vermont, with trail names that told the whole story.

I was taking runs called Paradise Meadows and Sweetheart. He was taking Deliverance and Vertigo. We were both exactly where we needed to be—just not on the same trail anymore.

The contrast with my brother Peter was striking. Two days earlier at Bolton Valley, when we'd accidentally ended up on that black diamond, Peter believed I could do it. He got down the first steep drop-off and waved me on, shouting "You can do this!" When I panicked and said "I can't" and bailed to what I thought was an easier route—which turned out to be an even harder black diamond that I had to navigate alone—he met me at the bottom and said, "You looked great! You totally have this!"

I didn't believe him—I'd felt terrified the whole way down—but he pushed me anyway because that's what siblings do. That's what people who've known us our whole lives do.

They expect us to keep up.

Our children? They let us take our own trail. Especially when we've already told them we can't keep up.

The Sculpture Is Already Carved

When we took our mid-day break, I suggested putting all our wet gear in the dryer to get it nice and warm. Of course, Sam stood back about eight feet and decided to throw his things into the open dryer rather than just placing them in like a normal person.

One glove—swish. Second glove—slam dunk. Hat—right in, no net.

His balaclava? Right over the stackable dryer-washer unit and behind it went, irretrievable in the small closet with no way to move the machines.

He laughed. "I loved that baklava." (He can't pronounce balaclava, so he calls it the dessert.)

I just stared at him with more seriousness than I'd shown while watching him throw the other items, waiting for him to recognize this wasn't a good idea and decide to just put things in the dryer like one usually does.

Lesson learned. Hopefully.

But here's the thing: I can't teach that lesson for him anymore. The sculpture is already carved. I've done my pulling and tugging at the clay. I've chipped away at the marble. Now he's out in the world making his own mistakes, losing his own balaclavas, learning his own lessons on his own timeline.

This is what we signed up for. We sow independence, confidence, and adventurousness in our children, and then we reap teenagers who don't need us to follow them down black diamonds anymore. That's success. That's also loss. Both things are true.

A Museum in Paris, Three Years Ago

In February 2023, I went to Paris with my daughter Calli. One of our stops was the Musée Rodin.

I've always loved Rodin's work—The Thinker, Le Baiser (The Kiss), the way he could pull beauty and agony out of bronze and marble. But visiting his museum in person with Calli, seeing Camille Claudel's work given space in his galleries, buying books about Claudel that still sit on my bedside table—it all hit differently as a mother of five watching her children scatter across continents.

And then Stella arrived. She took the five-hour train up from a small town outside Montpellier, where she had been living for her entire tenth-grade year—ten months total. I had dropped her with a host family in August 2022 and hadn't seen her since. When she stepped off that train in Paris, it was one of those reunions that rearranges something inside you. Here was my daughter, thousands of miles from home, thriving in a language and culture that wasn't hers by birth, becoming someone I couldn't have predicted.

Beneath Rodin's "Le Baiser" (The Kiss) at Musée Rodin, Paris, February 2023. The sculpture of love, connection, creation—all the things that matter most.

With Calli at Musée Rodin—expanding her world the way my parents expanded mine. 

I thought about how we are all simultaneously:

The clay being shaped by our own childhoods, relationships, and wounds. The artist pulling and tugging at our children, creating conditions for their growth. The muse modeling what it means to be human, flawed and trying. The creation becoming who we are through the very act of parenting.

Rodin was brilliant. He was also an awful human being, particularly to Claudel, his muse and mistress, who many believe was a better artist than him. Their relationship was destructive, tumultuous, shaped by childhood wounds that turned them into the adults they became. One of my favorite French films is Camille Claudel with Gérard Depardieu because it captured how profoundly destructive relationships can sculpt us—just as surely as loving ones do.

Rodin worked primarily in clay, pulling and pushing the material, then casting it in bronze or chipping away at marble to create his masterpieces. As parents, we do the same. We pull our children close and push them toward independence. We chip away at their rough edges while trying not to damage their essential form. We model and muse and create, often while carrying our own unhealed wounds.

The truth I wasn't expecting: sometimes our most beautiful work emerges from our most broken places.

You Never Know Who They'll Become

I thought Stella's path was clear. French immersion elementary school led to French immersion middle school, which led to ten months living and studying in France, which would obviously lead to a French major in college or maybe even attending university in Europe. She got great marks in her French high school, all of her subjects in French. The trajectory seemed undeniable.

Instead? She's a biotechnology major at a university two hours from home.

I couldn't have predicted that. I can't predict any of it.

Ann Dunham couldn't have known that the baby boy she held in Hawaii in 1961 would become the first Black president of the United States. She just woke him up at 4:30 every morning to study English before school because she believed education was the great equalizer. She expanded his world. Then she died at fifty-two, never seeing him become a senator, a president, a father, a husband carrying her fingerprints in every choice he made.

The Bushes got their grandchildren pile. The chaotic 6 a.m. bedroom scene, the togetherness, the golden years of watching their legacy unfold in real time. They sowed faith, family, and friendship, and they reaped the harvest.

But here's what both stories teach us: We don't control the outcomes. We only control the daily work of sculpting.

With Calli and Stella in Normandy, France, 2023—three women becoming who we're each meant to be, one day at a time.

What You Sow, You Reap

There's a verse in Galatians that keeps coming back to me: "What you sow, you reap" (Galatians 6:7).

But it's not about outcomes. It's not about fame or wealth or presidential runs or perfect GoPro footage without any stops.

It's about the materials we work with every single day.

Love. Compassion. Curiosity. Gratitude. Faith—in God, in the Universe, in the future we can't see. Humor. Playfulness. Warmth. Acceptance for the child you have while also raising them to meet their full human potential by expanding their world, the way Ann Dunham did with Barack.

These are the things that create loving, kind, giving, sensitive, compassionate, positive, grateful, mindful, faithful humans for generations to come.

Worrying doesn't raise great humans. Money doesn't. Fame doesn't. Catastrophizing about futures we can't control doesn't.

What raises great humans—whether you're a single parent or have an incredibly strong marriage, whether you have one child or five, whether you're parenting biological children or nieces and nephews or mentoring young people in your community—is showing up every day as both model and artist. Showing them what it means to be human while also designing the conditions for their growth by what you expose them to, celebrate, make space for.

Sometimes we're so busy with our own lives that we forget: We are both models for and artists of our children. And when they're grown? We're still being sculpted ourselves—by our relationships with siblings, parents, partners, friends, communities. The work never stops. The clay is always in motion.

Tomorrow Isn't Promised

I need to be honest about something.

I lost Chip—the greatest love of my life, my second husband—to cancer when he was fifty-nine. The exact age I am now. The reality is that people start getting cancer and other diseases in mid-life. People die too early. They never make it to the golden years of retirement, of grandchildren piles in bed at 6 a.m.

Tragedy can strike at any age.

I'm not afraid of dying. I believe my energy will remain as part of the Universe when I die, mixing in with everyone else's who has gone before me. For me, it's more like severe FOMO—Fear of Missing Out. What if I don't get to meet my grandchildren? What if I die before I see all the amazing greatness that my children will achieve and become?

Ann Dunham didn't get to see Barack become president. She didn't get to see him be a father, a husband, a leader who changed history. She missed all of it.

And yet—she didn't miss what mattered most. She didn't miss the 4:30 a.m. English lessons. She didn't miss the Indonesian markets. She didn't miss the daily work of teaching him to see himself through her eyes, as someone worthy of love and capable of anything.

She didn't miss the sculpture. She just didn't get to see it in the museum.

Rodin's "Le Penseur" (The Thinker) at Musée Rodin—contemplating the human condition, the weight of creation, the beauty and agony of making something that will outlast us.

The Work That Matters Is Happening Now

Sunday morning on that lift ride at Jay Peak, I asked Sam to confirm he wouldn't leave me on the mountain.

"OK," he said.

But of course he's leaving me. Not on the mountain—not on the lift, not in the car, not in the condo. But in all the ways that matter for a sixteen-year-old becoming himself, he's already gone. He's editing me out of his footage because his life's recordings are going to look very different from mine.

And that's exactly what I sculpted him to do.

My bookends—Calli and Sam—taught me that parenting is about holding on and letting go simultaneously. It's about being the clay and the artist and the muse and the creation all at once. It's about expanding their world (French immersion, ten months abroad in France, black diamonds at Jay Peak) and then stepping back to watch them choose biotechnology instead of French, Deliverance instead of Paradise Meadows, their own trail instead of yours.

Even if we begin down a black diamond thinking we can't make it, the ending might surprise us. I made it down that slope at Bolton Valley without serious injury—terrified but intact. Sam made it down "Expert Only" at Jay Peak, again and again, building confidence with every run.

We're all making it down mountains we didn't think we could handle. We're all being edited in and out of each other's footage. We're all clay and artist and muse and creation.

And tomorrow isn't promised.

Which is exactly why today—this run, this conversation, this stop on the mountain to catch your breath, this museum visit in Paris, this train reunion after months apart, this balaclava lost behind the dryer—matters so completely.

The Bushes got their grandchildren pile. Obama's mother didn't get to see him become president. I'm getting edited out of my son's GoPro footage while dreaming of grandchildren I may or may not live to meet.

All three truths point to the same wisdom: We can't control how much of their story we get to witness. We can only control how we show up in the chapters we're given.

Wonder before you worry. Imagine before you interpret. Create before you catastrophize.

The sculpture is happening now. In this moment. In how we show up when our children say "I'm fine" curtly or "I'm editing you out" casually or nothing at all when we ask if they're OK.

In how we let them take Deliverance while we take Paradise Meadows.

In how we sit beneath Le Baiser in a museum in Paris with our daughters, all of us becoming who we're meant to be, all of us carrying wounds and creating beauty anyway.

In how we throw balaclavas into dryers from eight feet away and learn our lessons on our own timeline.

The work is now. The love is now. The sculpture is now.

Tomorrow isn't promised.

So today, we pull the clay one more time. We chip away at the marble. We model what it means to be human—flawed and trying and full of FOMO and gratitude and fear and faith all at once.

We sow love, compassion, curiosity, gratitude. We sow presence.

And what we reap—whether we're there to see it or not—will be humans who know they were sculpted with intention, expanded with courage, and loved without condition.

That's the legacy that matters. That's the footage worth recording.

Even when we're edited out of frame, the love remains. The sculpture stands. The work continues.

With Stella in Normandy, France—the reunion after months apart. These are the moments that matter. The sculpture is happening here. 

About the Author

Cynthia Z. Stevens Copeland, MA, CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist with 30+ years of experience, specializing in early intervention since 2018. She is the founder of Right Track Parenting and creator of the Investigative Parenting methodology—teaching parents to "wonder before you worry, imagine before you interpret, create before you catastrophize." A certified parent coach and student of Dr. Martin Seligman's Foundations of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Cynthia writes from lived experience as a mother of five adult children scattered across three continents. When she's not working with families, you'll find her on the ski slopes with her youngest son, contemplating the art of letting go one black diamond at a time.

© 2026 Cynthia Z. Stevens Copeland / Right Track Parenting. All rights reserved.