The Girl Who Was A Star

And they would call her, "Stella"

My kid’s favorite movie is Tangled. You know—the one about Rapunzel and the lights in the sky.

Here’s why that’s pretty special.

You could argue that anything you put on the TV in front of a baby will grab their attention, but with my own kid, I have found this not to be true. After a moment, a months-old minion can decide quite firmly that they are on to the next thing, and often that’s exactly what happens. Attention spans on anybody under 1 seem to resemble an overserved grown-up at an Americanized Irish pub.

When I say that Tangled is the favorite, it’s seriously THE favorite that my child cannot stop watching once it’s on. She cannot stop talking, laughing, happy screeching at the screen at all her favorite parts. If I need a babysitter while I do a load of laundry, I turn on Tangled. If my poor girl is going through a rough bout of teething and just can’t seem to be comfortable, the only distraction from that misery is her BFF Rapunzel.

A couple of months before I became pregnant with Stella, LT and I went to a lantern festival. It’s a whole evening of live music, food trucks, and personal fire pits and marshmallow kits while you wait for the sun to go down. We stretched out our lanterns while we sipped on cider with our friends in the chilly, late fall weather of northern Idaho, and mused over what to mark up on the thin rice paper. You can do anything you want with these luminaries, but usually the intention is to draw or write wishes and affirmations on the lantern’s paper to then send into the sky. And the lanterns were huge, spanning my entire torso and head almost, so there was plenty of real estate to doodle all sorts of dreams.

I think we both took on a casual, yet whimsically serious note as we thought about what formations we wanted the ink drips to take when they hit the paper. But by the time the sun had set, we’d finished our drawings and set flame to wick inside the lanterns. We held onto them for a moment, waiting a beat past the moderator’s okay-to-let-go signal, and looked at one another as the hundreds of other lanterns from other dreamers rose slowly into the indigo sky. Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World droned out from the speakers to the far side of the crowd where the live music stage sat, and LT grasped my hand in his as we turned our eyes to the stars. At the same time, we let the lanterns escape our fingers and watched as they lazily made their way behind all the ones before them, the bright twinkles seeming to melt into one another. This was at the tail end of the covid year, and in that sky, there was more than just lackadaisical dreams of tomorrow. There was a whisper of a wish, booming through the night in the form of those hundreds of lantern flames—a wish that we would be all right in the end, and that life would pick itself back up. A wish that after such hardships and heartbreaks touching every single person and place in the world that year, we’d appreciate the normalcy a little more if we could get back to it. We’d be a little better, a little kinder.

There were tears and laughter, sighs and smiles drifting through the darkened crowd, only illuminated by the tangible dreams we’d sent off into the heavens.

About a year later, LT and I were looking into the face of the most beautiful little star, sitting in our brand-new little house. It felt as though we were living out the crude doodles we’d sent into the stars not so long ago. The doodles of a new house and a baby.

The stars we’d sent those wishes into had quite literally dropped our own star into our life.

Stella.

So, when the first months of her life went by and Tangled became that one movie and story that enthralled Stella, LT and I almost couldn’t handle the weighty, lovely sentimentality of it all.

I know there are plenty of people who believe in the concept of manifesting your own destiny in a big way. I’m not so sure I personally transcend into the whole cosmic fantastical of it all, but you best believe that I cannot wait to tell Stella one day the magic of her beginnings.

And how she is a literal embodiment of those ethereal sky lanterns, a glittering reflection in her favorite Disney princess’ big, blue-green eyes that so closely resemble Stella’s own.