VIV Moments

Hometown

New York, NY

Joie de VIVre

Ordinary days spent at home being a mom and a wife: cooking, grocery shopping, picking up my daughter from school and watching her play in the schoolyard.

VIV Moment

The day my husband, Rick, and I met our adopted infant daughter, Molly, in China in 2003 was the day that changed everything for me. The adoption process had been long, arduous and frustrating, and here we were, at last, in China. We stood in a drab office with 10 other waiting families. I was excited and very scared. What if I didn’t love Molly the way I was supposed to? What if she didn’t connect to us?

Finally, I spotted an incredibly beautiful baby with thick black hair being carried to us from across the room. I was weeping uncontrollably when they placed her in my husband’s arms. Molly was 10 months old and had spent her whole life in an orphanage. She was calm and constantly played with her fingers; we guessed that they had been her only playthings in her crib. We fed her (she was very hungry), and then we carried her around the room, talking to her, showing her sights out the window.

Just like that, we were a family. I was a mother. She was our daughter. I loved her instantly, completely. All my worries and all the waiting disappeared as if they had never happened. She was happy, easy, alert, curious and very funny. Although she had developmental delays, she caught up quickly. In those first few days I was feeling a kind of love and a depth of joy that I had never known.

About a year before the day we met Molly, a friend of mine who had adopted a baby girl from China had told me the legend of the red thread. In China, there’s an ancient belief that when a baby’s born she’s connected to everyone she’ll ever know by an invisible red thread. The thread can stretch or tangle, but it will never break. This powerful idea touched me deeply, and I found myself writing a song and eventually an album called The Red Thread (Red House Records, 2004). The album was really about the threads between me and the daughter I hadn’t yet met; the thread between me and my wonderful husband; the threads between me and my parents, who were reaching the end of their lives, and the threads between me and my fellow New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11.

I’ve recently been given the opportunity to expand on this theme artistically, in collaboration with a wonderful beauty company called La Prairie. I wrote and recorded a song called “Life Threads,” inspired by their new fragrance line of the same name, which evokes a similar idea that what matters most in life are the ties that bind us together.

I have learned since becoming Molly’s mother — really since that day that I wept as they brought her to Rick and me in that office in China — that those threads, those ties, are the most important and meaningful in my life. My daughter has taught me that most important lesson, once and for all.

Photo credit: C. Taylor Crothers

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