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 everything changed. 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, thinking, What if I don’t love her the way I was supposed to? What if she doesn’t connect to us?
Finally, I spotted an incredibly beautiful baby with thick black hair being carried to us from across the room. When they placed her in my husband’s arms, I wept uncontrollably.
She was 10 months old and had spent her whole life in an orphanage. She was calm, constantly playing with her fingers; we guessed that her fingers 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, and although she had developmental delays, she caught up quickly. In those first few days I was suddenly 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 told me there’s an ancient Chinese 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 myself and the daughter I hadn’t yet met; the thread between myself and my wonderful husband; the threads between myself 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.
Recently, I was 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 the ties that bind us together matter most in life.
Since becoming Molly’s mother — really since that day I wept as they brought her to us in that office in China — that those threads, those ties, are what are most important and meaningful in my life. My daughter has taught me that lesson, once and for all.
Photo credit: C. Taylor Crothers
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One Reader Comment:
Beautiful story, Lucy. And you’re absolutely right – what matters most in life are the ties that bind us together. They are not only unbreakable, they are eternal.