Courage of the heart
I sit on the rickety auditorium chair with the
camcorder on my shoulder and I can feel the tears
well up in my eyes. My sixyear-old daughter is on
stage, calm, selfpossessed, centered and singing out
her heart. I am nervous, jittery, emotional and trying
not to cry.
“Listen, can you hear the sound, hearts beating all the world around?” she
sings.
The lovely face turned up to the light, little round face so dear and familiar
and yet so unlike my own thin features. Her eyes look out into the audience
with total trust... she knows they love her. Eyes that don’t look like mine.
“Up in the valley, out on the plains, everywhere around the world,
heartbeats sound the same.”
The face of her birth mother looks out at me from the stage. The eyes of a
young woman that once looked into mine with trust gaze into the audience.
These features my daughter inherited from her birth mother… eyes that tilt
up at the corners and rosy, plump little cheeks that I can’t stop kissing.
“Black or white, red or tan, it’s the heart of the family of man... oh, oh
beating away, oh, oh beating away,” she finishes.
The audience goes wild. I do, too. Thunderous applause, and they rise as one
to let Melanie know they loved it. She smiles… she already knew. Now, I
am crying. I feel so blessed to be her mom... she fills me with so much joy
that my heart actually hurts.
The heart of the family of man… the heart of courage that shows us the path
to take when we are lost... the heart that makes strangers one with each other
for common purpose… this is the heart
Melanie’s birth mother showed to me. Melanie heard her from deep inside
the safest part of her. This heart of courage belonged to a sixteen-year-old
girl… a girl who became a woman because of her commitment to
unconditional love. She was a woman who embraced the concept that she
