A Birth

Last week I had the awesome experience of witnessing the birth of my firstborn. Words can hardly describe the depth and breadth of the emotions I felt as I saw my son for the first time. Before I became a parent, other parents always told me that watching a child being born is unlike any experience on earth, that there is no way to describe the intensity of the love you feel for that brand-new person, inextricably bound in blood to you. I always thought I understood what they meant, but I never really did. Until now.

What an amazing feeling, to look into your child’s face and see a part of your own. But he is so much more than that. He is a product of a long line of his kind, a grand heritage of culture forged by those with the courage to live, love, sacrifice, and pass their genes on to the next generation, each line joining in an intricate, wonderful web to produce, at the end to this point, my son.

I see in his tiny face the Nelson line of my mother, hardy folk who inhabited the coastal areas of Alabama, enduring hurricanes, humidity, and even Sherman’s march, to make a life there. I see his great and great great-grandfather, both Southwest Virginia coal miners who scraped to make a living and died of lung disease from the work they did not because they loved it, but because it was a living for their families. I see the Jacksons of Tennessee, the Couchs of Virginia, the Esteps of North Carolina, and countless other people and families long gone but still alive in their progeny.

I see knights and warrior-priests, peasants, philosophers and kings, a heritage of high culture produced by a people with the genetic capability to send a man to the moon and back again.

When I look at my son I am reminded of just how important this struggle is, this struggle for the survival of our people. When I look at him I am reminded that that crying little bundle of joy is what this thing is all about.

I want him to have a world to live in that’s worth living in. I want him to, as his ancestors did, rise above the decadence that will surround him and be proud of who he is and who his ancestors are, to forge, bit by bit, a little piece of the world they created. It will start by such a fundamental act of nature that, were it not for the Political Correctness of this evil day, it would not need to be said . . . when he produces a child like himself.

I am proud of his race, my race. I want to see our people survive. The day after my son was born I had the honor of handing to my father, his grandfather, a grandson who looked  like him. All of my adult life I had dreamed of that moment, the moment when I could say that his line, my line, would continue. I didn’t say much, just held the back of his head and carefully handed him to my Dad, but my eyes swelled and I got a little lump in my throat.

I thought of many things in that moment, the past, the present, but especially the future, perhaps twenty or thirty years from now when my son will hand me a little bundle of miracle, potential and promise. Then, if I have taught him well, he will truly understand that his people, his race, can die or live depending on the choices he makes.

He will tell me with the little bundle he hands me that he has chosen right, that his people will live on, will continue.

Editor’s Note: This essay was written five years ago. Since then, the author has welcomed two more children to his family, and number four is on the way.