My Own One Moment in Time

Can you recall that one magical moment in your own life when you felt truly special? There are times in every person’s life when they feel a sense of genuine achievement.  Getting the grades they need they need for entry to university or passing the driving test.  As euphoric as these feelings are when they happen, they can never approach the sensations that flood through you at the one moment in your lifetime that is uniquely yours.

Our greatest natural urge in life is to pass on our unique genetic heritage by becoming parents. Singers and poets refer to all of us experiencing that ‘one moment in time’, and some are lucky enough, like me, to believe they’ve lived it by being present at the birth of their first child.

My son Robert is now seventeen years old, and literally looks down on me, because he’s

Six inches taller, and he will gaze at me, quite puzzled, on those occasions when my eyes fill with tears of pride, as I look at him.  He doesn’t yet understand that I re-live the joy of watching him take his first breath every time I see him.

How could I convey to him the feelings that went through me on the day I was privileged to have watched his birth? The years have passed, it seems, in the blinking of an eye, and

Yet it is still as clear to me now as if it had happened only yesterday.  My wife even recalls the impassioned lovemaking that led to his conception.  Joyful memories that  gladden the heart.

Robert’s conception was unplanned, but not unwelcome, and like any other man who finds out that he is to be a father for the first time, my chest swelled with pride, despite my fears.  There was constant worry, but every time my wife took my hand and placed it on her swollen belly, so that I could feel the baby move, the pleasure was intense.

There was an air of urgent expectancy about the two of us.  Plans being drawn up for what our child would become as he or she matured and how best we could educate them. Our own life ambitions were shunted unceremoniously to the back of our priority list as the magnitude of our impending task began to dawn on us.