Best. Job. Ever.

I spent this past week building a video.

One hundred and forty-four photos, ten years, set to music — Jayden from the day he was born to the kid standing next to me now, almost up to my shoulder, a cheese-eating grin from ear to ear and a laugh that brightens every dark corner. I’d put the pictures in order, oldest to newest, and somewhere around the 2019 shots — the gap-toothed grin, his cheek pressed against mine — I had to stop and just sit with it for a minute.

Ten years. Gone like that.

When people ask what I do, I give the usual answers. The work, the projects, the title in the email signature. But if I’m being honest, none of that is the real answer. The real answer is that I’m Jayden’s dad. That’s the job. Everything else is just what I do to take care of the job.

And it’s the best one I’ll ever have.

The best day

The day Jayden came into my life is still the best day of it. I’ve had a lot of good days since — more than I probably deserve — but none of them have ever bumped that one out of first place. They all just line up behind it, grateful to be in the running.

I didn’t fully understand what people meant when they said your kid changes everything. I figured it was the kind of thing you say. Then he showed up, seven pounds of pure stubbornness and wonder, and rearranged my entire sense of what matters. Turns out it wasn’t a saying. It was a warning I didn’t take seriously enough.

Truth is, we’d been getting to know each other before he ever arrived. Through Yvette’s last trimester, Jayden and I kept a standing 2:30 a.m. appointment. While his mother slept, I’d talk and play with him through her belly — pep talks, play-by-plays of a life he hadn’t started yet, the kind of one-sided conversations that feel a little ridiculous right up until the day they don’t. I was exhausted. I was also, somehow, the happiest I had ever been, sitting there in the dark thinking I would lose this much sleep every night for the rest of my life if it meant more of this.

So by the time we actually met, I froze. I was so locked in on this brand-new little human — the one I’d already been talking to for months — that I tuned out the entire room. The nurses were asking me to cut the cord, and I didn’t hear a single word. I was just staring.

Jayden fixed that. He gave me a look — the first of about ten thousand — that said, plain as day: They ain’t talking to me… hurry up! So I cut the cord. And just like that, a partnership that had quietly started in the small hours became official. It’s been going strong for ten years now.

What ten years actually looks like

People tell you it goes fast, and you nod, and then it goes fast and you realize nobody could have actually prepared you for it.

It’s the swim lessons where he wouldn’t put his face in the water — and then one season, just like that, he was doing laps. It’s the conventions where he walked up to R2-D2 like he was greeting an old friend. It’s the movies; we just saw Toy Story 5, and that whole “find your people” message hit me sideways, because I’d already found mine, and he was sitting right next to me with a bucket of popcorn bigger than his head.

It’s a thousand small, unremarkable days that turn out to be the whole thing. The handshake-hug at drop-off. The questions in the car that I have no idea how to answer. The way he still grabs my hand sometimes without thinking about it, and I have to remind myself not to make a big deal of it so he keeps doing it.

Fatherhood has taught me more than any job, any degree, any hard season ever did. It taught me patience I didn’t know I had and a kind of love I didn’t have a category for before him. It taught me that showing up — plain, boring, consistent showing up — is most of the assignment.

The part I keep coming back to

Here’s the thing I find myself thinking about, especially on a day like today.

I won’t get to write the stories Jayden tells about me one day. When I’m gone, the narrative is his. I can’t edit it, can’t add a footnote, can’t sit him down and explain what I really meant. All I get to do is live in a way that’s worth telling about, and then let go of the rest.

And if those stories carry even a piece of the joy he’s given me — if he remembers being loved, being seen, being somebody’s absolute best thing — then that’s enough. That’s a life well spent. That’s the whole job.

That’s a big part of why I came back to writing here, if I’m honest. I don’t want these years to dissolve into “he was a good kid and time went by.” I want the specifics. The popcorn. The pool. The belly laughs. The hand that still finds mine.

Happy Father’s Day

So happy Father’s Day — to me, I suppose, but mostly to every dad out there pouring everything he’s got into his kids. We don’t get a performance review. We don’t get a raise. We just get them.

And honestly? That’s the whole reward.

Best. Job. Ever.