When we woke up the next morning, Jacob was gone. 

The Cottage Health nurse took him away. When she did her morning rounds, she found him in his hospital crib, and he was gray. She scooped him up and swept him away to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

The next time I saw him he had an intravenous needle jabbed in his foot, taped on, so he wouldn’t wiggle it out. Later, they stuck the needle in his forehead.

Our son Jacob Molina had developed a severe respiratory infection less than eight hours after his birth. After a grueling, day-long labor effort, his mother and I slept in the hospital room.

Had the nurse not found him, they told us he may have died. He spent the first eight days of his life in the NICU, with needles in his body. We had to wash our hands “vigorously” for minutes before entering the room, and he lived in one of those artificially lit incubators.

It was a brutal dose of trauma for him, me, his mother, and his family, to begin his life. I could not have predicted or expected it. Just like everything that was to come.

Being a dad is not easy. Correct that. Being a present and engaged dad is not easy.

All of these memories came back to me like a wicked kick to the solar plexus last week, and the feeling remains.

Jacob moved into UC Berkeley on Aug. 15, turned 18 on Aug. 16, and I said goodbye to him on Aug. 17. He starts classes on Aug. 23.

How do you go from doing just about everything for your kid for 18 years to surviving on text messages? It’s no doubt a moment many parents experience.

For me, it has been nearly unbearable, only survivable because I have another child, a 9-year-old daughter, Megan, to also be present for. 

Jacob and I did it all together. He was my best friend. We did everything, everywhere, all the time.

He was among the most-practiced youth athletes on the South Coast as a child. I ran a tight ship. He was on the court and field every day, and literally, twice or more on Sundays for baseball tournaments. Jacob never played video games. He always played with a ball, and for hours at a time.

I never played youth sports, not because I didn’t want to, but because I had a very challenging childhood and wasn’t allowed to spend time with other kids. So being a parent was also, for me, like being a kid for the first time, too.

I coached most of his teams. He was an excellent pitcher, with crazy accuracy. We bonded in practice, warm-ups games, we got along, we argued, we won, we lost. I watched parents and coaches make him cry at 8. I made him cry a lot too.

We cried together. 

Nothing, and I mean nothing, bonds a father and a son like baseball.

You learn everything about a person’s character playing a game and managing a game, umpiring a game. We did it all, won championships, played and coached on All-Star teams, and our success pissed off a lot of people along the way. Some others were happy for us.

When he got to high school he played freshman baseball at Dos Pueblos High School, but the pandemic hit, and he decided to play tennis instead the next season. He made the varsity team as a junior after never playing competitive tennis prior.

The only tennis we ever played was for fun, and in the few tennis summer camps he did. I always loved watching Jacob play tennis because he had this remarkable ability to rally and win when down 5-2. I asked him how he was able to do that. “Baseball,” he said, taught him how to stay calm under pressure. He knew he could win the mental game first, and then the physical game. He always knew how to get out of an inning.

To this day, he is the calmest person I have ever known.

I wasn’t just the dad who coached. I was everywhere. I managed his school lunch program at Laguna Blanca. I organized the lunchtime volunteers, and served several days a week myself.

As anyone who has ever been around us knows, I was also the protective dad. Maybe that birth experience taught me that, although I tend to be a very paranoid person in general.

I spent the first 18 years of his life guarding against his nut allergy. He’s a 10 out of 10, meaning any contact with nuts, and many legumes, means Epipen-time, or if we are lucky, just a huge dose of Benadryl. Every school, camp, youth sports team, restaurant, play date, party, you name it, I was there reminding everyone that Jacob has a nut allergy so please keep the nuts away from him. Nut allergies can be deadly.

Even before all the youth sports, Jacob and I bonded through trains and the train table. We bought every Thomas the Tank Engine train made at the time. We never liked that showboat Thomas. We were Percy fans, always rooting for the underdog. 

Jacob and I, it seemed, were always the underdogs in everything we did.

I enrolled him in Laguna Blanca School, and spent thousands and thousands of dollars a year so that he could be in a small class and feel safe at school. Our family was the outlier in that group, although those parents were among the kindest people I’ve ever met.

Later he went to Goleta Valley Junior High, and I sweated everyday waiting to hear about his day.

It’s impossible to not see Jacob through my own experiences. (I remember being assaulted in the shower and beat up at Goleta Valley Junior High, with lots of unprovoked homophobic slurs directed at me because I was a quiet, shy kid.)

I usually picked up Jacob from school in junior high. His days were good, and nothing like what I experienced. That was a relief.

In high school, he slayed it. His friends called him “Slaycob.” In the yearbook, he appeared on multiple pages every year for his myriad club and sports involvement. Not like his dad. I was in the yearbook once, for the main photo. I might have been in there twice, that year I did JROTC. 

I lost count of how many Mock Trial awards he won. And I never pressured him to be a journalist, but he and another student restarted the Charger Account online newspaper, which had been defunct for five years. They were co-editors in chief. They, the students, brought back the paper and ran it as a club, forcing the professional staff to make it a class again the following semester. That’s called creating your own legacy.

And Jacob can write a news lead as good as anyone I know. He loves journalism, but wants to be a defense attorney instead, defending that underdog.

That’s all to say that Jacob was not only my son, but he was also my friend, and, essentially, the biggest part of my life for 18 years. 

It’s hard to let go, but it’s all worth it. I realized that my entire life I had been working to put Jacob in positions to be successful: school, sports, theater, chess, everything.

Him going to UC Berkeley is just the latest example of that.

We are so similar, yet we are so different. I never took the SAT, Jacob scored high on his. I was terrified of school most of my life, Jacob walks on campus with swagger. I struggled to find purpose until I reached my adulthood, Jacob found it at 10 years old.

Jacob is brilliant. I get by. 

I realized that good parenting is not smothering your children and locking them up at home like my parents did with me. Great parenting is preparing them for success, guiding their path, and not letting your burdens be their burdens. 

Just like that nurse picked Jacob up and took care of him at Cottage Hospital, essentially saving his life while his mother Dina and I slept, I know there are amazing angels at UC Berkeley, nurses in different forms, ready to help him, take care of him, rescue him if needed, and uplift him in the next stage of his life.

In the meantime, I have my daily text messages, and a peaceful, satisfied mind when I sleep at night. 

The work of a present father is never completed. It just changes form. And I still have lunches to prepare for my daughter.