We arrived back home in Oklahoma City just after midnight last night, following six hours at the hotel pool, multiple Lyft rides, two flights, delays, and the slow collapse of three people who had squeezed every possible drop out of a Disney vacation. We were exhausted, but the Disney high was still hanging around us. Suitcases were scattered across the house, our bodies had no idea what time it was, and part of me was still somewhere beneath the fireworks, walking through a park with Mary and Jett.
As I’ve looked back on the trip, I’ve written about presence, fear, discomfort, fatherhood, and the strange experience of watching time move through the person you love most. But there is one important part of the story I haven’t expressed yet, and the story would be incomplete without it.
Family is funny.
There are people you assume will want to hear everything. People you imagine will be waiting for the pictures, asking Jett which ride she loved most, wanting to share in the joy of something she may remember for the rest of her life. Sometimes those messages never come. There are people you try to move closer to, only to feel them pushing back at every opportunity. You can spend a great deal of energy trying to understand those absences, especially when the roles and relationships seem like they should naturally produce something warmer.
Then there are the people who simply show up.
Jett calls her Baba. Rebecca is Mary Ann’s sister, but when Jett was first learning to speak, the complicated mechanics of language transformed her name into Baba, and it stuck. Over the years, the name has come to mean far more than the accident of a child’s early vocabulary. Baba has become a role of its own.
Rebecca has stepped into so many spaces in my sweet ladies’ lives, and she has never shown them anything but a depth of love that makes this Dada’s heart feel like it might burst. She and her husband have offered an open-door policy not merely to their home or their pool, but to their lives. There has never been a sense that Jett is an inconvenience to accommodate or a relationship to maintain out of obligation. She is welcomed, considered, celebrated, and loved.
That kind of love is easy to underestimate because it rarely announces itself. It appears through consistency. It is remembering what matters to someone. It is making space. It is anticipating a need before anyone has to ask. It is the quiet accumulation of small gestures that eventually becomes one of the safest structures in a child’s life.
Our household is far from traditional. I stay home with Jett, and Mary Ann is the primary breadwinner. I’m sure there are parts of that arrangement Rebecca may not fully understand, just as there are parts of any family’s life that remain somewhat mysterious from the outside. But whatever differences exist, I have always felt that she was my sister too. In many ways, she has been since I was fifteen years old. That sense of family has never depended on our lives looking identical or on us agreeing about every choice. It has been built through years of presence.
Then came Disney.
When Rebecca learned she would be attending a conference there, she bent over backward to make this trip happen. She coordinated arrangements, bought flights, and secured park tickets—not for herself, but for us. Once we arrived and ordered our practical little Walmart grocery haul for the week, she kept going. She booked dinners, arranged Lightning Lanes and Premier Passes, and spent every available moment outside the conference with us and with Jett.
Her friend and teammate, a Disney planner extraordinaire, helped shape each day so seamlessly that the enormous machinery behind the trip almost disappeared. We simply woke up and stepped into experiences someone else had spent time, energy, money, and attention preparing for us.
That distinction matters.
The trip didn’t happen because we got lucky. It happened because someone decided our joy was worth sacrificing for.
Without Rebecca, Jett would not have had the best vacation of her life. I would not have watched her conquer every ride, talk herself through fear, discover Star Wars, and walk through the parks beneath fireworks. Mary and I would not have shared those long, exhausting, beautiful days together. I would not have written any of these reflections because the experiences behind them would not exist.
Every insight I found at Disney rested on a foundation someone else quietly built.
There is a temptation, when thinking about family, to focus on the people who do not show up in the ways we hope they will. Absence has a way of demanding attention. It leaves questions behind. It invites comparison. It can make us feel as though love should be measured by who failed to provide it.
But this trip reminded me that absence is not the whole story. Sometimes the empty spaces make it easier to recognize the person standing inside them.
Rebecca has filled roles others either could not or did not choose to fill. She has never treated that as a burden or used it to remind us of what anyone else lacked. She simply loved. She showed up. Again and again, without needing a title grander than the one a small child accidentally gave her.
Baba.
Maybe that is what family actually is.
Not a biological chart or a list of people assigned to particular roles. Not the people who should care, in theory. Family is the collection of people whose love becomes visible through action. It is the person who opens the door, makes the reservation, remembers the detail, buys the ticket, gets in the picture, and helps create a childhood worth remembering.
Disney sells magic with remarkable efficiency. It builds castles, launches fireworks, and constructs entire galaxies in central Florida.
But the most important magic of our trip did not come from Disney.
It came from someone who wanted us there.
As we settle back into Oklahoma, I feel immense gratitude for the rides, the meals, the laughter, the fireworks, and every ridiculous mile we walked. More than any of that, I am grateful that Jett has a Baba. I am grateful that Mary has a sister whose love is not merely spoken but repeatedly demonstrated. And I am grateful that somewhere along the way, she decided I was her brother too.
Disney gave us castles, fireworks, Star Wars, and memories I’ll carry for the rest of my life. Baba gave us the opportunity to have them.