I became a dad in an unusual circumstance. My wife’s brother died in the fall of 2016. His daughter—Asher—was almost one year-old and in foster care at the time. Prior to his death, Asher’s mother and he had agreed to ask my wife and I to adopt Asher. Asher’s mother persisted in this wish after he died.

Asher’s dad died at the end of August 2016. My wife and I had graduated college in May 2016, were married in June, and moved to Ghana for a company I was starting at the beginning of August.

I am now 25 years-old, Asher is two and a half, and my wife and I are expecting a second child in September.

In some respects, my position—25, married, one kid with another on the way—is quite normal. Statistically, it is not the average. But I grew up among devout Christians in the midwest. Many of my high school friends are married and some have kids.

But among my more recent peers, it is very odd. I went to college at Brown University. People thought it was crazy that I was engaged my Senior year, and I have no friends from school who have gotten married or engaged. If being married made relating difficult, having a kid pushed me into a whole different universe.

It is odd also among my startup founder peers. When my wife and I were actually able to get full custody of Asher, in January 2017, we all moved to San Francisco so I could participate in Y Combinator’s startup accelerator. Very few in my Y Combinator batch were married, fewer had kids, and adopting a few months after starting a company seemed crazy.

And in a way it was and is crazy, but humans are adaptable and what’s crazy today feels normal next week.

Being a dad is a very special thing. Asher is one of my closest friends. I think adopting has made the oddity of it more stark to me. To be a parent feels to me to be arbitrarily paired with this other person. The relationship has a lot of unique characteristics and many of the most important are purely cultural.

It’s like all of my other human relationships: we’ll have good times and bad times. We’ll try to love each other. We’ll certainly hurt each other.

Though the relationship feels unique to me unique in that the joy and love and affection are more intense than I have felt in any other relationship. I think some of this is just due to the fact that kids are joyous.