My dad left for Jordan two days after my first day of third grade.

I had spent the entire night before crying into my pillow until the entire thing was a disgusting wet mess. Sometime during the night I had rolled out of bed and sat against my bedroom door, huddling under my blanket and burying my face into my knees to hush my sniffling and hiccuping. I didn’t dare let anyone hear me cry because I didn’t know how to explain why I was so shaken up.

Growing up, I was always the closest to my dad. Daddy’s little girl, my sister would mutter. Memories from my childhood were almost always centered around him-- he was the one who picked me up from school and took me out for ice cream and taught me how to ride a bike and spent hours trying to help me with subtraction problems.

And so when he sat me down and tried to explain his fancy contract my breath hitched and for once it wasn’t the humid July air that flushed my cheeks. I wiped my clammy hands on my Powerpuff Girls pajama pants as he explained what I saw as the end of the world as I knew it-- four months of teaching in Jordan (which was a modest 6815.82 miles away), two weeks of visiting, four more months of teaching, and then two months of visiting over the summer.

His reassurances and comforting smile somehow held me over until the end of the conversation, and for the rest of the summer the vacations and normal family routines kept me distracted. We spent July traveling from one place to another and having weekly picnics by the lake, and most of the time I pretended that the moment would never come.

But when I saw him packing his suitcases one morning I broke down. The fact that he was leaving soon had been in the back of my mind the whole summer no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, but when I saw him emptying his closet and packing his things it suddenly struck me-- my dad was going to live in a different house in a different country on a different continent for the rest of my childhood. I walked around for days with a queasy stomach and a seemingly permanent lump in my throat.

And then came the final goodbyes in the airport. I had tried to hold it in and stifle my tears  but then he hugged me and he smelled like shaving cream and shampoo and I just started sobbing-- that horrible kind of uncontrollable sobbing where everything you had bottled up and tried to choke back down is released and you’re embarrassed because you really shouldn’t be crying this much but you can’t stop, and his chest doesn’t muffle your cries like your pillow does and you really hope that you’ll catch your breath soon (or someday).

But I miraculously survived. He wasn’t there for my graduation or  any of my parent-teacher conferences or my gymnastic tournaments or birthday parties or school plays or father-daughter dances. He wasn’t there to drive me around town and talk to me about what I wanted to be when I grew up. But all night movie sessions turned into three hour long Skype calls. Nightly bedtime stories turned into  helping me with my math homework through video chats. And when he came back in June, summer became road trips and obnoxiously loud music and uncontrollable laughter and cherry popsicles dripping down our hands.

And it became routine-- his absence so customary that it was strange to see him in person when he visited. He never had the chance to see me grow up gradually and instead watched me mature in spurts, and I never realized just how much of my childhood he had missed. An extended four year leave allowed him to witness my glorious teenage years, however, and I never really thought about the fact that he was on temporary leave until the summer before eleventh grade. It was hard to ignore the daily phone calls from the university while I pored over summer assignments, but not just because it made it difficult to concentrate. Even after all those years, I had never acclimated to goodbyes. His absence was something I had always endured rather than accepted, and even at sixteen I didn’t know how to grasp it.

The second time around wasn’t as traumatic for my now mature 16-year-old self, but as he helped me with a dumb Mastering Physics assignment the day before he left, and as I stared at the crinkles around his eyes and wrinkles in his forehead while he intently explained the velocity of a speeding object, I didn’t start tearing up because I didn’t understand physics (despite my earnest claims and the fact that physics is really, really hard).