He had a laugh that came easily, the contagious kind. He called me “Sammy” or “love” or “Smarzolian,” which was some type of alien he made up. He thought it was funny if I accidentally knocked over the popcorn and never asked me to help him clean it up until our show was over. It was at his house every other weekend that I fell in love with old sci-fi TV shows we watched together: Doctor Who, Star Trek,Firefly, and Farscape. His friends from the engineering firm where he worked taught me to play poker and how to draw perfect circles. He was the one who signed me up for Imagineering as part of the Talented and Gifted program in elementary school and photographed the moment my eyes lit up when we launched the first rocket I designed myself. My times with him were the reason I’d started dreaming about the stars, wondering what I might be able to do to help humanity reach them.

But somehow, in spite of the good times we’d had, he left. When he was offered the job transfer to London, the pull of his homeland was stronger than any connection he felt to me. I understood some of his reasoning — he worried about my grandfather, who had been alone and in declining health since my grandmother passed away. I knew he missed his “mates” from Cambridge, most of whom chose to stay in the UK. He used to tell me all the time that he loved me, and nothing in the world was more important to him than I was.

Still, it wasn’t enough to make him stay.

My parents asked me if I had any feelings about the custody arrangements, Mom with tears in her eyes and Dad with a worried crease in his forehead, but how was I supposed to feel anything but confusion and heartbreak? I loved them both. I needed them both. Middle school had been a horror of alternately being teased and ignored, and Dad’s move was the shit frosting on a cake made of misery.

As it turns out, judges don’t like to take children from their mothers, especially when they’ve had primary custody for seven years. Dad agreed it would be terrible to move me so far away, leaving Mom all alone, so Mom got full custody.