'I'm a long distance daughter. I'm still trying to not feel guilty.'

When I was about to turn 19, the safety blanket that had wrapped around me for my entire life vanished. 

My mother, who had moved to Australia from New Zealand at 25 years old, was going home to be with her parents.

She'd had a dream; in it, her long-dead grandfather had told her it was time to return. Family members were dying. She needed to be home to oversee funerals, to step up when needed, to be there for her own father whose health had taken a sudden downhill turn. 

A poorly remembered dream was all it took for her to leave me.

In a few mere months, she'd packed down our family home, given the beds and blankets away, packed my little sisters' belongings into suitcases and told my dad she would come back, eventually. 

She was lying. We all knew it. 

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I'm turning 25 later this year. I've graduated from university, moved in with my best friends and gotten my heart broken twice. I've lived in two apartments, one townhouse, taken in two cats and re-homed both of them. 

I've only been back to New Zealand, my mother's home country, three times. 

I've missed the birth of both my nieces, my grandfather's 70th birthday and my younger sister's 21st. My nieces learned my name through FaceTime. My dad and I reconnected on Facebook Messenger after months of silence. I talk to my mum once a week if either of us has time.

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I try my hardest not to feel guilty for being a 'long-distance daughter', for missing the moments my family don't recall on video chats and phone calls, or for ignoring my parents when they ask me to come over so I can be with them.

But some days, the guilt is overwhelming. On other days, I am angry and sad; I feel defeated for everything that I am missing because my mother left me on my own to grow up. Sometimes, I feel selfish for staying behind and then I am devastated because staying was the right decision. 

In many discussions with friends who've had similar experiences to mine, they know leaving their hometown is the good and just and valuable thing to do. They're on a journey to gain more life experience, make good money and live freely without being under the watchful eyes of their parents. 

Of course, some days the guilt traps them to their beds. They can only blink through tears. They miss a life they are sure they would not have been satisfied with. 

Even so, it is entirely too painful to reckon with. They know leaving was always the right decision. 

But what do you do if your parents left you? If you are a long-distance daughter whose family packed it all up to go seek a greater 'perhaps'? 

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The sad, difficult-to-admit truth is, I am happy on my own. 

The distance between my family and I has been freeing. I've started therapy. I mostly buy my own groceries (still can't cook though). I spend money on treats sometimes (or rather, a lot of times...) and if I ever stumble through the front door late at night, I don't feel bad about it. 

My mother leaving gave me an independence I didn't ever really think I was capable of. I've learnt how to be calmer without my family around, to talk openly instead of screaming because something doesn't go my way. If she had stayed, I know I would have lived with her until I could afford to buy a house and then, because I couldn't possibly ever imagine living without her, I likely still would have stayed by my mum, always within reach. 

Becoming a long-distance daughter forced me to grow up. 

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It's also taught me — with a searingly painful reality check — that being left behind by family, or leaving family behind, is sometimes the only way for one to learn how to breathe on their own. 

Being a long-distance daughter is a constant feeling of guilt; a sharp pang in the stomach's base and a needle that flickers between pricking the heart and pricking the ribs. 

It is painful and frustrating and constantly terrifying. It's also freeing - the good kind. The kind that only comes when we do something that hurts really, really bad. 

The kind that makes it completely, utterly worth it. 

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