At 5:30 a.m. this morning, I dragged my suitcase down to the ground floor of my in-laws’ home in Taipei and hailed a taxi to the airport. Trailing me were my wife, Jean, and daughter, Sasha, and as the cab driver loaded my bags into the trunk, I kissed them good-bye in a ritual that is becoming so familiar that I worry it’s losing all power to unsettle me.

I travel. It’s my job. I go away for a week, two weeks, at a time, to random corners of the globe (today: Tokyo), on missions almost too ridiculous to describe (eat ramen till I burst).

Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn or Taipei or wherever home happens to be at the moment, Jean and Sasha carry on without me. The baby eats, sleeps, poops, plays, laughs at jokes only she understands, and cries at every minor head bonk or perceived abandonment. The nannies come in the morning and leave in the evening, and sometimes my mother comes down from Connecticut to help out.

Really, I don’t know what things are like there. I’m having picnics in Paris or sailing the Caribbean, and though I whip out the iPhone to show strangers photos of my darling daughter, to be honest I feel a bit of relief that I don’t have to get up at 6 to change her diaper and prepare her bottle. With that comes a bit of guilt, of course, that Jean is stuck with the chores, but such are the paths we’ve chosen. This is my job; what am I supposed to do?

At the end of it all, though, I get to come home, and there confront an infant who’s probably on the verge of forgetting my face. The first few times, it was as if nothing had happened at all. Daddy’s here—she grins! But the morning after the last trip, when we brought her into bed with us for that first bottle, she smiled and gave me… this look. “You again?” she seemed to say, a bit sarcastically. “So glad you could join us.”

Did she really know I’d been away? I mean, she knows if I put her in the playpen and walk into the other room. I can tell by the screams. But not to have seen me for 16 days—does that compute for a 10-month-old?

For now these reunions are easy. What more does a baby want than a bottle and a cuddle? But soon, I know, she’ll see the packed bags in the hallway, and though she’s recently learned how to wave and say “Bye-bye!” what I’m sure I’ll see is tears.