I always thought that the year I missed my parents the most would be my first year away from them – freshman year. And while I did miss them an awful lot that first year away at college, nothing compared to the emptiness I felt this summer.

Now, before you get any crazy ideas in your head – no, nothing happened to my parents. They’re both perfectly healthy and alive, and I consider myself very lucky. But something about this summer made me miss my parents more than I ever could have imagined…

You see, my parents both immigrated to America when they were mere teenagers during the time of the Vietnam War, forcing them to start their lives over. They started working straight out of high school, knowing just enough English to get them multiple jobs to support their families.

Fast forward about 40 years – one marriage and two kids later – and my parents are as happy as they can be. In those 40 years, my parents worked themselves to the bone, constantly providing for our family, giving my sister and me the education that they never had the chance to have. And this summer was no different – except for the fact that I finally felt their absence in my life.

My parents are the hardest working people you will ever meet. They always put other people before themselves, leaving them no time to be selfish. Every year when their jobs offer them to work overtime, you can bet that my parents will be signing up to work every extra hour they can – no matter how crazy the hours get. My mom works from 5 AM to 5 PM every day (plus, 20 hours of overtime each week). My dad works from 3 PM to 11 PM every day (plus whatever 7 to 14 hour shifts he can squeeze into the weekends). They have insane schedules that keep them from seeing each other for more than a few minutes each night. And quite honestly, I don’t know how they do it.

This summer, I haven’t seen much of my parents. Between my internship and their need to work during every waking hour, it’s almost as if I weren’t even living at home with them. And for the entire summer of living at home, I’ve felt empty. We don’t eat dinner together around a kitchen table like we used to. Instead, we quickly scarf down whatever’s in front of us so they can get back to work. We don’t hang out as a family on weekends and watch Redbox movies late at night like we used to. Instead, my parents keep reeling in the money on weekends while I sit on the couch with the TV on wishing my summer could be different. I sit and wonder why all of a sudden, it feels like making money is more important than spending time with their own daughter.

The first thing that came to my mind was greed. They talk about it all the time – they sign up for the overtime because they’re greedy; they want the money. And for the entire summer, I believed it. I believed that my parents – the most selfless people I’ve ever known – are the greediest people I’ve ever known. But it wasn’t until recently that I realized it’s not because they’re greedy – it’s because they’re still working to put me through college, to put food on our plates, to give me the chance to live a life they never had at my age.

My parents are the most selfless people I’ve ever known. And while they’ve spent more hours this summer working than they have spent with me, I realized that I’ve been the selfish one all along. I’ve been accusing them of making my summer at home sad and lonely, but in reality, they’ve been doing everything they can to balance the time spent at work with the time spent with me. They call me on their work breaks. They offer to go get food before going to work. They ask my how my day was – even if there’s only enough time for me to say “good.”

All this time, I was missing my parents, but I’ve just been too selfish to see that they’ve been here for me all along.