While there are sympathetic ears, I thought I would share my own story, just so I can let it out.
I'm the son of immigrants who worked hard to get me the best education that they could afford. My family have been through hard times and good times, and back to hard times recently since the housing bust.
Money had always been a thorn for as long as I can remember.
Some time during college, while tasting such freedom (education afforded by grants and loans from my father), I began to experiment and grow more distance from my parents. My mother was having a hard time for various reasons, and she was very disappointed that I didn't call her every week as she had asked.
I stopped calling, and sometimes ignored the calls. The relationship began to sour, with hateful messages left in voicemail, admonishing me for something or another.
It wasn't always bad. I would go back for holidays and such, but they would always say, that I need to visit every Christmas and Thanksgiving, because that is the right thing to do. It was always like that: I need to do something because it is the thing to do. I can't be friends with someone at school because they had a quarrel with my friend's parents, and it is the right thing to support your parents. I have to break up with my girlfriend (way back in highschool) because I need to focus on my college education. I need to repay them when I become rich because they provided for me.
I haven't seen them in 3 years now. I'm afraid my father is forever doomed to be guilted into providing for my mother, who forever states how she hates my father being inadequate in so many ways. She says she can't leave him because she has no way of sustaining herself. He says he loves her, and that she is ill and doesn't mean what she says to me and him, but I can't tell if he's lying to himself because the alternative is too sad to contemplate, him having cut off his relationship with his own mother and family because she compelled him to do so a long time ago.
Anyways. There's too much to this story. I can go on but the details don't matter.
I wish I had a cool story about my dad saving a dog in the ice. I don't. But I did have a loving family once. It got ripped apart by money and lies and insecurities, and I've been left with estrangement and a sense of longing for over three years now. I could give them a call, as I've done before, but I've been there once and it didn't help -- I feel like I'm healthier this way.
I'm thankful for my dad who continues to say that he believes in me, through sparse email correspondences. I'm thankful for my mother who insisted that I be educated well. I wish we had it better, and I wish this guilt doesn't last forever.