Every person has had that phase when they were a teenager and didn’t want anything to do with their “embarrassing” parents. I was no different.

But as I have gotten older, I have grown much closer to my parents and try to spend as much time with them as I can. There is a reason for that.

A year ago, my dad got very sick with pneumonia and the flu. He had to be placed in a medically induced coma, and we sometimes thought that he wasn’t going to make it. After that, I started to feel a ravaging guilt.

I kept wondering, “Have I spent enough time with him? Will I regret anything if something happens to him?”

My parents are divorced; my mother lives in Ohio while I live with my dad in Georgia. My first boyfriend lived in Ohio, and some might think that would help me spend more time with my mother, but it didn’t.

I was always with him, and when I wasn’t, I was texting him.

Now, I haven’t seen my mother since I graduated from high school two years ago, and I keep telling myself, “If only I wouldn’t have wasted all that time I could have been spending with her.”

Guilt is a feeling that consumes me when it comes to the people I love, and I let it. I feel like there isn’t enough time in the day or enough of me to spread across the people I hold close.

I don’t have an answer or a solution when it comes to these feelings. All I know is that I just have to keep reminding myself to remember the times I have spent with my parents instead of the times I have not.

Maybe we should all keep that in mind.