Since When Did They Care What Time I Came Home For Dinner?

God, I'm racked with so much damn guilt right now.  It was another punishing day at work for me in The Third Department.  By now I am resigned/determined to work way past my eight hours (though that may change soon; I'll discuss that some other time), and so it's been routine for me to call my parents late in the afternoon to tell them I'm coming back some time in the evening.  That was the case yesterday/Friday.  I told them 7, but I was hedging that it could be later than that.  See, it was my last day of the week at work, and I am not the type to leave a lot of work for one of my co-workers to pick up the next day.  We are leaving some work in The Third Department for the next day anyway, but I don't like it when I am faced with a ton of work that I consider to be the previous day's work because it pushes back when I get to today's work, which I also have to dedicate a lot of time to.  And since I don't like it when it's done to me, yesterday/Friday I felt like I could go a ways in order to do my part, and to leave my co-worker with something slightly more manageable so that she doesn't curse me under her breath.

Because of that, not only did I blow through eight hours of work, my set limit of ten hours of work has been obliterated often as well.  Now I'm just staying until I'm damn good and ready to leave.  And yesterday/Friday, I just kept going and going and going until I felt like my co-worker won't be pissed at how much I left for her.  That, however, caused me to stay past 7 -- like, way past 7.

I got done around a quarter to 8.  I called my parents in my car, to which Father told me I could heat up dinner myself.  No problem nowadays; I've done that several times for dinner after my folks have been home.  So I got home, turned off the alarm, and heated up the spaghetti they left for me.  And when they came home a bit later, they asked me why I didn't call to tell them I'd be later than 7.

Dammit.  I got caught up on work that I hurriedly tried to do.  But frankly, it didn't dawn on me to call because there have been several times where I would call, say I wasn't coming home until 7, I get home at around 7 ... and they have left dinner for me to heat up and help myself.  Once or twice they were going out for a walk to exercise off whatever they ate for dinner, which they had eaten before me.  More often, they were just cleaning dishes or scrolling through their phones or downstairs doing whatever they wanted to do.  I don't remember the last time they asked me why I didn't call to tell them I was going to be late, if ever.  And if they have never asked me why, I did not think it was a big deal that I came back 45 minutes after I told them I was coming home, which, again, was a time I was soft on.

Then again ... well, I think I did tell Father over the phone when I told him 7 that if I was going to be late, I'd call.  And I didn't.  And I can tell that Father was a little miffed about it, even though, like I said, I don't remember the last time he wondered why I didn't call to tell them I would be late.  I think it's water under the bridge, but knowing how passive-aggressive My Father can be, and knowing that they are leaving soon, he might think one day in the next couple weeks would be a good time to bust my balls over this, just to shore up his masculinity.

I feel so fucking guilty.  But goddamn, man, since when did they care what time I came home for dinner?