Sassy's Up Late Again

My birthday looms like a stalking badger. I never thought I'd be the type to fear turning 40, and had I done so at just about any other point in my life, I probably would be handling it a lot better. But give the fact that I'm making less money than I did two years out of college, drowning in debt, and a career that stinks like a rotting corpse, I feel as if these 40 years have been a complete waste of time. I'm no better off today than I would have been if I'd decided to "find myself' after college and settled in to live in my parents' basement while I whiled away the years smoking pot and getting into bar fights. What's the fucking point of working so hard to be a good person, to make myself better, to learn new things and even survive the petty crap life throws your way on a regular basis if there's no reward? What exactly have I achieved? Not a damned thing. "You have your kids!" you want to tell me, as if this is an achievement to be proud of. Any moron with a working uterus and a sperm donor can have a kid. Just because they've lived this long doesn't mean I'm a good mom.

To make matters worse, Rusty seems bent on ruining it for me, again. He has once again failed to provide the one simple thing I really want every year: a surprise. A nice surprise, of course. Given our financial situation, I explicitly told him I don't want an expensive gift--the guilt would ruin any pleasure I might get out of a luxury item. My expectations are low. A dinner I don't have to cook, a birthday cake, and a small gift that indicates some level of familiarity. And we do this every year and still he fucks it up. I'm trying to figure out if I'm just a hardass bitch who can never be satisfied or if there's some fucked up message he's trying to send me by refusing to comply. The key issue he competely fails to get is that a birthday is an event. It happens once and then it's over. Giving me a gift two weeks prior and saying "This is for your birthday." isn't a birthday gift, and only ensures that I will spend my birthday like any other day of the year and wondering in my head if anybody even remembered or gives a damn. My kids don't give me gifts, and my parents send me a check every year. So it falls on him, unfortunately, to make it an event and not just another toilet-scrubbing lonely afternoon on the couch. I've been trying to get that through to him for what, 4 years now? Maybe my parents fucked me up more than I realized, maybe it's competely unrealistic to want to celebrate my birthday with something other than a passing insincere phrase on a Hallmark card.

So yes, it annoys me that when he ordered my birthday present online (spending at least 10x more than I'm comfortable with), he made absolutely no attempt to conceal it and went to great lengths to tell me about it.