Happy Birthday - Not!

Anyone who tells you being married is all romantic dinners, roses and mind blowing sex is either 16 or so crazy in love that reality is on a picnic. There is a reason for all the better or worse stuff in the vows. Of course people just repeat them blindly because if you went into marriage thinking about all the sickness, poorer, worse, and other vagaries of marriage, no one in their right mind would actually sign up for that.

Let’s face it, if it weren’t for sex, the human race would be segregated by gender. Air quality warnings and haz mat suits issued at the checkpoint to Maletopia. Testosterone supplements issued at the checkpoint to Eve’s Paradise, lest the men fear growing a vagina (as my brother would say) just from exposure to candles, salads, and chick flicks.

For those of us in reality, marriage is a constant state of compromise, tolerance, and the knowledge that killing one’s spouse for leaving the seat up, again, does not meet the standard of severe psychological distress and will get you 25 to life.

A marriage can chug along this way until one spouse becomes such a teenager that the other spouse feels more like a juvie parole officer than a spouse.

Hubby had the misfortune of having his birthday fall on the same day as the visitation for grandmother.

It would not have been so bad were it not for the fact that it was also THE birthday of the slide over the hill – the big 4 – 0. Given where we were and the gloom, there wasn’t a celebration. The best we could do was Long John Silver’s and a Best Western. Hubby would have preferred Bravo’s or Red Lobster and a night at the Marriott or Hyatt. Hubby would have preferred not spending the evening in the funeral home in an introvert’s computer nerd’s nightmare – people, people he didn’t know, and more people with emotional stuff going on.

We did celebrate with his parents at one of Craig’s favorite places – Maggiano’s – a week later. We had great Italian food. His mom made a delicious chocolate cake complete with candles. There were so many candles on the top of the cake that when Hubby blew them out, we almost died from smoke inhalation.

He did manage to blow them out with one breath. I wonder what he wished for? I hope it doesn’t entail gold chains and a red sports car.