[SolarCat]

I used to dread my birthday every year, because my mother would always find a way to turn it into a horrible, stressful day. To name a few examples:

There was the year she screamed at me for having the audacity to spend time with my friends when they visited instead of cleaning the house while they were there.
There was the year she visited me in college and pushed me away when I went to hug her, announcing I was an ugly, greasy-haired child who looked homeless, and she wouldn't talk to me unless I took a shower. (My hair looked greasy because it was still WET from the shower I had taken before they arrived.)
There was the year she made me a kind of cake I had hated for YEARS and yelled at me when I wouldn't eat it. (I wouldn't eat it because when I was much younger she had made me eat a half-baked one as my only food for a week as punishment for something I was too young to understand was wrong - I had thought I was helping. But she won't even admit that ever happened. To this day, I still can't eat that cake, OR the fruit that's in it.)
There was the year I was a horrible and ungrateful child for not liking the 'gift' she had been trying to force on me for the last six months (when I literally had an inability to even use it - who uses a giant steel-reinforced suitcase they aren't tall enough or strong enough to lift when EMPTY, in a room several floors up with no elevator? Wheels don't help me with that). She told me before she gave it to me, "I have a present for you, but you're going to hate it," and then was surprised when I told her I hadn't come up with a use for it since I had turned it down the week prior, and angry that I scuffed up the bottom in my attempts to bring it upstairs (empty, at her insistence) to the point she couldn't gift it as "new" anymore.

I can never win with her. I can't even break out even.


Living several hours away, over the last few years I have had enough space to retake back the days that should be mine, because it's too far for her to travel comfortably. I have had some great friends who have gone out of their way to make the day special until finally, my birthday is mine again...

And now she's announced that we're celebrating my birthday together this year. My parents have picked a restaurant halfway between, because I have a gift certificate to go there and they want to try it. At least it's not going to be at my house, like originally announced... (That is a complete other story, but my mother is not allowed at my house after her first and final visit there, the day after I bought it.) And I can't say 'no' because I have been through those repercussions before, and they are not worth it.

I am an absolute mess, and it's getting worse as the week gets closer.
I'm not allowed to like my birthday, because my birthday is about my mother, not me, and it's going to always be like that until one of us is dead.

I dread my birthday. It's the worst day of the year.