My Birthday!!

About a week ago, Kevin was talking about how I “saved him from his townhouse”. 

If you don’t know the story, to make a long story short, he had inherited a townhouse from his grandmother. It was the second from the right in a row or five in a complex full of townhomes. The building had a bad foundation, and Kevin was dealing with a bad HOA as well. 

In 2023, I took a real estate class for fun. Almost as soon as Kevin allowed me to see the damage in his house, I asked him why he didn’t call an investor. He said “Because obviously they wouldn’t want this place.”  

Feeling unsure of that, I called an investor and described the situation without giving the actual address.   Once this investor convinced me to get Kevin to call him, I told Kevin what I did, fully expecting him to be mad at me for “overstepping.”  (I mean, I was overstepping, but I only called for my own curiosity and wasn’t going to tell Kevin until this dude convinced he wanted the townhouse and could deal with the HOA.) 

At the end of that week, Kevin met the investor, and the investor paid him for the townhouse about the same amount Kevin would have paid someone to take it off his hands. Since then, Kevin has said that “I saved him.” We had just become “official” about 2-3 month before. We then moved into the guest house on his parent’s property, where we still are to this day. 

I got this awful feeling that if god forbid something happened to Kevin and I was in severe grief talking about how “he always said I saved him” that others might just think that’s BS. Or, they might think that I just wish a man had said that about me. So I asked Kevin to write it all down, in his own handwriting, and sign his name. I said “don’t type it out, because that’s not proof.”  

I don’t know why I had that intrusive thought about some hypothetical future scenario in which I’m grieving my husband and no one around me believes what I’m saying he always told me. That was 1-2 weeks ago, and we forgot about it. Then I woke up on my birthday, and this note was with my card. I also got a $100 gift card, and we took my daughter to eat after work. 

Today I turn 47. Every year since I turned 36, I’ve googled on my birthday what celebrities died at the age I’m turning. This is the first time in 11 years that I didn’t do that. I knew offhand that Judy Garland did. I wasn’t interested in the rest. Maybe that anxiety is going away.