But in the same breath, why should you have to be the one to remind your spouse to be considerate? It is incredibly awkward, because even reminding someone makes it sound like you think they may have already forgotten it, not to mention it is putting that responsibility on you, not because you actually want them to make a big deal of it, you just don't want the awkwardness and accusation when they forget and get pissed off at you for "not telling them". In an adult partnership you should be bloody remembering your partners birthday, and not making them responsible for informing you, it's the same day every year!
In fairness though my sister has always done what your mum did, weaponise it, but with her husband.. she would purposely not mention anything about it to us in the run up, hoping we would forget so she could make a massive deal of being upset with anyone who forgot it, my argument was if it was so important to her why not just remind people??
I always remind MY family that my DH birthday is coming up by mentioning plans that we are making etc, because I couldn't bring myself to be upset that they don't consider his birthday as one of their 'top tier' birthdays and I don't want any awkwardness for him, so I subtly remind people on his behalf, that's what you should do when you care about people, not weaponise it.
In our family 'top tier' birthdays are your spouse, children, siblings, parents and very close friends, you should know and be thinking about those in advance without anyone having to remind you on their behalf, if you can't do that with all the modern technology we have then you just don't care enough to remember.