Mom's Birthday Dinner

One of my favorite pictures of Mom from the 80s.

Mom's birthday is this Thursday. She's been gone for 9 months now and my sister Julie had a great idea of celebrating her birthday in her honor at her favorite restaurant - Brick Oven Pizza in Provo. Now that I think about it, I suppose it's kind of an odd thing to celebrate a birthday for someone who has died but that thought was far from my mind as we were eating together as a family. Instead we were thinking and talking about each other's lives: Jen's absolute passion about being a science teacher (she was wearing a button on her bag that said "I'm a science teacher. What's your superpower?" and her admitting tonight that she makes up songs with science terms as lyrics to help her students learn.), Julie's pending divorce and the proposed terms of the legal contract, Tam's adventures of coming to my work at the alcohol averse Church inadvertently wearing an alcoholic beverage t-shirt she got from her work, Dave's crazy graveyard working schedule and my finishing of the MBA.

In fact, we didn't even talk about Mom until the very end of the meal. With a good amount of laugher, some expressions of condolences for Tam's job situation and Julie's divorce situation, and healthy doses of Hawaiian pizza (Mom's favorite as long as it doesn't have almonds on it) behind us, we raised our mugs over our circular table and toasted Mom.

I've heard that the test of a good leader is the quality of individuals left behind to continue on in the leader's absence. The family is in good shape. We've been though a lot and probably have much yet to endure but if Mom was aware of tonight's birthday celebration, I imagine that she was proud of her kids and hope that she felt honored.