Happy Birthday, Mom!

My mom's birthday was Sunday.

I have a pretty fantastic mother. I give her a hard time and act exasperated by her at times. But all in all, she's pretty great.

We had dinner with her sisters and their daughters Saturday. My mom had kind of a crumb of a grandmother, and her sister brought up something awful her grandmother did to her at the dinner. I could tell how much it still hurt my mom. But the neat part about it, to me, was no matter her feelings toward her grandmother she didn't let that cloud my relationship with my great-grandmother. I had no idea she didn't like her until long after she had passed away.

I'm feeling lucky because I was out with a friend last night whose mother called to say she was in the hospital. She fell after having too many drinks and split her head open. Another friend told me the other day about how her mother started drinking again, and it got to the point she had to go to rehab for the third time. She went into rehab a month before she was supposed to watch my friend's sons for a week while she and her husband went on vacation. Yikes. Talk about rough mothers to grow up with.

And I'm not saying my mom is great simply because she's not an alcoholic, sometimes it takes hearing those stories to realize how great she is. So Happy Birthday, Mom! I won't say how old you are.