After all, it leaves out her family.

She and her three children do not fit the resolution's stated ideal: a provider-father and a homemaker-mother rearing a "full quiver" of kids.

"It's starting to make me feel like a second-class citizen," Marina says about the nonbinding decree endorsed by the mayor and adopted by the City Council. "But I have nothing to be ashamed of."

Eldest daughter Jakey agrees; her 46-year-old divorced mother more than measures up.

"She's a great, loving mom," the 18-year-old says. "She cares about everything and everyone. She's taken in people she hardly knows because they were living in a car. She's always worked two jobs and was working three at one point. And she's done pretty much everything on her own."

The Johnson clan's message to Kanab Mayor Kim Lawson and council members: Their family works just fine, thanks, and works hard - too hard to be discounted.

Indeed, labor is what defines this family's workaday world.

A mainstay with her children, Marina is a fixture at Nedra's Too, the diner where she has dished out breakfast and banter with piping-hot coffee and sizzling salsa for a decade. Besides waitressing there days, she moonlights nights, waiting tables at Thunderbird Resort in nearby Mount Carmel.

"I took a second job because the natural-family proclamation [the city adopted] made the job situation too iffy because people are boycotting," she laments. "I can't make a living if people are not coming to Kanab."

Jakey also does double duty. She works full-time days at Vermilion Espresso Bar and Cafe and six-hour shifts three or four nights a week at Nedra's.

Younger brother Luke, 17, is a Kanab High sophomore who lives with his father, Joe Johnson, owner of a Kanab auto body shop. When not in school, Luke buses tables at Nedra's and at the Thunderbird.

Lauren, Marina's 10-year-old daughter, lives with her mom and is too young to toil outside the home.

"My kids work as much as I do - we have to," says Marina, who recently moved into a modular house in the Ranchos subdivision south of the town center. "They don't help with the house [payment], but they pay for their own car insurance and gasoline. And I hate the clothes my son wears, so I won't buy them. You tend to appreciate what you have a lot more when you buy it yourself."

Still, everyone but Lauren is pitching in to help Jakey pay for college. (She starts this fall at Dixie State in St. George.) Marina & Co. manage to cover most of the basics, except for medical and dental bills.

"We have no insurance," she says. "You hope nobody gets sick. I have to take my daughter to the dentist, and I have no idea how I'm going to pay for it."

The daughter of an Italian father and a Greek mother, Marina could label her brood "Russian," er, make that rushin'. They're always "rushin' off to school and jobs," she says.

Jakey is up first and wakes her mother before leaving for the coffee shop. Marina hurriedly dresses fourth-grader Lauren and gets her ready to catch the school bus. Mom then leaves for Nedra's.

Shortly after 3 p.m., mom and children - Luke included - are back home for homework and dinner. Marina has a sitter for Lauren, and the remaining three leave for their evening jobs. On Saturdays, Marina's day off, the family catches up on shopping, cleaning, washing and the occasional movie.

"I have my first dishwasher," Marina says, "but I usually do them by hand. Old habits are hard to break."

Lauren and her friends often picnic and nab lizards at a Kanab park. When her mom and siblings work Sundays, she gets religion at the nondenominational Rivers of Life Church.

Jakey says she and her siblings savor mom's killer cooking - not the cliché funeral potatoes so commonplace in Utah, but her spicy ethnic entrées.

"She makes awesome Cajun spaghetti and baklava,," Jakey says.

When Marina's not in her kitchen, she's on her soapbox. She does not want the natural-family resolution to make bigots of her children. So she teaches them tolerance and respect for individual differences. And she scrimps on luxuries to provide them with the basics.

"It's not a wonderful life," Marina says. "But we're making do and doing the best we can."

meddington@sltrib.com

Johnson family snapshot

Mother: Marina, 46.

Children: Jakey, 18; Luke 17; Lauren 10.

A closer look at Kanab

Kanab's passage of the "natural-family" resolution has sparked much debate. This week, The Salt Lake Tribune is profiling the mayor and four types of families with one common ingredient: love.

This week in The Tribune

* Monday: The resolute mayor who pushed the resolution then and defends it now.

* Tuesday: A hardworking doctor and an industrious mother who are rearing seven kids.

* Wednesday: A councilwoman who still feels the sting of being unable to bear children.

* Today: A single mother who works two jobs to support her three kids.

* Friday: Two women who fell in love 16 years ago, reared a son and now care for a "full quiver" of cats.

Kanab's City Council adopted a nonbinding "natural-family" resolution, which touts marriage between men and women as "ordained of God" and conceives homes as "open to a full quiver of children." It also promotes young women becoming "wives, homemakers and mothers" and young men growing into "husbands, home builders and fathers." Since the resolution's passage in January, women's advocates, gay-rights activists and others - inside and outside of Kanab - have decried the decree and even called for a boycott of area businesses.