Bad Writing_2

"No good deed goes unpunished."
 
The quote that serves me is my mother's crumpled sign above her kitchen sink, "Act as if what you do makes a difference," William James.
She did.
She kept Paula when the doctors told her to institutionalize her.
Mom is Bohemian and Irish.  Stubbornness is predicated on these two islands, I mean, in these two places.  I hated Paula because she got new underwear before her six year jaunt to St. Colletta's in Madison.
I hated her less when my brothers and I would watch from the back seat of our late 1950's station wagon, Paula in tears, as we left her in Madison once again after a day visit.

What good deed did Mom do to deserve a cognitively disabled child?

Mom's courage was not enacted on the blood of a battle field, but within the beating heart of a child of the Great Depression.  Her older brother, David, sent home $2.50 from his naval pay in California to assist her large Catholic family at Lawler's Grocery on Webster Street in Green Bay, Wisconsin.  She listened as her brother, Eddie, got whipped with a willow branch by Patrick Henry because Eddie had taken her for a perilous ride in a dinghy on the river. 

Mom's good deed was perhaps to hope.  She hoped she wouldn't get caught whispering during general math class at West High.  She hoped she wouldn't get caught in a lie about not being seen with another man after her first blind date with Bob.  She hoped she wouldn't starve before she married.  She hoped her children would be healthy.  And when one wasn't healthy she hoped she'd have courage.

She did.  Have courage.

And perhaps the former quote is correct.  She hoped and sometimes received.  She was punished with Paula. 

I'm glad she hoped, glad she had courage, and I'm glad she had Paula.