Help or Hindrance

Good morning Bloggers,
     As we prepare our children, and in my case, grandchildren, for the end of their summer vacations and are arranging their lives to head back to school,  I would like to take a moment of your time to write on the  subject of enabling.  How do you know when your help is really not a hindrance?  We all can agree that hindsight is twenty-twenty but how do we know when our help is actually not handicapping, restricting, limiting, obstructing, or restraining?  Unless you are the owner of a proven crystal ball, it can be as difficult to discern as to which came first, the chicken or the egg.  We all want our children to have fewer hurdles, obstacles, snags, and glitches during their formative years than we did.  Of course I am biased, but there was no greater love expressed by parents than mine to their seven boys.  My father would have turned one hundred this year and my mother would have celebrated her 90th birthday this past January.  Growing up in the deep south, they wanted my brothers and me to not have to struggle as they did and in the midst of all this, I ended up taking advantage of their goodness. In the middle of my storm,  my moral compass had no north, south, east or west, it always pointed at me.  Read this excerpt from my book.  It’s found in chapter three, Progressively Paralyzed;  Helping is doing something for someone that he is not capable of doing himself, and enabling is doing for someone things that he could and should be doing himself, writes Allison Bottke, author of Setting Boundaries for Your Children.  Any attempt at describing my mother’s love for us would be inadequate and lacking.  I am sure there are physiological and genetic reasons that are mixed in the equation, but my mother’s love was best expressed in the feeling that I got from seeing her, sharing my thoughts with her, or just hearing the sweet calming sound of her voice.  She was caring and compassionate, stern but sweet, demanding yet divine.  The best word–and there are many–to describe my mama is “angelic.”  What usually starts out as helping ends up crippling the individual and leads to enabling.  I was no exception to this rule, and as you will read later in the book how many who thought they were helping, fueled decades of enabling.  There are times when you have to touch the stove to know it’s hot, there are moments when not having brings appreciation for the things that we do have, love is not always doing, and sometimes having less gives you so much more of what you need.