The worldview of some people is really interesting. Some seem to believe that things will change the way they want them to change without them putting anything into it, or even if their actions feed into the contrary effect. This is the case of... Carly.
Carly has a child whom she has spoiled since the crib. We all know because she has been our coworker since before she was pregnant. Whatever the kid has wanted, she has always provided, to extreme lengths. She has rushed to the hospital with the kid for reasons most people would just keep them at home or give it a thicker coat and send them to school. The kid also goes only to private hospitals, which is not your only choice here. Curiously, the kid has been pumped full of pills for all sorts of allergies and things to the point where they take daily more medication than most elder people, with ever changing needs and issues.
Before you say something, yes, it is possible the kid indeed suffers for a long series of illnesses and allergies, and that their parents to everything they can to help them live a normal life, but then wouldn't all those affections also show? However, the point here is that Carly is going far and beyond. Kid has allergies and all sorts of diagnosed illnesses, and needs to be checked monthly by the pediatrician (for the last twelve years) - and the kid belongs to four different sport clubs at school, and all of them are extremely physical and outdoorsy - and so Carly also does the kid's homework, gets them all the videogames and videogame consoles, sneaks out of work daily because she has to pick her kid up from school, and school ends three hours before the end of her work day...
And so it happens that in the last years the kid has taken the habit of telling her of the homework that needed to be submitted twenty minutes before class. The kid doesn't study, doesn't move a finger, because they are used to Carly leaving work, risking her job and making homework materialize out of thin air. Recently Carly spent a weekend preparing the kid's science project, only to have them misplace it and lose it. So now, an hour before Science Class, Carly had to sneak out of her job, start scrapping the project back on, find her files and print them, and then hire a messenger to send it to her kid's school.
Of course she gets mad and calls her kid and berates them, but you can hear the ennui in the kid's voice, like they boringly put up with the mother's rant, because they don't care.
For years Carly has been doing everything for her kid and instead of them. That child has no sense of responsability or cause-consequence, because Carly has been dealing with all of it and keeping them from facing real life situations. She keeps insisting to the rest of the office that she is going to stop, she will make the kid responsible, but yet she runs and picks up their responsabilities because "what can I do at this point". Oh, but "they will hear me out when I get home".
Except next week is going to be the same.
In a way, she drops her own responsabilities to attend her kid's responsabilities, which puts her at risk, because at one point people will stop be linient with her slipping away from the office on a daily basis half through the time she should be here and working.
So, what am I trying to say here? Though you can turn a situation gone wrong and make it better, this is not always the case, which is why, when you start something - like you decide to have a child, or you enter a relationship, start a company, etc. - you have to have a clear view of where you want to go, and go constantly for it. You can't do everything for someone else constantly and expect them to start doing everything for you. People get used to the comfort you give them, and then they expect them.
When you "ruin" a relationship by not enforcing limits and boundries, and then wish to enforce them, you will have a harder time than if you would have started with this from the begining. In a relationship you can try and fix it, but when it doesn't work, you have the chance to break up. Can you do that with your own child? And there are many other situations where walking away isn't an option. Think of a job relationship, where you have to set boundaries to keep bosses and colleagues or clients from taking advantage of you, demanding more work from you than what you have been hired for, or what's recognized in your paycheck. With the current economy, leaving might not be an option.
So, don't wait until things become unbearable, until you break under the weight of the burden you have been carrying for others. Start small and always start at the begining. Learn to know yourself, your capabilities and your limits. And respect them.
In the end, it's all about respect: respect for yourself and all the others: those you think you are helping, and those you are imposing on in your effort to haul the issues of others.
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