The word “enable” has taken on such a negative connotation. We use enable to mean that we are giving someone the ability to do something that is less than positive. We enable their bad behavior. We enable their self destructive patterns. We enable them to settle rather than strive.

I’ve been thinking about this word in the context of Mother’s Day. I’ve thought about my mother and the role she played in my life. My father was always the one who pushed. He was the one who would want to debate your American History essay or discuss the book you had to read and write about. He’d look at a paper with an “A” and ask why it wasn’t an “A+” and there was no teasing in that at all. So I have always thought that his expectations have been what drove me, what launched me, what led me to want more of myself.

But as I think about it now, I realize how often it was my mother who made it possible. She did enable in all the best senses of the word. When I wanted to raise money for our high school’s radio station, my passion for my junior and senior years, it was my mother who left early, drove me to pick up donuts and coffee so I could take them to school and sell them to students as they day began. It was my mother, when I wanted to study abroad my last year of college and my dad said no to the extra expense, who found a way to make it possible. It was my mother who, in her quiet way, made me “able” to do the things I wanted to do.

As a middle school kid, with few friends that shared our Jewish faith, I was invited to go Christmas caroling. My father would have raised the roof. My mother made it happen because she knew it mattered to me. She understood that it would not compromise my identity but rather that it would allow me to enjoy my circle of friends. And, in fact, it made me clearer about who I was than had I been denied the opportunity.

Although the 25 years we had together were far too few, her life lessons live on in me and her words often ring in my ears. She was always positive, always kind, always loving, When she was dying and I had to leave her side in the hospital, she smiled at me and said “The children come first,” once again enabling me to do what I needed to do, to live as I needed to live and to remember what mattered. As I work to find a full heart, I strive to be more of who she was, whose heart was always full and who made all things possible.