Like most of my theories, this one is certain to be proven wrong. I doubt it will be as spectacularly ill conceived as the whole offer a newborn cash and it will sleep for more than four hours idea or the don’t expose your girlchild to Barbie and she won’t insist on everything she touches being a screaming pink theory. Those hypotheses were born out of frustration; rather the sort of cool rational thought that hits you after four hours of holding an impossibly hot baby and staring at the impossibly hot Steve Burns.

No, this theory is a good one. Hold on to your socks, mamas, they are about to be knocked off.

We don’t have enough to worry about.

I can hear you laughing. Lady, you’re thinking, you are completely insane. I have far too much to worry about, you’re muttering to yourself and giggling. Remember that they laughed at Galileo, too.

Hear me out.

Back in the day – for my purposes “day” means “before vaccines and indoor plumbing and agriculture” – mamas had plenty to pace the dirt floors over. Which of my kids will die from typhus or the plague this year? Should I let the girl starve to death in order to feed the boy because he’ll be of more use when he’s older? How will we all make it through the drought or the current revolution? Of my 14 pregnancies, how many of my babies will make it to adulthood?

And as much as this has the potential to turn into a diatribe on how conditions in most of the world suck ass for women and children, my new theory is only marginally related. When I was holding my small, feverish kid and having those 3 a.m. nightmares about this illness doing lasting (or, frankly, fatal) damage to my boy, I realized that as moms we have a finite capacity for worry. It’s like a deep well that always has to maintain a set water level. If your kids are in life-threatening states, then your well is completely full of that fear. All your brain can deal with is making that situation end. It’s a bit of cunning programming, really. What is more important to the survival of the species than an adult who is genetically designed to do her utmost to make sure her wee ones live? (and I don’t want to leave dads out of the equation – but I don’t think they have quite the same hair trigger and obsessive capacity for concern. Any Austindad, though, is encouraged to prove me wrong).

In the absence of dire situations, which is where most of us are most of the time thankfully, our worry well still needs to hit its benchmark, otherwise we just don’t feel like we’re doing a decent job as a parent. Because of this, we get all knotted up about the stuff that doesn’t matter nearly as much, like how much TV time is ideal or how long we should read aloud or how evil high fructose corn syrup is. Our well needs to be full in order for us to function. Most of the time, we fill it with dozens of insignificant worries rather than big ugly ones.

I’m not advocating a return back to the days where everyday brings up new hurdles for survival. I do think that we should all do what we can to make sure that others can enjoy this luxury as well. But what we need to think about is my hypothesis that most of our parenting choices are chock-full of angst because we need something to get all worried about, despite the fact that, in the long run, they don’t matter nearly as much as we want them to. Given that we don’t have enough life or death stuff to fill the well, we see dire situations where they don’t actually exist.