NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the asteroid zoomed past Monday morning.
The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth. That is just twice the height of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the moon.
I trembled at the thought. We were seriously this close to potentially being obliterated! Wiped out! Just like that!
As if I don’t have enough to worry about.
I hate these kinds of news stories. This might happen! And That! And oh merciful heavens, That Other Thing might come about, too! Bees might become extinct! The sun might burn itself out! Global warming might fry us all! Or another Ice Age might freeze us to death! And ASTEROID is headed our way! Somebody! Get a giant net!
And while I’m laughing about these things as I write, it’s only because a little piece of me does indeed worry about some giant meteorite landing on top of my house, or the earth getting sucked into a black hole, or, or, everything the media warn us about on a daily basis.
We are a society built on fear, after all. Fear propels the sales of organic food. Fear prompted the CPSIA, which is clearly doing more harm than good. Fear has passed laws that force our kids to wear helmets when they ride bikes and to sit in the backseat until they’re ten; surely these are good, life saving laws, but at the same time, I can’t imagine having to have worn a helmet on a hot summer day as I rode my bike through my small-town neighborhood (on the other hand, my unhelmeted self flew off that same bicycle, hit the pavement and got a concussion that landed me in the hospital overnight, so, heh), and I can’t believe my own kids won’t know the feeling of riding shotgun with mom or dad until they’re eleven years old.
Fear can be healthy, or fear can be asteroid-y and futile. Have kids and you find your fears all multiply by 100.
I’m struggling now to maintain a balance between healthy and unhealthy fear. I want to protect my kids, but I also want them to grow up with a mom who doesn’t worry about every single little thing they do.
Heaven knows, society isn’t making that very easy for me. Bruiser is an inquisitive little guy and he falls down all the time. I generally let him pick himself back up and go on, and you should see the looks I get from bystanders for not rushing to his aid every time he stumbles. But those same strangers who want me to monitor his every move would hold my “helicoptering” responsible if Bruiser grew older and didn’t have the toughness that being a boy in this world requires.
So what’s a mom to do? I try to take each day and each situation as it comes.
On this day, that means I won’t let the asteroids get me down.
This post originally appeared on Parents.com.
