We’re arguing about who will drive the Camry. I want to, not because I really want to, I don’t like that car. It’s gutless and boring — it looks like a member of some nameless corporate fleet. But I want to drive it because I don’t want to worry about other people being inside the car if the accelerator sticks. At least I drive alone most of the time.

Not that I would know what to do if an accelerator stuck. I wouldn’t even realize the point at which, yes, I should go ahead and panic, because even before that point, my brain would be so preoccupied with worrying about the possibility of the accelerator sticking that it would take a while for it to shift gears into a full blown panic. Is it sticking? No, it’s okay. No, no, that feels like it’s sticking, am I slowing down? Ah, okay, the brake’s working, but better be safe and stay under 50 miles an hour just in case. Oh shit! It’s sticking! No, that’s just my foot. Just like that all the way to work.

The whole reason we bought a Camry — the whole reason anybody buys a Camry — is for safety and reliability. I wish I could trade it in right now, today. Drive it to a Ford dealer and exchange it for an F-150. The kind that tows boulders in the commercial during the football playoffs. That one there. The one that promises invincibility. I’ll take some of that, thank you very much.

Toyota, you’re going to have to do a lot to win back the hearts and minds of American moms. We hate being more scared and worried than we already are, especially when it comes to the safety of our families. You just mashed the hottest hot button we have. In fact, I would say that button is permanently stuck.

Yesterday was my dad’s 70th birthday. So we all took him for a ride in a Hummer limousine. We drank champagne and glided through my hometown, gazing through tinted windows that bathed the world in orange and gold.

For a while, we were rock stars with no Visa bills, no fleas in the carpet, no teenage angst. We were untouchable in our spaceship with the twinkling ceiling; Dad in the center, 70 but looking 55, in his heart 17.

Yesterday Girl found a pretty green notepad with a “D” on it, sitting on my dresser.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, “it’s a notepad I bought for Aunt Dora, but I didn’t get a chance to give it to her. Do you want it?”

Of course she did. She’ll write on anything that isn’t nailed down.

Aunt Dora passed away in June. For a while, whenever I woke in the middle of the night, the thought “Aunt Dora is dead,” would involuntarily pop into my mind, as if my subconsious were grappling with the hard concept. Only recently has this stopped.

Girl doodled on that notepad for hours. On the first page, she drew a picture of Aunt Dora, but it looked as if she had four legs. Girl explained to me that that was her walker.

Then, on the next dozen or so pages, she wrote sentences all beginning with “Aunt Dora is.” In her best kindergarten phonetics, she wrote, “Aunt Dora is a special person.” “Aunt Dora is a great aunt.” “Aunt Dora is the best person in the world.”

She kept wanting my help. “What else should I put?” she kept asking me.

I didn’t know what to say. I got tripped up on the word “is.” Did Girl realize Aunt Dora is gone? Would she ask me when we can visit her again?

I didn’t remind Girl that Aunt Dora is in heaven. Maybe the next time I wake up in the middle of the night, I won’t think “Aunt Dora is dead.” I’ll just think, “Aunt Dora is.”

If you ask Sicilians “How are you?” they don’t answer “Fine, and how are you?” They say “cosi cosi,” which means so-so. Or “I’ve seen better times.” They think it’s bad luck to wish someone good luck.

So it is that I am genetically predisposed to negative thinking. It’s deep in my gene pool. And with negative thinking comes two corollary afflictions — worry and anxiety. I suffer from “worst case scenario” thinking. This would be very helpful if I worked for the Department of Homeland Security. It is not helpful whatsoever in motherhood.

I have tried many techniques to avoid negative thinking and was very heartened this week to read an article in Time Magazine saying that a lot of those techniques just don’t work. I could have told them that. For instance, the technique of trying to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts only makes people feel worse, the magazine reported. Well, duh. We don’t believe the positive thoughts. We know better. And it totally invalidates our feelings to say, “Turn that frown upside down, Missy.”

The magazine went on to report that meditation seems to work with negative thinking. Again, had they bothered to interview me, I could tell them why. I am an expert in this subject. You see, I come from a long, long line of negative thinkers. I believe that while the ancient Greeks had an Olympics to display their athletic prowess, the ancient Sicilians had an Olympics of Worry. My relatives, I surmise, must have been gold medalists in this field. Because their worry genes are so strong, they dominate me and my family to this day. By the way, this gene presents itself best on the Y chromosome.

To continue, the reason meditation works with negative thinking is that negative thinking/worry/anxiety stems from projecting your mind into the future and deciding that whatever happens next is going to be so horrible that you just can’t handle it. So meditation works because it brings you into the present moment, a time in which everything seems pretty much okay. Meditation reminds you to take a deep breath and be still.

“Be still and know that I am God.” Isn’t that much better than “Turn that frown upside down?”