Before my newborn daughter came home from the hospital, she had a rash. It wasn’t a one-time event either. Rashes were a constant as were the visits to one specialist after another who couldn’t solve the mystery.

Then came solid foods and even worse rashes until finally when she was about 18 months old a specialist recommended we try taking her off gluten. Within weeks the rash was gone and we were officially unhappily gluten-free!

Driving home from that official pronouncement, I started sobbing. I mean like I had to pull over to the side of the road and cry. Why? Well, I had this picture in my mind of all her little Kindergarten classmates eating cupcakes to celebrate her friends’ birthdays without her. Yep, I know it sounds ridiculous but out of all the things I could have thought of, that was what I was worried about.

Now to be fair, I was pregnant and this was a decade ago when the world was just becoming aware of gluten.

Here is the thing though. My daughter who is now 13 has never attended public school and her homeschool coop has never had a birthday celebration involving cupcakes. Moreover, I have heard that most public schools don’t even allow the birthday celebrations that were a mainstay of my childhood.

Over the years that moment has stuck with me. When I have my moments of panic over their future I have remembered those cupcakes that never came to be.

The fact is that we are terrible at predicting our future problems and almost all of our worries are misplaced. They never come to fruition. This is just as true for dyslexia as it is for gluten allergies and most our other parenting worries.

But it is so easy to worry and so hard to dispel our worries no matter how unrealistic they may be. A tool that has helped me is to trust my future self to deal with my future challenges.

You are amazing and you get more amazing every day. You have already overcome so much and you grow with every challenge you face. Just think how much more wise you are than you were a decade ago. If this pace keeps up, just think how wise you will be in another decade!

Your future self will have all the knowledge and wisdom needed to overcome your children’s future challenges (and your own). There is no need to cry over the cupcakes of our imagination. We can, instead, deal will the real challenges of today and know that when the time comes we will deal with the real challenges of tomorrow!