If I Didn't Exist: A Scientific Study

We all have moments when we would wish ourselves out of our lives if we could. For me, this most often occurs between the hours of 8AM and 5PM on weekdays, or in other instances, such as trying to pick up my mother on a busy street corner in heavy traffic. She sees someone she knows and instead of saying, "lovely to see you! My daughter is waiting so we'll have to chat later!" she engages in a full blown conversation. Twenty minutes, three trips around the block and numerous angry horn-honkings later, she is still chatting away, oblivious to the fact that I am about to become the victim of murderous road rage because there is nowhere to park without blocking traffic. At this point I snap and shriek, "MOTHER! GET IN THE CAR!" which is clearly audible to everyone in a 500 yard radius except the one person I am actually talking to.

But I digress. My point is that we all have these moments. And if we did actually wish ourselves out of our lives, maybe an angel would come visit and we would have a heartwarming, Jimmy-Stewart-esque moment where we realize how much we mean to the people in our lives, how much they mean to us, and how important we really are. The problem with this theory is timing.

Even if said angel were to appear and closely resemble Mark Wahlberg, you can't count on these things to happen when you really need them, as I have learned from waiting for the money tree in my backyard to bloom. So why not take the bull by the horns and figure the answers out on my own? I took it upon myself to execute a highly professional and accurate study using the very exact sciences of Guesstimation and Makingitup.

Here are the results:

My mom would be a whole lot more crazy - 317% to be exact - without my calming presence and constant voice of reason. (You may think it wouldn't be so hard to get a person to see reason if you haven't met my mother, who maintains that potato peels are toxic because some whack job proclaimed them to be so on a radio show in Milwaukee in 1957.) Her increased craziness would have far reaching effects. For Example:

There is a 71.8% chance that my dad would have faked his own death within the past two years and taken refuge in the Brazilian jungle.

My brother would be 67% more passive aggressive, driving my sister-in-law to be 209% more aggressive. As a result, 20% of their children would grow up to be criminal masterminds and/or megalomaniacs (I'm looking at you, Michael).

My sister is a tossup: There is a 43% chance that she would have run off and joined the circus, a 40% chance she would have become a blousy alcoholic, and a 17% chance she would have gone catatonic in 1984 and never recovered.

If I didn't exist, it is likely that my husband and I wouldn't have met. As a result, he would have forgotten every single parent-teacher conference ever and No. 2 would never have learned how to properly read. No. 3 would be a career criminal, specializing in forgery and identity theft, and would be featured in the "Stupid Criminals" column after trying to convince a bank teller she was Oprah.

No. 1 would have been born to a less conscientious mother who didn't think twice about pimping her out to the "agents" who wanted to put her in commercials when she was a baby. She would have shot to stardom and had her own show on the Disney Channel, sinking in to a crippling depression after its cancellation and the end of her high-profile romance with Chace Crawford. After three trips through rehab, she would spend the rest of her career making dreadful Lifetime movies with titles like, "Love Me, Love My Hip Displaysia: The Shirley Snively Story."

The disastrous consequences of my non-existence would stretch far beyond my family. Without my hard core Diet Coke addiction, the Coca-Cola company would have smaller profits and none of their employees would have gotten raises last year. Their entire production staff would have gone on strike and a worldwide shortage of Diet Coke would ensue, leading to a 91% drop in worker productivity at A Plus Benefits and any other place where employees get free Coke products. Thousands of businesses would go under, unemployment and homelessness would increase exponentially, and the USA would become classified as a third world country. Maybe fourth.

So, I'm pretty much the glue that holds the universe together.