The other day on my way home from work, I got rear-ended in my car. I was sitting at a red light on Tyvola, minding my own business (fiddling with the CD player is more like it) when suddenly, wham-bam, I had a minivan up my back bumper.

I got out, slammed the door, stomped to the scene of the crime, and looked at the rear of my Ford Expedition. And then, I couldn’t help it. A chortle — something akin to the sound Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor often made on the sitcom Home Improvement — gurgled in my throat. With pride, I patted my five-year-old Ford, good car.

The car behind me looked like it had a broken nose and a ruptured jaw, and a kick in the hiney to boot. Other than a few scratches on the bumper, my car was otherwise unharmed. (And thankfully, no one was hurt.) It was a three-car fender bender, caused by a little fella in a tiny VW, who hit a woman in a medium-sized minivan, who ran into my big ol’ Expedition and bounced off like a tennis ball. So does that make me Papa Bear, or what?

Then came the whole debacle … pulling into a nearby parking lot … calling every family member I could think of … waiting for the cops to come write the report … and making small talk with the woman from the minivan, who happened to have three of her five (yes, five) children in the car with her. (The little guy who caused the whole shebang was too nervous to chat.) Before I knew it, the sun was going down, and so, while the mother beside me chased and herded her children around the parking lot, I popped into my car and proceeded to sit and stare into the darkening twilight, contemplating the black etching of the tree branches against the deepening blue of the sky.

That was when it hit me how drastically different I am now, from the woman I used to be. Before my daughter was born in 2003, the exact situation would’ve caused a deep and irrational panic in my chest. Certainly, it helped knowing that a) the wreck wasn’t my fault, and b) my car was fine (chortle, chortle). But that wasn’t it. I realized, as I watched the trees sway against the night sky, that as a younger woman, I would’ve been sick with impatience at being stuck in limbo, waiting, waiting. I would have ferreted away that precious nugget of quiet time worrying about things I couldn’t do a thing about.

These days, with a busy job, an enthusiastic 5-year-old daughter, and an endless list of to-dos that never get done, I am smart enough to recognize a break when it hits me in the rear-end. And so I sat quietly, gratefully drinking in a moment of tranquility — trying not to look too triumphant that my gas-guzzling SUV was, finally, good for something.