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About a month ago, with husband and kids in tow, I was returning to frigid New Jersey from balmy Palm Beach, Fla. I was already in a funk when a TSA agent pulled me out of an airport security line for "extra screening."

The agent pointed at me and said, "Palms up." With my usual smooth eloquence I said, "Huh," so the TSA agent repeated, "Palms up," at which point I complied. She swabbed my hands with some device and told me I needed to wait for the results before proceeding. It was neither humiliating nor terrifying but it was, and here's the understatement of the decade, preposterous.

Security is a serious business. I understand that sometimes it can be inconvenient, intrusive and seemingly arbitrary and really I'm down for all that. In light of the fact that TSA doesn't know me, I thought I should let them know that when it comes to extra screening they are not only barking up the wrong tree when it comes to me, they are not even in the right forest.

Here are the top five reasons why TSA need never again swab my hands for traces of explosives:

5. As a child, I cried and begged for a chemistry set because I thought it looked like such fun, but when I got one as a gift, I cried all over again because that chemistry set was, without exception, the most disappointing gift I'd ever gotten. It was not even a little fun. You see chemistry has never been my ish, leading inexorably to the conclusion that my fate as a person incapable of making a bomb was sealed long ago.

4. I am a 50-year-old woman whose perpetual state of being is drop-dead exhaustion. Removing my shoes in a security line while standing and at the same time getting my coat off, my electronics out of their cases and onto the conveyer belt and my pockets emptied with people breathing down my neck is the stuff of my nightmares. By the time I've done all that, I'm all in. Doing all of the above whilst simultaneously masterminding criminal activity - for goodness sake, I can't even remember where I packed the toothpaste.

3. I can't even maintain the simplest lie, so if I was up to no good, would I be waltzing through security without breaking a sweat? When the Israeli security agents for El Al Airlines ask me if I packed my own suitcases, even though I did, I get so nervous I feel like I'm going to vomit.

2. I travel with my children, the very children whom I've spent the last 22 years cherishing and nurturing. I take care of every last detail of their lives. From years of sleepless nights, loose braces, badly broken out skin to hellish school projects, I have poured body and soul into these children. I have given them my life's blood and I can assure the TSA I am most certainly not building explosives and stewarding my children onto an airplane with those explosives. When I decide to take these kids out, they will know it. There will be no ambiguity, and there will be no trace of explosives on my fingers because I will be ripping their hearts out, as any self-respecting Jewish mother would do, not blowing them up on an airplane. Common sense, people, common sense!!!

1. To be perfectly honest, loud noises followed by puffs of smoke terrify me.

TSA, you have my admiration, respect and thanks but you can just go ahead and cross me off the list of people you need to worry about because, trust me, you've got bigger fish to fry.

I am not now, nor will I ever be #publicenemynumberoneorevennumbertwo.

- Helene Hirsch Wingens

Helene Hirsch Wingens is a mother of three boys, wife, daughter, sometimes writer and retired lawyer. With 50 in the rear-view mirror, she's trying to figure out if there's a second act - and what it is. Her writing can be found online at themid.com, The Forward and Betterafter50.com.