Between the two trips I took this week, Husband had to handle the home front by himself for almost five days straight. At the end of this very long week, Aitch fell on the playground, slicing open his face, and Husband had to spend five hours in the emergency room waiting for two stitches to be put in.

As Husband explained it, Aitch was going down the slide backwards and on his belly when he gained a little too much speed, and his head struck the edge, which cut open the flesh near the eye. There were blood and tears, and Husband scooped up Aitch, threw him in the stroller, and ran home as fast as he could. That is, Husband ran for a block and a half before he ran out of breath and had to slow to a “brisk walk.” Luckily by this time the blood had slowed and the tears stopped, and so Aitch was in no immediate danger of exsanguination. (You know how you’re always asking why I bother to work out? This is why, Honey.)

Aitch was reportedly a trouper through the whole thing, enduring the long wait with good humor, and crying only when the stitches were put in. At the hospital, Husband explained to me incredulously, they had to sit in the waiting room for hours, then wait in the exam room for an hour, then wait after the local anesthetic had been applied for the doctor to show, then wait for an additional half hour after the stitches were finished for the discharge instructions to be printed out. I was incredulous at Husband’s incredulity. I remarked, not for the first time, that Husband would be better prepared for life’s little exigencies if he would only pay closer attention to “ER.”

While all this was happening, I was stuck in traffic, going through security, sitting on the airplane, driving home. Husband got Aitch home and put to bed just minutes before I walked in. I missed it all.

While I was in transit I couldn’t help thinking of a book I read when I was a kid, Kramer vs. Kramer. I believe it was turned into a movie with Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, bits of which I’ve seen on TV over the years. A woman has left her husband and four-year-old son, and the man (in those cold, pre-stay-at-home dad days) is completely unprepared for his role as a single father. He has a couple of rough months when the kid falls on the playground and hurts himself. Caring for his boy leads the father to a kind of breakthrough: he changes from a grudging caretaker to a real dad. When his wife turns up to seek a divorce and reclaim custody of the child, she uses this injury against him in court, but he argues that he was there, parenting, while she was off finding herself, and he is awarded custody.

I wish I had been there.