This has nothing to do with working, and everything to do with being a parent.

The little kids and I had an excellent weekend. We went to karate class, ran errands, and picked apples. We went on a hay ride and chose pumpkins right from the pumpkin patch and ran ourselves ragged at a really cool playground. We played Chutes and Ladders five times, folded laundry, re-folded laundry after it was used as a landing platform for a bed-jumping contest, and drank warm apple cider with cinnamon sticks for straws.

And now, just a few hours later, my nearly 4-year-old is in the hospital with an IV full of antibiotics, and I don’t know what’s wrong.

At dinner, she complained about her hand hurting and, sure enough, the back of her left hand looked swollen, like she had a bug bite or something. Except she didn’t remember getting bitten or stung. She hadn’t hit her hand against anything while we were playing. She could wiggle her fingers and make a fist, but the skin hurt, she said. I gave her a dose of antihistamine and herded her and toddler-boy upstairs for baths.

She winced as I pulled her shirt off, and I noticed that her forearm was swollen, too. Hot and taut. She said it didn’t hurt, only her hand did, but my husband decided to call the doctor, just to be safe, and I added a dose of ibuprofen to the mix.

The doctor said to take her to the hospital, just to be safe, but to pack a bag. Which surprised me. Since when does one pack a bag for a bug bite? Since I was wrangling a wet toddler and had a pile of work waiting for me downstairs, my husband said he’d take her.

I wish I had gone instead.

It’s been four hours, and they still don’t know what the problem is — no evidence of trauma to the hand, no evidence of bug bite or sting, the swelling isn’t responding to the antihistamine or to ice packs. They decided to admit her, and she called me in tears. She’s exhausted and bewildered and I am thisclose to strapping my sleeping toddler into his car seat and driving over there. My husband has had way more at-the-hospital-with-a-sick-kid experience that I have — our older kids have had more time to get sick and hurt, after all — but I’m the Mama… he may be infinitely capable, but I can’t shake the feeling that I should be the one curled around her on that uncomfortable hospital bed.

They just called again; this time, she sounds wide-awake and perky, telling me about the IV they put in. She hands the phone to my husband, and I ask if he’d like to trade places. It’s more of a request than a question, but he says I should stay at home. Everything is under control, he says, and besides, this way you can get your work done.

He says it kindly and is genuinely trying to be helpful, but I feel helpless and horrible. I do have work to do. And I’m doing some of it right now, typing this. I might as well, since I doubt I’ll be going to bed tonight.

This is a new type of working mom guilt: Feeling guilty about being able to make deadline tonight, because I’m not at the hospital instead.

I don’t know how to juggle this one.