Last weekend, my (35M) wife (33F) and I took our 8-year-old son on a family hike in a large national park about an hour from our house. We’re outdoorsy people — we do this stuff a lot, and Eli’s grown up hiking little trails with us. Nothing extreme.

At some point, about 3 miles into the trail, I told Tina I was going to jog ahead to the car to grab a charging pack from the glovebox (we were taking photos and both phones were dying). I said I’d meet them on the way back.

Fifteen minutes later, I head back into the woods and find Tina walking alone. No Eli. I immediately ask where he is, thinking he ran ahead or maybe stopped to look at something.

She shrugs and says, “Oh… I thought he was with you?”

Cue full-body panic.

I sprinted back along the trail calling his name, heart in my throat, imagining every worst-case scenario — him lost, injured, taken. After ten full minutes of shouting and running, I find him sitting on a log, crying, completely alone.

He had tried to follow her when she walked ahead, but he got tired and stopped. She never once looked back. Never noticed he wasn’t behind her. Never counted steps, never checked.

When I confronted her — and I mean panicking, furious, emotional — she got defensive. Said she was distracted, that it was just a mistake, and that I was overreacting because “he was fine.” I told her that’s not the point. What if he wasn’t fine? What if someone had grabbed him, or he wandered off the trail? We were in a literal forest — not a backyard.

She then accused me of “trying to make her feel like a bad mom” and stormed off. We haven’t really spoken since, beyond logistics. But the more I sit with this, the angrier I get. It feels like such a massive failure of basic parenting — like a primal failure. How do you just forget your own child?

Now I’m honestly wondering if I can stay married to someone who can forget our son in the woods and then act like I’m the crazy one.

I haven’t said the D-word out loud yet. But it’s in my head. And her family has been blowing up my phone, saying that everyone makes mistakes, and I should let it go. But I can’t shake this gut feeling that something broke in me that day.

WIBTAH if I divorced her over this?