This conversation was meant to be a podcast interview.

It was scheduled weeks in advance, planned as a recorded interview about marriage, motherhood, and the recent US release of her book, I Wanted to Be Wonderful. But when Lihi Lapid joined the call, she wasn’t sitting in a quiet room with a computer. She was in a hospital.

Her mother had broken her hip and required surgery. Lapid was splitting time between bedside vigils, phone calls, and family logistics, trying to hold everything together while insisting — almost apologetically — that we continue.

The recording glitched. The connection dropped. Parts of the video were lost altogether. Eventually, the podcast became impossible to salvage. But the conversation didn’t disappear. It transformed.

What follows is not a transcript or a traditional interview. It’s the story that emerged from a fractured recording. At one point, I apologized — again — for doing this at all. For talking about books and ideas while she sat in a hospital room.

Lapid waved it off.

“This is life,” she said. “We’re all doing everything.”

It became the core of the conversation — and, ultimately, of this piece.

What We Owe Our Parents

We talk endlessly about what parents owe their children. Love. Stability. Presence. Therapy money. But we speak far less about the reverse — what, if anything, adult children owe their parents when roles inevitably reverse.

Lapid has written about this before, but here, in real time, it was no longer theoretical. Two daughters caring for a mother who wanted no one else near her. ........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)