Looking back, it was the ultimate scene:

Captain’s Blog – Startdate 29.1, Location: The largest hospital in the city, The Participants: One exhausted father with one over-3 years old girl, lying in his arms like a maiden, all sluggish from distress, bumped head from a fall at nursery school, vomiting intermittently, crying frequently, the father wandering in and out of the emergency room, since the emergency room is flooded with sick children at different stages of the flu, and the maiden in his arms is insisting on falling  asleep, and as we said previously, vomiting. Every once in a while I run to the children’s emergency room to find out when somebody can check the bump before she falls asleep or covers the floor with vomit.

Me, I’ve been hospitalized since Sunday with a mysterious bug.

A doctor from the emergency room has been interrogating me since I first arrived: “Do you raise poultry? Did you come back from a country that raises poultry? Do you know any poultry? If it cackles, flies, or swims, is it poultry? Do you like grilled chicken?” Understand this, I had a fever of over 41 degrees (centigrade) at this stage, and it was during the period that bird flu was really hot and people liked trying to cause others to look as if they’re ill with it, so as to give them a magnificent cure “house” style.

Armed with a drip stand that I’d succeeded in getting out of a good-hearted male nurse from the ward (“Understand me, my daughter is in the emergency room” ) my left side looking like something between a hamster and The Elephant Man (in the wonderful scene from “The Tall Guy” where Jeff Goldblum plays The Elephant Man in a low-budget marginal play), chasing after my little daughter all over the maternity emergency room (the most-not-sick place in the hospital), my daughter determined to play her best at the most wonderful game of all, “Let’s Pull Out Mommy’s Infusion”, and the next-best game, “Let’s Try Squash Ourselves in the Automatic Door” – and the third-most enjoyable but intellectual – “Let’s Knock Over the Doctors and Take Their Papers Away From Them” while shouting out “I want boobie, I want chips” , and summarizing, in her special way: ” I want everything”.

During all this, while still not certain if I should die immediately or wait to see if my eldest survives, since she’s fallen into a deep sleep in the last few minutes in spite of the fact that her younger sister is trying to pull her to the floor, A’ calls me (Boss A’), all joy and happiness, and informs me that they’ve solved one of the problems we’ve been working on over the last two weeks “we used what you suggested from the start”, A’ rejoices as if there is no cosmic justice in the world, I mumble thank you (and a curse) and hurry to catch my younger daughter by the tail-end of her clothes once again – group after group of women with round and wonderful pregnant stomachs are passing by in procession, in my humble opinion some are regretting the entire pregnancy business at this precise moment, others are deciding that their children will never behave in such a provincial and barbaric manner, and second, third and fourth-time mothers nod towards me as a sign of commiseration.

I finally pull out my doomsday weapon, and sit down to breastfeed.

(no pic here, sorry)

Imagine the following scene: a hamster-resembling mother is sitting there, wrapped in a few meters of infusion piping that’s still attached to a bag and a peeling stand from the best of the Salvation Army surplus, holding an over-one-year old girl, burning with fever, next to her an over-three-years old girl with a contusion the size of a ping-pong ball on her head, a monstrous pink penguin doll sitting beside her, with a realistic baby doll in his transparent belly aimed to amaze all who see him with the miracle of birth, on her other side is a dolphin, opposite her are two toddlers wearing skullcaps that arrived from somewhere and are staring at her while she suckles.

It’s superfluous to point out that during all this, work called at least three times, in order to make sure that I wouldn’t forget them, God forbid, or even worse, remember that there are more important things in life, unheard of, not in the startup nation.

A group of men who’d escaped from their wives’ birth preparation course raid the coffee(shop), they’re all called Michael, it seems. They happen upon a travelling freak show and sit down opposite me, in the most natural of ways (for them), burst into lively conversation, I recognize a few key words from within the feverish mist I’m in: “Breastfeeding, Yuck, Birth, My Wife, Never, Disgusting, Me, Boobs, Boobs, Boobs, Unnatural,” please children, help these young men put the sentence together.

That was the ultimate scene.

Many other scenes came before it, building on and intertwining with each other, piling up like a tower of cards (for instance, I’m on my way to the emergency room, falling asleep anywhere I’m left for more than a second, burning up with fever, for instance, – I’m on the heartwarming,  “Skin and Sex” ward, neighboring the desirable “Internal C” ward, for instance, my father, whose philosophy of life determines: “If you’re ill, you must have not eaten enough, if you want to get well, you have to eat, how will you not get ill in the future? Eat.” And in accordance with this philosophy he broke in with an enormous box of gummy sweets and a flask of rich meat soup, soup that could awaken the dead, soup that only my father can prepare. A bunch of amazingly good-looking doctors will also be remembered, well-done hospital. – What? You can’t bring them by again when I look like a human being? And not like The Elephant Man??

I don’t remember what happened at the end of that day. I eventually got well, my eldest managed to get a minor concussion and my youngest finished destroying the maternity emergency room – but I can promise you that this bundle of incidents will never be forgotten.

What was your impossible parenting day?