Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day was a holiday we all looked forward to in my house in 1950s Rochester. It was the one day of the year my parents would take us all out to a restaurant for a non-kosher lunch, and we got to order from a real menu. The meal wasn’t complete without at least one objection from my father about spending the money on a restaurant when Mom always made such fine meals at home. Mother’s Day celebrations continued throughout the 55 years I had with my wife Judie before her passing in 2017. Now, I leave flowers at her gravesite and Mother’s Day is a day of remembrance, of my late mother and wife.

In the spirit of remembering the mothers we have lost, I am proud to share the work of a guest columnist this week, my daughter Kara:

What I Carry #

By Kara Sue Ackerman

Mother’s Day has never quite felt like a celebration to me.

It’s not a day that arrives with plans or reservations or anything particularly light. In many ways, it sits alongside the day my mother passed, and her birthday—days that feel more like quiet markers than holidays.

Over time, I’ve learned not to force it into something it isn’t.

Instead, I’ve let it become a day of reflection.

I think about who my mother was—not just to me, but in the way she moved through the world. I find myself asking my father questions I didn’t think to ask when I was younger. Small things, mostly. What she liked, how she spent her time, what she was like when we were little. The details that, somehow, feel more important now.

And in those conversations, she becomes present again.

“She never really left. I just learned how to carry her differently.”

Not in a way that feels heavy, but in a way that feels continuous.

Because the truth is, she never really left. I carry her with me, quite literally, every day. Something I wear, something I reach for without thinking—it’s almost always hers. It’s become a quiet ritual, one I didn’t plan but now understand.

A way of keeping her close without needing a specific day to do it.

Mother’s Day, then, isn’t about trying to recreate something that no longer exists. It’s about acknowledging what still does.

It’s also a day I’ve come to spend differently. I reach out to the women in my life who are mothers—the friends and family who are in the middle of raising children, building lives, showing up in ways I now understand more deeply.

There’s something meaningful in that, too. In recognizing them. In celebrating what motherhood looks like in the present, even as I reflect on it in the past.

If anything, Mother’s Day has become less about the idea of a holiday, and more about a perspective.

About legacy, in the quietest sense.

About what stays with us.

Read this essay and others by Kara Ackerman, about family, friends, and fashion on her personal Substack, SecretsNStyle: substack.com/@secretsnstyle