*Mother’s Day and the Day Without | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 15.5.2026*
This past Sunday, my daughters wished me a happy Mother’s Day. Not that it actually was Mother’s Day - in Israel, we haven’t marked that day since the 1990s. But my daughters, their bodies are in Israel and their hearts are on TikTok and in America, and there, every year on the second weekend of May, people celebrate Mother’s Day. So I thanked them, and we moved on.
.
But as I scrolled online, almost everyone I follow from the United States, Canada, and Europe had posted something related to motherhood. One of them was the beautiful poem by Maira Kalman, the Jewish artist who published a memoir in drawings and texts called Women Holding Things. Here is the poem that opens it:
.
*What Women Hold*
By Maira Kalman
What do women hold?
The home and the family.
And the children and the food.
The friendships.
The work.
The work of the world.
And the work of being human.
The memories.
And the troubles
and the sorrows
and the triumphs.
And the love.
Men do as well, but not
quite in the same way.
Sometimes, when they are feeling
particularly happy or content,
women think they can provide sustenance
for legions of human beings.
They can hold the entire world in their arms.
Other times,
they can barely cross the room.
And they drop their arms.
Frozen.
There is never an end to holding
And certainly there’s always the feeling of never doing enough
And then there is the next day
And the next day
And one holds on
.
What a beautiful poem this is. I was glad to encounter it again. But then I came across it a second time, and a third, and more poems about motherhood, and suddenly I was flooded with sadness over the fact that in Israel we no longer celebrate Mother’s Day. That it was turned into Family Day. That no one in Israel was talking about mothers that day at all. So I looked into it. What other places in the world had Mother’s Day been abolished in? It couldn’t be that only Israel had canceled Mother’s Day. That only Israel had erased it.
.
Sod I went country by country, every country I could think of, and discovered that indeed, only Israel had abolished Mother’s Day. In the United States it’s celebrated on the second weekend of May, and so it is in Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Brazil, India, and a long list of other countries.
.
Other countries celebrate it on different dates: in England in March, in Thailand in August, in Russia in November. And there are many Arab countries, among them Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, that celebrate it in March. When I tried to find out who doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day at all, I discovered that two countries simply never celebrated it in the first place - North Korea and Afghanistan. And it is also not customary in several tribal societies in Africa.
.
And then there’s Israel. In Israel, it turns out, Mother’s Day was celebrated for many years on the birthday of Henrietta Szold, the Zionist leader who founded Hadassah and laid the foundations for the entire healthcare and social welfare system even before the establishment of the state. In the 1990s, the Ministry of Education decided to change it to “Family Day” in order to "emphasize the connection among all family members.”
.
At the time, there were those who said that the day was deeply painful for children who had lost their mothers, and for children growing up in households with fathers only, without a mother, and that the day also reinforced the burden of caregiving and family life as something placed solely on mothers.
.
And it faded away. Though despite the thirty years that have passed since then, not much has changed in the burden mothers carry when it comes to caregiving and family life. On the contrary, without Mother’s Day, their work - meaning our work - has become even more invisible, because there is no single day in the year when we stop, focus on mothers, and ask: what percentage of Israel’s gross national product is made up of the labor of Israeli mothers? And what would happen to the economy if mothers stopped doing the work of motherhood for a few days? And many other questions, whose answers teach us unequivocally that without the labor of motherhood, there is no economy and there is no market.
.
In other words, if mothers decided at this very moment to go on strike from the daily labor of caregiving, within a matter of days the entire economy would collapse.
.
And by the way, speaking of Mother’s Day, I read that the woman who initiated Mother’s Day in the United States, at the beginning of the twentieth century, began it as an intimate and beautiful idea of children and fathers thanking the mother of the family, recognizing the immense burden she carries. But very quickly, as happens with everything in America, the day became commercialized, with a huge market of gifts, flowers, and generic greeting cards, and she was so horrified by it that after fighting to institutionalize Mother’s Day, she spent her later years fighting to abolish it.
.
But that, of course, was because of the commercialization.
Not because mothers are unworthy of a day. Of recognition. Of conversation.
.
And if you ask me, that day should exist every month.
.
And if you ask me as someone who lost her mother, I would have been glad if on Mother’s Day people also looked at everyone who no longer has a mother, and who throughout the year must mother themselves. And if you, too, have lost your mother, then you know exactly what I mean.
.
And finally, I’ll also say that during Mother’s Day another video resurfaced on Instagram, one I already knew from previous years, in which the Indian journalist and podcaster Raj Shamani interviews her mother and aunt about motherhood, only to discover, to her horror, that they never actually wanted to be mothers. That the best moments of motherhood for them were when the children were asleep. And then when the children left home. “We don’t like children,” her aunt explains in the video. “We love our children, but we never enjoyed being mothers.”
.
So I would also dedicate Mother’s Day to those who don’t love it. Or who chose not to enter it at all. Simply because especially in Israel, even if you chose not to become a mother, you still spend your entire life in dialogue with motherhood, with the fact that we are the country with the highest birth rate in the OECD, and the highest rate of fertility treatments, and of course you live in dialogue with the constant questions from the people around you about your choice, because in Israel, where there is no Mother’s Day, the choice not to become a mother still remains, in the eyes of society, a mystery.
.
So may we all have a happy Mother’s Day,
and Shabbat Shalom
*Maya Tevet Dayan*
.