What do mothers really want for Mother’s Day?
For me, it was not the sweet, socially acceptable answer. I mean the honest answer, the one that tends to surface when you are overstimulated, touched out, running on too little sleep, and trying not to sound unhinged when someone asks what would make you happy.
I didn’t want flowers, nor jewelry, a crowded prix fixe brunch in which someone (read: me) would still have to think about the reservation, the stroller, the timing, or my son Aksel’s mood. I didn’t want one more nice thing that would be lovely for a few hours and then disappear back into the blur of family life.
What I wanted was time alone. More specifically, I wanted a week alone in New York City.
That may not sound especially noble, but I have reached the point in motherhood where I am much more interested in honesty and self-care, and the truth is that what felt most luxurious to me was not being celebrated in public, but autonomy and time to feel like me again. And because I now live in Copenhagen, while New York remains the city where I can do all of that quickly and well, it became the obvious place to go.
I chose New York City because it has everything for self-care
A woman relaxes on a bench, tilting her head back to catch the sunlight. She is holding a coffee cup and wearing a bright yellow summer shirt.
(LeoPatrizi via Getty Images)
What I did in New York was not glamorous, at least not in the way people imagine when they hear about a mother taking a solo week away. I did not arrive with a fantasy of becoming some sleeker, shinier, more optimized version of myself. I went because I was tired, because I had spent too long putting myself last in all the ordinary ways mothers do, and because I wanted to use one week to handle the things that keep slipping to the bottom of the list when real life Fs in charge.
I live in Copenhagen now, and I love my life there, but it is a practical life. My hair usually air-dries, and my nails are usually bare. My idea of wellness is less about aspiration than survival. I am not gliding through the week with a standing blowout appointment and a carefully curated Sunday reset routine involving dry brushing, green juice, and a silk robe. I am getting my child out the door about 4 minutes before his kindergarten closes, working, managing the endless invisible tasks that keep a household moving, and telling myself I will think about my own upkeep later.
Later, of course, has a way of never coming.
So once a year, I let New York become the place where all those deferred things happen at once. What makes it feel worth it is not the fantasy of pampering, but the practicality of the aftermath. I do not want beauty that creates more work for me when I get home, but beauty routines that require little upkeep in my daily life, saving time and removing friction.
Why did getting my nails done feel bigger than it should have
One of my first stops was Polished NYC for a manicure and pedicure, and even though nails are objectively the smallest part of this whole ritual, they always affect me more than I expect.
Maybe it is because hands tell the truth about a life. They reveal wear in a way your face can sometimes disguise. They show how much you are carrying, cleaning, packing, typing, buckling, wiping, cutting, opening, lifting, fastening, soothing. When you are a mother, your hands are rarely at rest, and there is something strangely emotional about seeing them, for once, look cared for instead of merely useful.
What I appreciated was that Polished NYC did not treat nail care as merely decorative. They told me that “regular nail care goes far beyond aesthetics—it’s a form of self-care that can have a meaningful impact on overall well-being.” While that might once have sounded to me like overly polished salon language, I understood exactly what they meant as I sat there. When so much of your life is about maintenance for other people, there is something genuinely restorative about maintenance directed back at you.
They also made a more practical point that resonated even more. Consistent nail care, they said, can help prevent “dryness, breakage, hangnails, and infections,” which is not a glamorous sentence, but it is exactly the kind of sentence that starts to matter once your priorities change. And while I came in with a hangnail verging on infection that made my nail technician gasp, I left with nails that are too pretty to bite or mess up (and trust me, I’m a full-on nail-biter when stressed). At this stage of life, beauty is not at its most valuable when functional.
The hair appointment that mattered most was the one that respected my real life
The most important appointment of the week, though, was my hair, because hair can either support your life or feel like a second job, and at this point, I have no tolerance left for beauty routines that require devotion.
At Abby Haliti Color Studio, I got a haircut and European French balayage highlights, and what made the appointment stand out was not just the result, but the philosophy behind it. Renowned hairdresser Abby Haliti immediately framed it in terms that made sense to me as a mother. “For moms who want to feel confident and refreshed without living in the salon chair, European French Balayage is my number one recommendation,” she told me. That phrase, without living in the salon chair, was more convincing than any promise of shine or brightness or transformation could ever be.
She explained that balayage is “a painted highlighting technique,” meaning the color is hand-applied rather than foiled from root to tip, which is why “it grows out fluently with no line of demarcation.” That matters because one of the most exhausting things about high-maintenance color is not the appointment itself, but the way it starts to announce your neglect back to you, as if missing a touch-up is a moral failure rather than the inevitable result of having a complicated life. Abby put it plainly: “That alone is a game-changer for busy moms. You’re not locked into a 6–8 week touch-up cycle.”
That, to me, is the entire appeal. I do not want hair that punishes me for being busy. She also described it as “long-term, sustainable color that looks intentional at every stage of growth,” and I could have hugged her for that phrase alone, because intention is exactly what mothers often lose in relation to their own appearance. We are not necessarily neglecting ourselves because we do not care, but because we care about so many other things first. The genius of this kind of color is that it lets you look like you made a choice, even when you ran out of time.
This treatment was the one that helped me most at home
At Warren Tricomi, I also got an Organic Smoothing Treatment. If the balayage was the appointment that made the most emotional sense, this was the one that made the biggest practical difference once I got home.
The salon describes it as a treatment that “smooths frizz, enhances shine, and makes hair more manageable without sacrificing health or movement,” but what was important to me was less how it looked on day one than how it behaved on day 12 and day 24, when I was back in Copenhagen and living my real life again. My hair dried faster, frizzed less, and needed less heat. It stopped resisting me every morning.
I bonded over motherhood and life with a master stylist at Warren Tricomi, Nina Velazquez. I asked her afterward about this treatment for moms, and she nailed it: “Keratin treatments are so essential for moms, because there’s not much time in the day to be able to take time for your mom, ourselves, when you have a home, work, homework, and meals to plan for the day. At least being able to have that 10 to 20 minutes to do our hair and not feel like a mess, it’s so great. It just makes you feel like yourself again and not lost.”
Being able to wash my hair and go has been a godsend, giving me time back with Aksel.
The massage made me realize how much stress I had started treating as normal
By the time I got to New York, I was carrying the kind of tension that had developed so familiarly I no longer registered it as tension. It had simply become the background music of adulthood, especially motherhood, that constant low-grade physical bracing so many of us mistake for functionality.
At Luxsa Thai Spa NYC, I booked a Thai Herbal Ball Hot Compress Massage, and what stayed with me was the way the spa described massage not as pampering, but as a reset. They told me it gives mothers “a dedicated moment to reset—physically and mentally, especially for those constantly managing work, family, and daily responsibilities.” That phrasing landed because it named something I had not quite named for myself. I did not need to be spoiled, but needed to be interrupted. I needed my body to stop carrying on as though there were no alternative to being tense all the time.
The treatment uses heat, compression, and traditional Thai herbs, and as the session went on, I could feel just how much tightness I had been storing in my shoulders and upper back without ever consciously deciding to. That is the strange thing about stress when it accumulates slowly: you stop noticing it until relief arrives. I walked out not feeling transformed, but feeling less gripped around my own life, which, in the moment, was more valuable than any visible beauty result could have been.
I thought the head spa would feel indulgent, and it turned out to be useful
At Allure Day Spa & Hair Design, I did a head spa and blowout package, and this was the appointment I expected to enjoy politely and then forget. Instead, it turned out to be one of the most useful parts of the trip.
The team described the treatment as combining “slow, intentional scalp manipulation, warm water therapy, and aromatherapy elements in a private room,” which sounded lovely, but what interested me more was their observation that “many people underestimate how much buildup accumulates from products, natural oils, and environmental exposure.” That turned out to be exactly right. The result was not vague or imaginary: my hair seemed lighter, cleaner at the roots, easier to manage, and somehow more cooperative for days afterward.
That is what I keep coming back to with all of this: the things that feel worth it are the things that improve ordinary life after the appointment is over. I do not need an hour of luxury that evaporates the moment I walk back outside, but an hour that leaves behind a practical benefit.
The best part of the sauna and ice bath was that nobody could reach me
At Othership Flatiron, I joined a guided sauna and ice bath session, and while I could describe the physical intensity of hot and cold, the real power of the experience had nothing to do with endurance and everything to do with absence.
Amanda Laine, the co-founder, told me, “As a new mom, it’s so easy to pour every part of yourself into your baby and slowly lose sight of who you are outside of that role,” and that hit with uncomfortable precision. She also described Othership as “a true no-phone, no-baby-monitor zone,” which may sound like a small thing to someone who is not raising a child, but to me felt radical.
As someone addicted to their phone, having a period of time that was meditative in one of the biggest cities in the world was a rare feat. Just a period of time in which I was unreachable, and therefore finally allowed to be entirely where I was.
Amanda said experiences like this can “regulate your nervous system, clear the mental fog, and send you back to your baby feeling like your most whole, confident self.” While I am always skeptical of language that offers too much, I grasped the truth inside it. What felt restorative was not the idea that I had somehow become a better woman through wellness. It was the much simpler feeling that I had briefly reoccupied myself.
Why a week alone felt more valuable than a traditional Mother’s Day gift
Olivia Liveng shares a candid moment of renewal, opening up about feeling refreshed, re-centered, and ready to take on motherhood again with a renewed sense of energy and clarity.
This is why the week mattered more to me than flowers would have, or brunch, or any of the pretty symbolic things mothers are often expected to want.
Flowers are lovely, but they die. Brunch is lovely, but it ends. Gifts are lovely, but they do not usually solve the thing you actually need solved. What I wanted was not sweetness, but more simplicity. I wanted to come home with hair that asked less of me, shoulders that hurt less, a mind that was less scrambled, and the slight but important feeling that I had stopped long enough to catch up with myself.
That, to me, is the real fantasy of Mother’s Day, and probably the most honest one too. Not being admired, not being thanked, and not being presented with something lovely in a restaurant full of other overstimulated families, but being given enough space to hear your own thoughts again, enough time to do the things that make your life easier, and enough quiet to remember that you are still a person underneath the role.
I didn’t want flowers for Mother’s Day. I wanted a week alone in New York City and, frankly, it was exactly what I needed.