“It wasn’t until I was in Melbourne that I realised it was serious. I started to see the footage and realised how bad it was.”

When she arrived in Melbourne, all Heather could do was wait.

“Mum wasn’t at any of the centres, the safe places they designated, so it was a few days of waiting and not being able to find out anything.”

She clung to the hope that her mother was safe and couldn’t contact anyone.

“For three days, we couldn’t do anything, then we finally got word.”

Her Mum didn’t make it out. Heather was 26.

“It changed our focus on our life. After that, we decided to move back to Albury, because my husband’s parents live at Walla. We wanted to be closer, not to be away, it was really important to have family.”

The death of anyone in these circumstances is traumatic enough but for Heather the Black Saturday tragedy was even more pronounced. She is an only child.

After her mother died, Heather could not face Mother’s Day.

“Being so young myself, it made it even harder on Mother’s Day. It was really sad and emotional just knowing that everyone’s going to spend time with their Mum and I can’t do it – it was heart breaking. I just tried to avoid it.”

The next year in 2010, she and her boyfriend of four years, Zac, decided to get married. They wanted to start their own family.

“It was very, very emotional, picking out the wedding dress and doing all the planning without her being there … it was a very, very difficult time."

“I got married the year after Mum died. That was hard, something so important that she shouldn’t have been there for and wasn’t. It was really hard to get through without her being there.

“Zac’s Mum has been incredible, she’s been very supportive the whole time. She was really good.”

Then Heather had her own children. This Wednesday her son will turn six and her daughter is nearly four.

“It’s getting harder now because I’ve got kids of my own, they’re getting to an age now where they understand Mother’s Day. I have to shift the focus from my mother, to me being a mother instead.”

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The loss of a child can be a very valid reason not to celebrate Mother’s Day. A mother I know who lost her daughter says: “Mother’s Day sucks. And it doesn’t get any easier. When my daughter died, I had 557 texts of ‘Hope you’re having a Happy Mother’s Day’.” 

She remembers a story when she was little. “They were giving out chrysanthemum flowers to the mothers at church. I was with my Aunty Beryl and I said to my mother, ‘We need to get a flower for my aunt’. And my mother said, ‘She can’t have one. She’s not a mother.’” 

Even for mothers who haven’t had a loss in the family, Mother’s Day can still be a trial. “There’s so much pressure. To see my mother, to see my husband’s mother. We are in the car all day with the girls. I can’t wait for it to be over.”

It’s not just mothers who suffer, it’s fathers too. For fractured families, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day leave many feeling inadequate and empty.  I remember talking to a colleague whose wife had forbidden him to see his children on Father’s Day.  He had married again and had two more children but the hurt was plain to see. These national days of significance are particularly testing for split families or children who are co-parented. The advertising industry has a role to play, their imagery long outdated. 

“There’s definitely a lot more advertising for Mother’s Day and buying Mum’s presents,” Heather has observed. “You talk to a lot of mums and they don’t want the present type things, it seems more marketing.

“Mothers just want the day off, to cook dinner, to do the washing. All this media hype about getting presents, it’s a bit unnecessary. It’s just about spending the day together, being a family.”

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I am fortunate that my mother is still very much alive.  We speak most days, her witty rhetoric challenges me nearly every phonecall. In a good way. However, the tyranny of rural distance means that we’re often not together on Mother’s Day. It’s a rare treat to be in the same place.

As a family, we didn’t make a fuss of Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. To us Mother’s Day is a phonecall or if Mum is lucky, a card. It was never a fancy lunch, an expensive present or a public show of gratitude.

Stephanie Wood explores this celebratory narrative of motherhood in her very personal story: Childless: how women without kids are treated in 2016. It’s a fascinating phenomenon that seems to have worsened the last ten years. The rise of social media perhaps? The advent of Mummy blogs? For our parents’ generation, having children was just something you did. Now, mothers are a revered species.

So, I usually make other plans. To stay away from social media, to stay away from public places that celebrate Mother’s Day, to stay away from the feeling that I am less.

A close friend who still struggles with not having children says that strangely enough, Mother’s Day is the day where she feels it least.

“We never made a big deal of it. I always thought Mother’s Day was the first Sunday of May and I’d ring home and Dad would answer the phone and I’d say, ‘It’s Mother’s Day’ and Dad would say, ‘Is it?’ Then Mum would get on the phone and I’d say, ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ and she’d say, ‘Is it?’  The next weekend when it actually was Mother’s Day, Mum would ring me and say, ‘It’s Mother’s Day’ and I’d say, ‘Is it?’”

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When Bec first fell pregnant she was 20. 11 weeks and six days later she miscarried. Twins.  Two years on, she fell pregnant again. In a cruel twist of fate, she miscarried at exactly the same number of weeks and days in the first trimester. Twins again. The third pregnancy, this time with her husband to be, was an ectopic pregnancy and she was forced to miscarry. By this stage, Bec was 26.

“When I had the ectopic, he didn’t cope too well. He was a bit oblivious that things could go wrong and it shook him for a while.

“We made the decision to keep trying but nothing was happening. We went and saw a specialist – there were so many tests, so many procedures, nothing was explained, they couldn’t tell us anything.”

When Bec was in her late twenties, they saw their first IVF specialist.  Five failed full cycles and tens of thousands of dollars later, Bec and her husband Cameron have one last chance. A fertilised egg, donated by Bec’s sister-in-law.

“When I was 40, I was told ‘Your eggs are a bit old. What you’ve got isn’t quality, if you want to do it, you’ve got to do it with donor eggs.’ Before I was 40, they didn’t mention that.”

“Constantly in the back of my mind, is my age, my age. As much as society encourages women to have children, it’s still frowned upon – an older woman in her forties being pregnant.”

While we are talking, Bec becomes emotional: “Because of my age my sister-in-law donated some eggs. She was wanting to be a surrogate. The NSW law says it’s just not possible. It got so complicated, it’s just so hard.

“We have one left. We’re too frightened to do it. I think about that quite often … on the one hand, we’d love to go and do it, on the other what if it doesn’t work? It’s completely the end of the line.”

She breaks down. “We don’t want to waste the gift she’s given us.”

Bec is 42 now and finds it difficult to attend events where everyone has children. 

“That’s what they talk about, that’s what they have in common … their children. No-one wants to hear about my fur babies.”

For both Bec and Cameron, the 12 years of IVF have been financially and emotionally draining. It’s hard enough for women having invasive procedures every cycle but men also feel the pain. 

“My husband struggles greatly with it at times. The infertility problem is on my side … he’s never blamed me but he’s very sad at times. I hear him saying, ‘We only want one, we don’t want to be greedy, we just want one.’”

Nearby, Bec’s younger sister is also going through IVF due to a medical condition.

“They’re the same, they’ve had no luck either and they’ve been trying just as long as us.

“My sister and I are great support to each other. We genuinely know and understand what the other person is going through and say dumb shit like ‘Fuck the world!’ If people heard us, I’m sure they’d lock us up.”

Bec and her husband live in a small country community, half an hour out of Albury-Wodonga.

“They don’t think about it. They’re all busy people – farmers or both parents work. You don’t know things that are going on in the community because you’re not involved in the school … you’re not informed because you don’t have children.”

For Mother’s Day, Bec will spend the day eventing with her horses. She and her husband usually go away or are on the road.

“I’ll make time to ring my mother and wish her a happy Mother’s Day. I don’t begrudge anyone having a Mother’s Day, I just don’t want to be a part of it. I think it’s too over the top these days. It’s not a quiet family gathering or a picnic or a barbecue – it’s in your face. I’ll see stuff on social media and I think ‘Errgh!’ but I just roll on by …”

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For years, every time I moved, a little yellow teddy bear that was a work Kris Kringle present moved with me, stashed in a suitcase. In my late thirties, I opened the suitcase and gave it to a friend with young children. “Here – have this,” I said. “I can’t carry it around any more.”

I don’t know what happened to that teddy bear. We haven’t talked about it since.

I could have been a mother. I could have had children. But it was important to me to be with the right person and not someone who was abusive.

I’ve had to do it twice now. The vicious pounding of the clock reverberating against my spine, is nothing short of heart-wrenching. But, I’m proud that I made a conscious decision not to have children in those circumstances. It would have been a life of misery.

I’m 44 now and have accepted that I will never be a mum. And for the most part, I’m okay with that. I have a beautiful, loving family. Just not my own.

I chose the latter. Spending time with kids is a hugely rewarding part of my life and I love being part of their community. I teach them skiing and filmmaking. We go on outdoor adventures. We tell stories and write. We make and create together. I’m an aunt to three wonderful nieces, an ace nephew and a godmother to two very spirited girls and like them, I am loved. But grief still strikes from time to time. 

That same friend I gave the teddy bear to said to me last weekend in Sydney, “You would have made a great mother.” “Yes” I said. “I think I would have.”

For Heather, she’s starting to make connections she thought were lost forever. “I never thought about people in the same situation, I thought it was just me but I’m learning that there’s a lot of other people out there without their Mums.”

For Bec, she’s met like-minded women on the horse circuit and is now eventing all over Victoria and New South Wales, but still deals with comments like these:

“Some days I brush it off and walk away. Other days, I’m so angry that people can be so ignorant and insensitive.”

Meanwhile, across three Australian states, there’ll be a phone call on Sunday, like there is every year on Mother’s Day. “Happy Mother’s Day” a voice will say down the line. “Is it?” she’ll reply.