The pain of a childless Mother’s Day

While most women will wake to Mother’s Day breakfast in bed and cards handwritten by their children, others will wake having to navigate an emotional minefield silently grieving the loss of infants or children they’ll never have.

A barrage of unavoidable advertising combined with Mother’s Day themes at busy restaurants and cafes can be triggering for one in six Australian women yearning for motherhood.

Catherine Vallence and her partner tragically lost their baby who was stillborn on Father’s Day. To help them both cope with their unbearable grief, the couple decided to add “Hair Cut Day” to their calendars to give the parent days a different name.

For the first couple of years they went to get haircuts, even sparking the hairdresser’s curiosity.

“We did it a few years in a row and then eventually they went …’you guys always come in on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day’,” Ms Vallence said

She explained this reframing helped the couple desensitise themselves in the beginning to a point where it didn’t bother them anymore.

“You can be just as isolated at an event as you can just by maybe avoiding it,” she said.

Ms Vallence, who is now an advocate for Involuntary-Childlessness through Treatment, Loss or Circumstance, said she appreciated the opt-out option offered by some businesses while also appreciating the commercialisation of the day was important for hospitality businesses who have had a hard time in recent years.

In the weeks leading up to Mother’s Day, most department stores and hospitality venues amplify advertisements by offering customers discount codes or new editions of products and experiences.

Australia and New Zealand Infertility Counsellors Association chairwoman Rebecca Kerner acknowledged the importance of celebrating “wonderful mums” on Mother’s Day while calling for sensitivity and awareness in the wider community for those who were fighting for the privilege of motherhood.

“It’s a day in the calendar where those who are on their fertility journey or have lost longed for babies or may never have the baby that they long for may be involuntary childless. It’s a day that’s really, really tricky for them. It’s a day that can often come with a lot of mixed feelings,” Ms Kerner told NewsWire.

She said every individual would have a different way of dealing with those feelings and should be supported to manage it in their own way.

“For some people, what works is to desensitise, and for others, it’s actually a space to be able to have all of their feelings,” she said.

“They may feel envious, they may feel sad, they may feel resentful, they may feel angry, and allowing them space to have those feelings and to know that it’s OK for this day to feel challenging is also OK.

“It’s not that they don’t want to celebrate their own mums. They just want sensitivity and awareness, and sometimes a space to retreat to permission to retreat to be quiet on a day like this too.

“We need to have more sensitive conversations in the tea room when people are talking about babies or talking about Mother’s Day.

“It’s not that we shouldn’t do it. It’s important we don’t shut down all conversations, but I think it’s a sensitivity to be aware of.”

Former Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk recently opened up about her own infertility struggles and her bid to become a mother.

“I just thought it was going to happen. I was gonna have a baby,” Ms Palaszczuk told NewsWire.

“There’d be times where I’d be quite sad. I’d have a … have a tear here and there, especially like on Mother’s Day and Christmas Day,” she said.

“But there’s a lot of other women out there going through that.”

The 56-year-old former politician writes about her struggles in her book The Politics of Being Me.

Under a chapter called Immeasurable Loss, Ms Palaszczuk reveals she had a miscarriage when aged 33 and a subsequent diagnosis with endometriosis.

“I went through years and years of IVF and really at the time there was no information, there was no help, there was no support, there was no counselling,” she wrote.

“I had a friend who helped me through it and thank goodness I had my friend.”

If you, or someone you care about is needing some extra support, you can easily speak to a Beyond Blue counsellor at 1300 22 4636.