“Is that a Kiwi accent I hear?” a fellow mum asked me at the park last week.  On the bus, at the playground, in the pub, these are just a few of the places I have bumped into other Kiwi mums over the last few months. Often conversation starts with the basics: where in New Zealand are you from, how long have you been here, where do you live? And very quickly turn to the dilemmas we share: are we doing the right thing by raising our kids here, should we go home, and where is home?

This got me thinking, there must be so many of us over here. And not just mums, but grandmas, aunties, daughters caring for their mums - Kiwi wahine experiencing motherhood in all of its forms. In celebration of New Zealand Mother’s Day, I spoke to some of these women.

Growing up on a one-acre lifestyle block in South Auckland, Katrina Megget didn’t strike her family as being particularly outdoorsy or adventurous. Yet Katrina, 42, has now made a name for herself internationally as an adventure traveller, tramping the entire length of New Zealand, sailing around the UK and scaling a number of volcanoes in a series of ambitious personal quests. Katrina regularly shares her travel experiences in publications like New Zealand’s Wilderness magazine and is a motivational speaker in England. She says going on any kind of big adventure is, in many ways, a “growth process”.

Katrina’s first great adventure was her spontaneous decision to relocate to the UK from Dunedin, 17 years ago. Today, she lives in Kent, where she is a freelance journalist writing mainly on medical science, new drug discoveries and the pharmaceutical industry.

Sometimes it takes two shots at London, before you find the fit that feels right. Just ask Molly Woods, 31, a high-flying lawyer from Hastings, New Zealand, now partner at the renowned law firm Ashurst. Molly practises multinationally on mergers and acquisitions, equity capital market transactions and corporate restructurings. Her promotion to partnership at Ashurst in May 2022, after just over five years with the company, means London now feels exactly the right place for her to be.

After studying politics and law at Victoria University in Wellington, Molly worked as a solicitor for top-tier Kiwi law firm Bell Gully, an experience she credits as being “absolutely foundational”. “In a market that's smaller, you take on senior responsibilities faster than over here, yet with incredibly-experienced, brilliant, qualified people as your first teachers and trainers”, she explains.