We’re taking a break from the Bluey series, because today is a super important day for Leadership. These leaders are used to disruption - they deal with it every day. They are tough, tenacious, and kind - all qualities we want in a good leader. I happen to share my life with one of these leaders, and I’m lucky enough to have another two of these leaders only a phone call away. I’m talking about Mothers, of course, and I’m honoured to make this Sunday Story all about them.
Motherhood has been a foundational part of human society for…well, for as long as we’ve known. It’s the core of creation - for the Haudenosaunee people, their creation story talks of Sky Woman who came to earth and gives birth to twins who help shape the world, and they play an important role in political and social life in many indigenous cultures - in the Haudenosaunee of the East and the K'ómoks of the West, mothers are responsible for selecting clan leaders and chiefs, and for many there’s an undeniable land connection to Mother Earth. On the other side of the world, the Greek story of Demeter, whose anger at the abduction of her daughter resulted in the creation of the seasons, is a nod to the power and influence of mothers on society. The Confucian tradition includes the concept of filial piety and emphasizes the role of respect for mothers’ role in raising children.
In modernity, mothers are also often sitting next to you in workshops, boardrooms, and offices - not only do they carry their role at home, but they do so to solve the big problems that organizations face every day. There is an often-cited (and, sadly, justified) concern among many women that taking time away from work to have kids is a career limiting move - to any hiring manager reading this who holds that attitude, give your head a massive shake. Would you judge someone for taking a pause from work to pursue a Master’s or PhD in exactly the kind of stuff you have to deal with every single day? Then you shouldn’t judge a mom. They aren’t taking time away; they are learning to navigate a maelstrom of leadership challenges that would test anyone. They are spending months and years mentoring, coaching, and managing people in the ways that cannot be taught in a textbook (and to people who often can’t speak or communicate effectively!) while also managing their own stress and maintaining balance and wellbeing. This is what you want your leaders to do too! You want those skills on your team, and motherhood supercharges leadership. Hire moms first!
I’ve mentioned how lucky I am to share my life with a mother, and a Sunday Story wouldn’t be quite right without the “story” part, so let me tell you hers as I see it. Teryn was born in Ajax hospital, to another wonderful mother named Barbara. For the most part, they lived a normal, suburban, southern Ontario life, until a tragedy changed the course of her life forever - at the young age of 16, Teryn’s father Mike passed away.
Imagine being a leader at work, responsible for the most important project you’ll ever do, and right at the most critical time half of your team isn’t there anymore. We can all read that sentence, and imagine the stress and difficulty such a situation would create, right? It’s one rife with leadership challenges. Now imagine being Barbara and turning this work scenario I’ve proposed up by a factor of a billion, because love is so much more important that a job, and as such the impact of loss is immeasurably more significant.
But Barbara rose to the difficulty and raised two great kids. Her son Sean is a constant inspiration to me - he’s incredibly brave and is willing to make big changes in life and career to ensure he’s living that life in a way that aligns with the man he is, and it takes courage and grit to be this kind of person - things he learned from his mom. And remember, he’s only my second favourite Jenkins kid - I married the other one.
Right now, as I write this, Teryn is building Legos with my son. The peace of our current situation betrays the adrenaline-soaked road we took to get here. For starters, we have always had a disposition towards adventures, and Teryn has navigated the most dangerous roads in North America at the wheel of a 4x4 vehicle, from the Arctic Ocean to Mexico, with calmness and eager excitement to see what’s around the next bend or across the next border. She’s competed in dance competitions in front of hundreds of strangers, and served as a beacon of health and wellbeing through instructing thousands of people along their fitness journeys. When she’s not putting herself out there with courage and integrity, she’s saving the lives of animals or teaching others how to do it. She’s a caregiver, an adventurer, and a wonderful human - and that’s just based on the adventures she’s chosen (If you want to see more, check out our personal page, Chasing Our Trunks)
The adventures she’s not chosen have demonstrated her true grit also. In 2019, my work caused an individual to decide that he wanted to murder me, and Teryn and I were forced to flee our home at midnight and live out of hotels for weeks. The stress of this situation was enormous for me as the target - a topic for another Sunday story - but that pales in comparison to the experience Teryn had to endure at the same time. First of all, she was at risk too - odds are good anyone taking a shot at me would also take a shot at her. In addition to the existential risk, she was of course incredibly worried about me, but that’s not all - she had to worry about our son, Kincaid, who we had not yet met. Teryn was 4 months pregnant at this time, and so he was still a few months away from taking his first breath when all this was happening. Eventually we had to return home, even though the situation was not resolved, and Teryn had to live her life under the umbrella of safety plans, go-bags, self-defence considerations, avoiding patterns of behaviour like rotating grocery stores randomly and taking circuitous routes home, and had to endure that constant risk of violence for months while ensuring a healthy and happy baby would arrive in the Spring of 2020.
Yes, she became a mom in the Spring of 2020, so let’s talk about when that baby arrived: April. You remember that time - the world had just shut down due to COVID and most families were deeply concerned about the dwindling toilet paper supplies. We got a call the week he was expected to arrive notifying us that our chosen place of birth - a nearby hospital - was no longer available to us because of short staffing and volume of hospitalized people. Teryn calmly watched me as I read articles, watched YouTube videos, and ordered items on Amazon to prepare to deliver the baby at home in our living room - the WikiHow article on delivering a baby isn’t bad, per se, but imagine being Teryn and knowing that your life and the life of your child depended on the Lumberjack-looking husband of yours who only started reading that article a day before the baby got there and also knowing full well he gets a bit squeamish with blood. It’s not exactly setting up a relaxing “welcome to the world”, is it? As it happened, our son didn’t arrive that way - after 24 hours of labour, we headed to the ER as per the advice of our health care professionals on our team, and she gave birth with the help of our wonderful midwife and occasionally a nurse, when they could spare one. Within an hour of giving birth (because no one was around to tell us to do anything differently), Teryn was carrying our baby out of the hospital, watching me install the car seat in the back of our truck (apparently you can do that ahead of time, who knew?!?), and driving home to start her life as Mom.
(6 months later when restrictions had loosened up, we were with friends who gave birth outside of COVID times, and they mentioned things like “nurses checking the car seat” and “Being kept overnight for health and safety observation” and “signing a bunch of paperwork”. We nervously looked at each other realizing that thanks to Teryn being a trooper and feeling up for a stroll so soon after birth, we may have stolen our own baby from the hospital. It’s probably fine though.)
And that wasn’t the end of the curveballs. Teryn got to watch me leave one job, knowing we didn’t have another lined up and knowing exactly how many months the dwindling savings would pay the mortgage on our house. I’ll never forget her face when I told her we had the chance to move to Vancouver Island - I’m terrible at details like dates, and I thought we had a month. She knew full well we had 9 days to make this transition. She didn’t even blink - she just made it happen.
And then (yes there’s more) we had more curveballs that Teryn once again had to navigate not just for herself, but for our family also. The move to BC meant selling our house in Alberta, but with interest rates creeping up, the house just didn’t sell. Then the worst happened - a flood of biblical (or at least, Olympic swimming pool) proportions destroyed our house, and we weren’t backed by our insurance company. Our “temporary” idea of living in an 18-foot RV for a month or two until we could find a place to live has, nearly two years later, become a way of life for us as our family shares our 130-square foot space on the beach. We are uniquely equipped to live life this way given our hobbies and what we consider to be fun, but it’s not always easy. For example, Teryn is no stranger to standing outside in December in the occasional snowstorm with a hairdryer to thaw our water line, which she affectionately refers to as “homesteading” (this usually happens only once or twice a year; we’re not that tough on Vancouver Island after all).
Put yourself in Teryn’s shoes — recognizing I’m always working so much of raising our son has fallen on her shoulders - and imagine being a mom through the curveballs I’ve described above. Imagine maintaining a positive attitude through it all. Imagine being the rock for the whole family, finding solutions and encouragement even in the darkest times. Imagine the courage, strength, and true grit that would be required to lead our family through these times - make no mistake, it might be my choices that result in these curveballs, but it’s Teryn’s leadership that gets us through them (and I’ve not even mentioned the countless times she’s watched my ticket get punched on a motorcycle adventure, or the time she watched me take off to the Amazon rainforest without knowing if I’d be coming back or not — these are all topics for other Sunday Stories though, so stay tuned!)
I just interrupted her Lego building to ask her if she could change anything about our lives given the journey we’ve had. Her character shines through once again:
“Nope.”
In fact, this entire series of Sunday Stories only exists because of Teryn. The reason I’m around to write them is Teryn. The reason I want to write them is Teryn - she’s convinced me that folks can benefit from reading them. The reason I don’t care if she’s right about that or not is because of Teryn, because with her in my life, I know everything else will be OK. She’s my rock, my inspiration, and my partner - and her leadership has never shone so brightly as it does in her role as Mom. There’s a 4-year-old building a Lego set right now, using his “please” and “thank you”-s, reading instructions, and being coached on spatial reasoning and awareness (As well as biology - she’s a scientist too, a Wildlife Biologist, and they are building a penguin together) — he’s a great kid, and a good kid, because he has a great mom.
Through it all, she’s taught me more about leadership than any workshop or course. The lessons I try to impart in these stories are often because of how I have observed her move through the world, and these profound lessons teach me the importance of patience, communication, clarity of values, courage, and kindness. These are all qualities essential to good leadership that are easy to define with a dictionary, but hard to make come to life - unless you are a mom. She makes it look effortless (but I know it’s not, and I’m grateful).
If you want to be a better leader, learn from a good Mom.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of you.
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