From struggles to startups: How 2 Regina mothers turned bad maternity leave experiences into businesses
Beth Wanner and Hannah Castle both saw a lack of security for mothers
For women in demanding jobs, the decision to have a baby can be a lot more difficult than missing a few days at work.
"I just always knew that once I made the decision to start a family, those two things were going to butt heads," said Beth Wanner, mother to a two-year-old girl, on CBC Saskatchewan's Blue Sky.
When she became pregnant in 2023, her career was taking off — she had moved from director to vice president for a tech company.
Wanner said she always feared how having a baby would impact her job. She would wait for the next career milestone to mark the right moment. At the same time, she was experiencing infertility issues.
She did not want to be seen by her colleagues as less dedicated or focused, so she carried her struggles quietly.
"There's a lot of assumptions that are made once you start having a family," Wanner said.
"So I made sure to over-perform at that time. I was going to put in everything, so nobody even had the faintest whisper that something was going on for me."
Wanner was waiting for the results from her second in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) transfer when she heard her work was planning to cut jobs.
"I started to get the feeling that I actually might be included," Wanner said.
"I said to my husband, 'would you rather that the results come back that I'm not pregnant and I get to keep my job or that I'm pregnant and I'm going to be fired?'"
Her husband chose the baby over the job — and that's exactly what happened.
Two days after Wanner found out she was pregnant, she was let go.
"I don't think my pregnancy impacted why I was let go in that case, but the irony was hiding it to prevent the worst, and then it happened," she said.
After four months of job-hunting, Wanner landed a new position as vice president for another tech company. Instead of hiding it, she signed the offer letter and told them she was pregnant.
"The reaction was horrible," Wanner said. "I believe the first question I was asked was, 'when did you find out?' The second was, 'why did you do this to us? Why did you pick us?'"
Despite their reaction, Wanner worked for the company until she ran into medical complications with her pregnancy. She developed placenta previa, a condition where the placenta attaches low to the uterus, which moved her delivery date up four weeks.
"I told my boss that I was actually going to need to take leave even earlier," said Wanner. "Three working days later, I was fired."
After giving birth to a healthy baby girl, Wanner decided to take her experience and come up with a solution to provide more security to women, parents and businesses during leaves.
In 2025, she launched Mother Cover, a fractional and interim agency that provides coverage for temporary leaves from work.
The business aims to look at both sides of a leave — the parent and the business.
"How can we step into that parent's shoes to continue their projects and their work, take care of their work, [their] baby, for them while they go do what's important in their life at that moment, and hand it back to them when they're ready to step back in?" Wanner said.
The business uses a roster of "leave partners" interested in fractional or interim type of work — many of them also being mothers and parents — to fill the spots needed in the workplace.
Hannah Castle, founder of My Friend Penny, is another Regina mother who turned a bad maternity leave experience into a solution.
Castle, who now has an eight-month-old daughter, battled chronic sickness during a very difficult pregnancy.
"I had chronic nosebleeds, I had very low iron, I had very low blood pressure," Castle said.
She ended up having to leave work when she reached 30 weeks and gave birth four weeks later.
Castle said her experience revealed a gap for women when it comes to navigating sick days while pregnant.
She and co-founder Mary Weimer decided to start My Friend Penny so mothers could take time away from work and still have access to their income without having to constantly explain it to their employer.
The business lives "somewhere between a benefit and insurance." It's a fund-to-fund model allowing mothers or employers to pay into a pool of capital that can be used for sick days due to "women-related health issues."
"We top up your income to 100 per cent for that absence," Castle said.
"So whether it's 30 per cent or 100 per cent, we're saying, for these next five weeks, we are going to make sure that you're paid."
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With files from Blue Sky