The Version of Leadership That Nearly Broke Me
There are moments in life that don’t just change you personally. They fundamentally reshape the way you understand leadership, sacrifice, survival, and what it means to truly show up for the people you love. This piece was one of the hardest things I’ve ever written. Not because the grief is new. But because the honesty is.
“Sometimes being brave means finally admitting that you cannot endlessly sacrifice yourself and call that leadership.”
There’s something strange about Mother’s Day landing next to the birthday of a child you never got to meet. Eight years ago this past weekend, I could have been holding a brand new baby girl in my arms. Instead, I spent the day with the two children who made me a mother in the first place. One somehow preparing for senior year and university life with starry eyes and endless excitement while the other storms headfirst through high school with equal parts attitude, compassion, and brilliance that catches me off guard almost daily.
And honestly? That contrast feels like motherhood in its truest form. Beautiful. Heartbreaking. Humbling. All at once.
I don’t talk often about losing my daughter.
Partly because grief around pregnancy and child loss can feel invisible. Partly because abortion and pregnancy loss still live in spaces people struggle to talk about honestly, especially in a world where deeply personal medical decisions have become political battlegrounds instead of conversations between women and their healthcare providers. But mostly because the story itself is complicated.
Because from the very beginning, this story was never only about loss. It was about choice. About survival. About the kind of leadership that asks people to disappear themselves in order to matter. About learning, far too slowly, that being needed by everyone else does not mean abandoning yourself.
At the time, I found myself pregnant unexpectedly. So unexpectedly that I was already into my second trimester before I knew. And despite all logic and practicality and timing and reality, there was a piece of my heart that wanted that baby desperately. I could picture her already. Wonder about her. Love her already. Because I had wanted a big family. But this pregnancy should have been impossible.
I had already made choices to help ensure I couldn’t become pregnant again because of the risks to my health. The details don’t matter for this story, but my body was physically incapable of safely carrying another pregnancy to term. Multiple specialists agreed: if I chose to continue the pregnancy, the odds were staggeringly high that my children would lose their mother in the process. No one really wanted to say it outright, but I am nothing if not persistent. The two doctors who finally gave me off-the-record odds estimated 85-90%.
Not in my favor.
And that’s the thing nobody prepares you for about motherhood. Sometimes love looks like sacrifice. Sometimes it looks like survival. And sometimes the most profound thing a parent does is choose the children already here. Because I had two children standing right in front of me who needed their mother. Needed me healthy. Needed me present. Needed me alive in every sense of the word.
And so I made the hardest decision of my life. Not because I didn’t love my daughter. But because I did love my children. At the time, though, I still didn’t fully understand the lesson life was trying to teach me.
When I found out I was pregnant, Uncharted was still in its infancy. We were five months away from our second ever event. I remember telling Andy I was pregnant and the very first words out of my mouth were: “Don’t worry. I’ll still be at Uncharted.”
He wasn’t worried. In fact, he seemed angry that I thought that was what mattered in that moment. But at the time, I genuinely believed that was what leadership looked like. Showing up no matter what. Putting work first. Protecting everyone else from your pain. Never letting people see you crack. Never quitting.
And honestly?
I carried that belief for years longer than I should have.
Because even before I lost my daughter, I had already normalized sacrificing myself in the name of ambition, responsibility, leadership, and proving I could carry it all. Like so many people in veterinary medicine and helping professions, I thought being “good” meant enduring more. Giving more. Needing less.
When I was first trying to start a family, I struggled with infertility. I had 4 miscarriages in the first and second trimester before my daughter was born and 4 more while trying to conceive my son. I worked through every single one of them. The one where I started bleeding in surgery. The one where I passed out coming out of an exam room carrying a patient because we were too short staffed to believe I could take care of me too - I had to cover for everyone else. The ones where I cried in the bathroom between appointments because my heart was breaking but I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t want my team to worry. I’d learned as a leader that the team could share details but I held myself apart from them as a leader and didn’t blur those lines.
It wasn’t until years later, after leaving the clinic I worked at during that season of my life and starting over somewhere new, that the weight of everything finally started catching up with me.
And grief is a strange thing.
People talk about healing like it arrives all at once, neat and cinematic. But for me, grief felt more like a wound with jagged edges. In the beginning, every movement caught on them. Everything hurt.
It felt like a comet collided with my chest and carved out something vast and unfillable, the edges razor sharp and catching anything that came close. Over time, those edges softened. But they never disappeared.
There are still days, days like Mother’s Day, days like the anniversary of my abortion, where grief catches on those rough places again. Days where it spills over unexpectedly. Days where the lines between gratitude and heartbreak blur together. And honestly? I think that’s okay.
Because somewhere in all of this, I became more human.
Not stronger in the polished, performative way leadership culture likes to celebrate. Human in the real way. Softer. More empathetic. More honest. More aware that every person walking into our hospitals, organizations, and meetings is carrying private pain we may know nothing about.
It changed the way I lead.
When I was younger, I thought leadership meant proving how much pain you could carry without letting it affect your work. Now I think leadership looks very different. I think leadership is teaching people they matter outside of their productivity. I think leadership is reminding exhausted veterinary professionals that there will always be another patient, another email, another meeting, another event. Work will always be there. But your children only get one childhood. Your family only gets one version of you.
And you only get one body.
One mind.
One life.
My friend Omar joked recently on a phone call that I have “better boundaries” than someone else we know, and I laughed out loud. Hard. Possibly with a snort mixed in. Because the truth is, I’m still a work in progress. I don’t have this mastered. Not even close. But do I have better boundaries than I did eight years ago?
10,000%.
Because I finally understand something I wish more leaders in veterinary medicine believed: Your humanity does not have to disappear for your leadership to matter. In fact, I think the best leaders are the ones brave enough to let people see that they are human too. The ones who teach their teams that vulnerability is not weakness. That asking for help is not failure. That protecting your mental health, your physical health, your family, your presence, is not selfish.
Sometimes being brave means enduring hard things. And sometimes being brave means finally admitting that you cannot endlessly sacrifice yourself and call that leadership.
A world exists where this weekend, I could have been celebrating my daughter’s birthday. Instead, I spent it grateful for the children I still get to hold close. Grateful for the life I fought to stay present for. And grateful for the painful lessons that reshaped me into a leader who finally understands that caring for people must include ourselves too. The grief never fully leaves. But neither does the love.
💗 Stephanie