Kim Palmer never actually set out to establish a global business. The inspiration for her award-winning health app, Clementine, grew out of her personal experience dealing with panic attacks during pregnancy and after childbirth. Her own mental health journey motivated her to develop the Clementine portfolio of hypnotherapy tools to help other women “in the trenches”. As interest exploded during the pandemic, this Kiwi FemTech innovator rapidly scaled her small UK business with impact investor funding, and is now taking the company she founded in 2017 into new international markets.

At the age of 16, Monique Cooper donned her uniform for the first time as a volunteer firefighter – a move that kickstarted her interest in mechanics and eventually, a flourishing engineering career. Now, Monique is a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, building on her early enthusiasm for employing cutting-edge technologies and processes to help people.

Born in Papakura and raised in Clevedon on the outskirts of Tāmaki Makaurau, Monique’s passion for engineering was sparked by her father – an electrical engineer. Monique used to attend Girls’ Brigade - a Christian youth organisation that focused on personal development and community service - while her father volunteered with the Boys’ Brigade.

“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.