During the holiday season a few years ago, the chief of my division at work gave each of us a bottle of wine as an end-of-the-year thank you gift.  Attached to the bottle was a typed note of the things she was grateful for, and at the top of the page was a handwritten, personalized note of gratitude.

To me, she wrote “Thank you for juggling work and motherhood so elegantly.”  Elegence?!  I was breathtaken.  I was only a few months back from maternity leave after the birth of my second child, and that word was the antithesis of how I would have described myself.

Here I was, thinking I was frazzled beyond recognition, burning candles at both ends, wearing  ponytails and quite possibly clothing that smelled like spit-up.  And the word she chose was “elegantly”?! […]