After graduating from Georgetown with a degree in Marketing, I decided to move to Chicago and join Leo Burnett (which is an advertising agency). This was a fun way to start my career in an amazing city. I worked hard (and very long hours) in those early years, but I learned a lot about working in an agency and about Marketing.

During these years, I was fortunate to work for a very special woman, Renetta McCann, at Leo Burnett. She was a working mom with two young children. She was one of the first women I was able to work with who was managing the juggling act. Renetta was a true inspiration to me and showed that it was possible to have a family and a successful career.

Then, I moved to Atlanta with my fiancé and joined The Coca-Cola Company in Global Marketing. This was the start of my globetrotting, which changed my life forever. I loved working with people from various cultures around the world. With each trip to another country and the special people that I had the opportunity to work with, I grew as a person and truly became a citizen of the world.

When I was thirty years old, I had Grace, and this is when my juggling act began. I was in a global role at The Coca-Cola Company and still doing significant international travel as part of my role (basically had a week-long international trip once a month). My husband traveled domestically each week, so we had a nanny who would stay with Grace during the weeks when both of us were gone.

My career continued to progress over the years, with more leadership responsibility. Along with the evolution in responsibilities,I continued thinking through how I was going to manage the juggling act and refine my working-mom operating model each year.

When Grace was seven years old, I went through a divorce, and this required me to evaluate all aspects of my juggling act. I needed to ensure that I could continue to do all that I was trying to do in both my personal life and my professional life… and I was committed to figuring it out.

When Grace was in eighth grade, I left The Coca-Cola Company and decided to join McKinsey & Company as a Partner. This required even more travel than I was doing before (on a weekly basis)… and further refinement of how I was managing the juggling act.

During Grace’s junior year in high school, I left McKinsey to join Google to lead Global Marketing Operations. This was during the pandemic, so I had the opportunity to work from home and have lots of quality time with Grace in her final two years at home. This time together was truly a gift.

This was also the first time that Grace had really seen me “work,” because I had always gone to an office (and did not work at home when I was with her). The silver lining of the pandemic is that Grace gained an appreciation for how invested I was in what I did each day… and how much I enjoyed my work.

Over the years of raising Grace, I constantly evaluated how I was doing in managing the juggling act… always keeping her as the priority… and took it on as a challenge to figure out how to make it all work. As I look back, I am proud of how I approached my juggling act… it was not easy, but it was definitely worth it.