Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer: Juggling Career and Baby is "Fun, Easy"

Who says you can't have it all?

"The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be," Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told an invite-only crowd at a Fortune magazine "Most Powerful Women" event earlier this week in Palo Alto, Calif. "I think I've been really lucky that way but I had a very easy, healthy pregnancy. He's been easy. So those have been the two really terrific surprises: the kid has been easier and the job has been fun!"

The secret to the Silicon Valley star's seemingly effortless success – aside from an "easy" kid? Priorities. 

Mayer, 37, told the audience of mostly women execs that having good priorities has made her life both doable and happy. "You have to ruthlessly prioritize," she said. 

"And that's one of the reasons I haven't been talking and I will go back to not talking after tonight."

As for what, exactly, those priorities are, she quoted a legendary football coach: "And you know Vince Lombardi says, in my life there are three things: God, family and the Green Bay Packers. For me, it's God, family and Yahoo, in that order."

Plus: Dad's Side: Trying to Have it All

Mayer, who became Yahoo's CEO while 6-months pregnant and gave birth shortly thereafter, returned to work after a two-week maternity leave, thrusting her directly into the "having it all" debate that peaked with a personal essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Atlantic. 

Slaughter, the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, wrote that even at her level, she found herself feeling forced to chose between career and family. 

Of course Mayer is a very wealthy woman with a huge job who can get all the help she needs with her son Macallister. Bonnie Fuller, herself a working family woman of means, bristled at Mayer's characterization of her work-life balance as "easy" and "fun."

"Most working moms may love their careers and babies," she wrote in HollywoodLife.com, "but mostly they just feel EXHAUSTED and overwhelmed." 

What do you make of her assertion that through ruthless prioritizing you, too, can have it all? Let us know in the comments.