Claudia Trupp was at her desk in the Center for Appellate Litigation in New York City, where she is the senior appellate counsel, when she looked at her computer.

"Oh, I just got an e-mail that my daughter threw up in my car. Great."

It was a sentiment that any mother who works can understand. The e-mail was sent by her husband.

Ms. Trupp, the author of "Hard Time and Nursery Rhymes" that comes out next week from Rodale Press, leaves the house four days a week to deal with criminals -- a job that in many ways is easier than raising her three girls.

So, when you ask her about work-life balance, she laughs and says she hates that term.

"Sometimes your work is going to be completely overwhelming and sometimes your home life is completely overwhelming," she said. "There's no balance there, there's just life in its messy entirety."

Ms. Trupp graduated from the University of Rochester magna cum laude and went on to law school at New York University, where she met her husband. Now they are both lawyers, living in New Jersey with three daughters, ages 5, 9 and 12. A nanny helps with the children.

By day, Ms. Trupp is working on appellate briefs and supervising other attorneys; at night, she is a mom, making dinner, cleaning up the mess and getting kids to bed.

When told some working moms could kind of hate her, her retort is disarming: "If you saw my closets you wouldn't hate me. They are such a wreck."

Early on in her role as a mom, she was run-down and convinced she must be sick. She went to the doctor, described her life, and his diagnosis was that she was tired.

The cure?

"Get used to it," the doctor said, "because that's what your life is going to be."

And she has gotten used to it, through three children, diaper bags, school conferences and court dates.

"I wish I had a great ability to compartmentalize my life and my emotions," she said. But when she is in the middle of a case, she sometimes worries about it so much at home that her husband tells her she has to stop because she is driving everyone crazy.

On top of it all, she wrote her book last year when she had a cancer scare that took about six months to resolve. During that time, she said, she was an insomniac and turned to writing to explain to her daughters why she left them at home to go to work.

She found, as most mothers do, that the best time to get her own work done was after the children were in bed.

And though she has received sympathy for working as hard as she does, it's really not the take on the book she was going for.

"I do feel really lucky and really blessed," she said.

And she knows that each stage of child rearing is for a limited time, that as each day stretches into unending hours, when she finally does have a minute to look up and think back, she will see the years have flown by in a flash.