Creativity and discipline to grow up "imperfect and happy"

“As a child of divorcees, I dreamed of the Bradford family, but I also wanted to have a job, a career of my own. Reconciling these two dreams was a very complicated journey, and the rhetoric depicting motherhood as idyllic did not help. That’s why I started my blog in 2006, to talk to other women.” 

Claudia de Lillo lives with her husband and three children in Milan. To the general public, she is better known as Elasti, the pseudonym she chose to communicated all the challenges involved in reconciling the roles of mother and professional woman. Her first two books – Nonsolomamma and Nonsolodue – Not Just a Mom and Not Just Two – come from a daily diary she has kept since she started working as an economic journalist for Reuters. 

In de Lillo’s words: “I’ve always had a creative soul, but I’ve always been very disciplined too. So when my parents, who are Bocconi alumni, insisted that I study Economics, I said yes, partly because I’ve always loved quantitative subjects.” She described herself as a “good little soldier” for four years, graduating with a thesis in financial mathematics. 

She got her start in the working world with an internship at Euromobiliare SIM as a derivatives trader. “I was the only woman on the trading floor. To give you an idea of the environment, one of the supervisors even told me that the reason was simple: women are bad luck in business.” After a while, it became clear that this was not the right place for her, not least because she felt like she was “making money for people who were already rich.” Then came the opportunity to work for the Reuters news agency, where they were looking for aspiring journalists in Milan. Thanks to her degree in Economics, the selection process was a quick one, with de Lillo specializing in Equity. “I liked the idea of informing readers through financial reporting. The writing was certainly not creative, but it was a good job that I did for years.” Eighteen, to be exact, working up to the position of senior editor. The decision to leave came after the birth of her third child. 

She says: “I started working part-time at the agency to try to keep the pieces of my professional and personal life together. But the gap between work and what I really wanted to do ‘when I grew up’ was getting wider.” Elasti got her name from Elastigirl, the protagonist of Pixar’s animated film The Incredibles, about a ‘normal’ family of superheroes. She tells a story that is both personal (time divided between work - children, babysitter – expenses – housework) and universal (female identity – reconciliation of work and family life – family models – social role). And it works so well that her blog became one of the most read in Italy.  “In the meantime, I had also been given a column in D La Repubblica on reconciling work and family life. It was time for a change,” she adds. 

On March 8, 2012, de Lillo was created Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica [Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic] for creating the persona of Elasti, and through her, speaking to the invisible reality of motherhood. She smiles: “For me it was an unbelievable honor. President Giorgio Napolitano presented me with the award. Then I found out that it was the staff who had handled the nomination and selection process who had put my name in: they were all moms who read my blog.” 

Today, de Lillo hosts Caterpillar AM every morning at dawn on Rai Radio2; she’s also a columnist for La Repubblica and writes for Il Venerdì and Affari&Finanza. She has published seven books, including three novels, with major Italian publishers.

To the young women of today, she says: “Find a job that fits you, but without the pretense of perfection. I’m a firm believer in sisterhood and I think that we women can help each other out a lot.” To grow up imperfect and happy.