Meredith Vieira with husband Richard M. Cohen in 2009. (Getty Images)

Meredith Vieira is smarter than most of us working women over 45.

The Today show co-anchor understood the whole work-life balance thing back when it wasn't cool - back when women wore suits and bow ties to work and denied their own womanhood, as if the acknowledgment of a functioning uterus could propel them smack into the glass ceiling.

I once had a boss who came back to work two weeks after giving birth. This act of physical and emotional endurance was a badge of honor to her - by golly, she would show those men she was as tough and dedicated to the newspaper as they were.

This decision seemed borderline wacky to me even then, in the 1980s, when I was a young journalist.

Yet, I remember being surprised when Vieira left her job as co-editor of 60 Minutes in 1991, when she was pregnant with her second child.

I remember thinking that was risky - leaving that powerful TV job and basically saying to the world, "I am not as committed to this career as I am to my family."

Looking back, Vieira seems like the courageous one: She did OK for herself, didn't she?

She came early to this whole "professional reinvention" thing, when she realized that "she was a reporter who didn't want to report because it required a tremendous amount of travel."

Then The View came along, a show that capitalized on Vieira's motherhood, her womanhood and her quick mind and mouth.

By looking out for herself - for her life - she put her faith not in the TV powers-that-be but in her own ability.

She did it again on Monday, when she announced that she was leaving the Today show after five years to spend more time with her husband and their three children. In June, Ann Curry will take the spot on the couch beside Matt Lauer.

"Time is one of those weird things you can never get enough of it," Vieira said. "And it just keeps ticking away, and I know that I want to spend more of mine with my husband, Richard, and my kids Ben, Gabe and Lily."

Yep, that Meredith is smart.

She had tears in her eyes as she said this, adding that she planned to stay in the NBC News family in another role. But her own family came first now, as it did 10 years ago.

Last fall, Vieira told the Ladies Home Journal: "I'll know when it's time to go, and I'm not afraid to go. I would look forward to not working, to traveling with Richard and carving out time for us."

It's notable that she said she's not afraid. Fear is natural when it comes to any leap, small or steep. But fear is never a good traveling companion, especially when time keeps ticking away.

Vieira is 57. Her husband, Emmy award-winning journalist Richard Cohen, has battled multiple sclerosis for 30 years, and colon cancer, too. He is legally blind, and MS has weakened his vocal cords, arms and legs.

In an interview the couple gave to Caregiver Magazine in 2008, Cohen gave advice to fellow patients that sounds a lot like something he might have learned from his wife:

"I think that people sell themselves short," he said. "People have a reservoir of strength and resilience that is invisible to them. It's something that they cannot see, but it's available to them and I think that if people believe in themselves and their strength a little bit more, the rest can fall into place."