Josh Kelley’s Actress Wife Katherine Heigl Opens Up About Family and Career Struggles

Josh Kelley and actress wife Katherine Heigl are a great example of a shiny celebrity couple who seem to have it all. But perhaps that's not as easy as it sounds. In a blog post for iVillage this week, Heigl wrote candidly and honestly about the struggles of balancing two loves: an acting career and being a mom to the couple's 3-year-old daughter, Naleigh.

For as long as she can remember, Heigl says, she has wanted to be a mom. In her post, she thinks back to when she would ask obliging mothers in her church if she could hold their babies and or when she would skip Sunday school to play with the little ones in the nursery. And while being a mother was a lifelong goal for her, it wasn't her only dream. She also remembers how enamored she was the first time she walked onto a set when she was only 11.

"I loved everything about making movies," she writes, "the wardrobe that made the character come alive in me; the hair and makeup that could transform me; the cast and crew that became like a family for those few short months; and the craft service where there was never a shortage of sodas and Slim Jims." But as an enchanted young child harboring two big dreams, she says she never realized that "having it all would not look and feel as I imagined." When she tried to reconcile the her two passions for the first time as a mother and actress, she says the result was less than dreamlike.

"No matter how great my intentions, how lofty my goals, how passionate my commitment, I was failing," she admits. "I was failing my work, I was failing my daughter, I was failing my husband. I was stressed out and exhausted." So she began staying at home full-time but wondered all the while why, with all the love she had for her daughter, she would still long for her work. In the end, she resolved to go back, admitting that she would have to make sacrifices, that she would miss some of the little moments in her daughter's life and that her motherhood would have to pour into her art.

"I began to understand that the blessing and the curse were one in the same, that nothing great comes without a price," she says. Now, when her young daughter asks why Heigl has to go to work, Heigl says she looks her square in the eye and explains one thing: "That work makes me a better person, a better woman, a better mother. Then I pray to God that she will understand one day and that my example will encourage her to find and follow her bliss as well."