Melissa Joan Hart entertained audiences as a teen as everyone's favorite witch Sabrina. But later in life, she had to make the difficult decision to choose between family and career. Ultimately, she faced a lot of guilt.
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"We always wanted them to have a home base, to have a place where they would, you know, plant their roots and grow," she told Fox. "And that was what we did. We moved around in 2009 looking for a place. We looked in Nashville, we looked in Connecticut, we looked in New York — we ended up in Connecticut. But I immediately got pulled back out to L.A. to work on a TV show."
Hart explained that it became difficult to work on TV shows due to the distance between her home and Los Angeles.
"And with a TV show like Melissa & Joey, you don't know if it's gonna be a half a year, a whole year, five years. So you take it a year at a time and make your decisions as a family as you go," she explained. "So for the first two years, I lived in California, and they were in Connecticut. They would come out and visit . . . we wouldn't go more than two weeks without seeing each other, but that was really, really hard on me."
Her family then tried moving back to Los Angeles.
She said, "So it was all sort of, like, year by year, sort of: Where should we be? How are we gonna do this as a family? And making decisions about my career, balancing out with our family. And, you know, sometimes I turned down jobs just to stay at home and just so the kids could be at home, or sometimes I would leave for chunks of time, which was heartbreaking and really hard for me."
Melissa Joan Hart Talks Guilt
Ultimately, she said she struggled with feeling guilty not being there.
"It was really difficult. But you know that mom guilt is real," she said, regardless of how much time you're spending with your kids. "That's the thing about my job; I get to be a full-time parent when I'm not working. Right now, I'm in West Virginia. I'm away from them for three weeks, but they know it's [these] three weeks, and then the next three weeks we're all together."
"We're going away together for Thanksgiving," she added. "We'll be together for Christmas, and we're going to ski together. And so we do it in chunks."
Still, she felt a lot of guilt in that regard.
"But mom, guilt, I think, is real; parent guilt is real across the board, I think, no matter what you're doing. But I do try to look at the blessing of the fact that I get to be home, driving them to school [or] be there for their birthdays," she said. "I'm making sure I'm home for Halloween this year. I didn't get to be at homecoming, so there's sacrifices. But then I get to work completely, too. Right now I am totally immersed in this movie I'm doing, and you know I'm getting full time to focus on that. And then I'll go home and have full-time mommy time. "
