Kelly Clarkson is the happiest she’s ever been, but she admits to struggling with fame at the start of her career.
“The fact that I’ve managed to find a husband who understands and respects everything I do is astonishing,” she told Good Housekeeping for the magazine’s December issue. “The fact that I have these four beautiful kids. … I just lucked out. I’m waiting for the floor to drop out from under me.”
The pop star, 34, is mom of River Rose, 2, and Remington, 7 months, with her husband, Brandon Blackstock, and stepmom of Savannah, 15, and Seth, 10, from the music manager’s previous marriage.
She wasn’t always this content, though. When Clarkson won American Idol in 2002 and shot to superstardom, her whole life changed. “I was in a very dark place for a long time,” she told the magazine. "It’s just so hard to have normalcy. I love to sing, and I love to talk to people at meet-and-greets. It’s just all the crap that comes along with this job. … I don’t love traveling, because I’m never home. It’s hard when you have a family.”
The “Piece by Piece” singer said that she thinks “all the time” about giving up her career for her family. “I have constant guilt. I don’t have to work; I think it’s because I have that option that I feel the guilt,” she said. “It’s important for my girls, especially, to see me as a woman accomplishing all these things while nailing it as a mom. I always come back to that.”
Becoming a mother has made her feel even more self-assured. “I sound like a tool, but becoming a mother has made me next-level confident,” she said. "I’ve never felt more empowered.”
However, she’s 100 percent certain that she won’t be having any more children. “I’m not going to be pregnant anymore — we scientifically made that impossible for both of us, because I have the world’s worst pregnancies,” she revealed. "I basically told my Ob-Gyn, ‘If you don’t handle this and I get pregnant, I’m going to find you!’"
Although she has a lot on her plate with a successful career and four kids, Clarkson makes sure to set aside alone time with her hubby every night. “We’ll get the kids to bed and go out by the lake with a glass of wine, and the next thing we know, it’s 2 a.m. We’re tired in the morning, but we need that time to stay connected,” she said. "He married at 21 the first time and knows mistakes to look out for.”
