How motherhood changed my ambitions.

In short: a lot. It happens. Actress Katherine Heigl has announced she’s quit Grey’s Anatomy after adopting her daughter Naleigh, in large part because she wants to spend more time with her family.

People magazine reports…..

In the end, Heigl decided to leave the hit ABC show because of her family — and not necessarily to advance her film career. “I started a family and it changed everything for me,” she says. “It changed my desire to work full-time.”

In Sept. 2009, Heigl and husband Josh Kelley adopted their daughter Naleigh from South Korea. She also took a three-month leave from Grey’s Anatomy to spend time with her family, an experience that made her want to focus on motherhood, she recently told PEOPLE.

“I think I’m just gonna try and keep it a little more mellow,” she told PEOPLE, “and be a little bit more of a mom, since that’s a big part of my life now. I took those three months off and I realized how very, very important is my family is to me and I want to be more available to them.”

I remember when I was a brand new editor and had to tell my boss I was pregnant. She said “It will make you a better editor” and I nodded as if I understood what the hell she was talking about when I totally didn’t.

And then I had Luca and I totally did understand.

My ambitions definitely changed after I had kids. Each time I had a baby I lost my ambition for around a year. It began to trickle back about the time I stopped breastfeeding each child, give or take. When it did come back, it was irrevocably changed because I was no longer the centre of the universe.

I have turned down many jobs that would have had too great an impact on my family – because they involved longer or less flexible working hours or relocating overseas. At no time did it ever feel like a sacrifice.

And a major motivating factor in leaving corporate life for me was my desire to have a different kind of working life, one that would allow me more time with my kids (Katherine Heigal and I are soooo alike, I always knew it).

If you have kids, how did having them change what you thought you wanted?

Whether it was your job or your ambitions, how did becoming a parent make you re-think what you wanted to do? And then, what did you do about it?