Talk show titan, media mogul, actress, author, philanthropist — Oprah Winfrey has excelled at every role she’s tackled. But there’s one job she’s certain she was never cut out for: motherhood.
At 63, Winfrey said she has no regrets about her choice not to have kids of her own.
“I didn’t want babies,” she said in an interview with Good Housekeeping UK. “I wouldn’t have been a good mom for babies. I don’t have the patience. I have the patience for puppies, but that’s a quick stage!”
While she’s convinced she wasn’t meant to be a mother to babies, she’s happily taken on a mom-like mentor role — many times over — to girls from her Leadership Academy in South Africa.
“I have 172 girls, and 20 are in college in the United States and use my home as their home base,” she explained. “It is more rewarding than I would ever have imagined. I was doing this to help them, but it has brought a light to my life that I can’t explain.”
Winfrey finds these bonds far more fulfilling than a traditional parental relationship would have been.
“When people were pressuring me to get married and have children, I knew I was not going to be a person that ever regretted not having them, because I feel like I am a mother to the world’s children,” she said.
“Love knows no boundaries. It doesn’t matter if a child came from your womb or if you found that person at age 2, 10 or 20. If the love is real, the caring is pure and it comes from a good space, it works.”
And while her Leadership Academy family is one she never imagined having, it’s a good fit with what she did imagine — simply making the world a better place.
In 2013, Winfrey told The Hollywood Reporter, “(My best friend Gayle King) was the kind of kid who, in seventh grade home ec class, was writing down her name and the names of her children. While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King.”
