Praise Oprah Winfrey for reminding us of something really important that society doesn’t seem to understand. Women are under no obligation to have children, and it’s OK if they decide not to.
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Winfrey herself just opened up about the reason she never had any kids of her own, and it’s remarkably simple: She didn’t want to.
“I wouldn’t have been a good mom for babies,” she said in the interview, which will appear in Good Housekeeping U.K.‘s April issue. “I don’t have the patience. I have the patience for puppies, but that’s a quick stage!”
Instead, Winfrey has found satisfaction in her work, which — and this is a crazy concept for some people, I know, but bear with her here — she decided to prioritize above reproducing simply because she’s biologically able to.
“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.”
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This isn’t the first time Winfrey has been open about her conscious decision not to have kids. In a 2013 interview, she acknowledged that her job was more important to her, which is obviously completely her call and an OK choice to make.
“If I had kids, my kids would hate me,” she said at the time. “They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
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