Who could hate Oprah Winfrey? Her hypothetical kids, apparently. In The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Power 100 issue, the 59-year-old TV legend opened up about why she never had children. Winfrey explained that she never had the desire to become a mother like her best friend Gayle King did, and doesn't believe she would have made a very good one.
"Gayle [now a mother of two] was the kind of kid who, in seventh grade Home Ec class, was writing down her name and the names of her children," Winfrey recalled. "While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King." (Winfrey has been dating Stedman Graham since 1986. The two became engaged in 1992, but have yet to wed.)
The Oprah Winfrey Show host has no regrets and is happy with her decision to forgo motherhood. "If I had kids, my kids would hate me," Winfrey said. "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."
Instead, Winfrey views the students of her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls as her children. She opened the school in 2007 and has contributed more than $100 million since then.
Winfrey told THR that one of the first things she does every morning is exchange emails with the OWLAG students. She explained, "I'm responding to everything from 'I'm feeling lost' to 'I need advice about a boy.'"
