Oprah Winfrey has everything – intelligence, money, power, her own magazine and even a talent for acting. Wait, something seems to be missing – she doesn’t have kids! Why doesn’t she have children? According to People magazine it’s because she doesn’t want any. People will argue her career is more important to her than having a family, but some women simply know what they want and what they don’t want out of life. Actress Octavia Spencer told The Hollywood Reporter that she is living a “content” life without children. Oprah isn’t alone and she boldly told the same magazine, “If I had kids, my kids would hate me. 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.”
Whether or not to have children is a choice that every woman cannot avoid. While in a high school home economics class Oprah’s best friend was already naming her children with the strong desire to be a mother. Not Oprah – she said, “While she (her best friend Gayle) was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King.”
Winfrey is the richest woman on the planet, the first African-American billionaire, and has recently been nominated for a Screen Actor’s Guild award for her work in the highly acclaimed The Butler with Forest Whittaker. It is perhaps her best performance since Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple. She’s hoping to take a break from it all by moving from Chicago to Montecito. In November she had a yard sale and sold $600,000 worth of items including tea pots and sofas for charity. If you’re going to be rich it helps to be kind. She commented, “It was about making space for a new life, which is what I’m getting ready to create for myself in California.”
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