Oprah Winfrey has made a conscious decision not to marry her longtime partner, Stedman Graham, or have a child.
Poverty, domestic abuse and a complicated relationship with her mother, Vernita Lee, shaped Winfrey’s childhood and left her with lasting trauma. At 14, Winfrey became pregnant with a baby boy, who died shortly after his premature birth.
The loss, coupled with feeling unloved as a child, impacted Winfrey’s relationships and her view of motherhood.
The media mogul’s strained relationship with her mother was a big factor.
Winfrey also expressed fear about repeating that pain and doubted her career would leave room to give a child the love she lacked.
On September 17, the OWN founder opened up to host Mel Robbins on her podcast about never feeling loved by her mom.
She recalled doing a show with John Bradshaw, a counselor and founder of the inner child movement. He had Winfrey do an exercise that requires you to look into the window of your childhood and explain what you see.
With that exercise, Winfrey realized she lacked love in her childhood.
She told Robbins, “I don’t actually remember feeling loved by my mother or my grandmother growing up. I now know, they loved me in the best way they knew how. But I didn’t feel it.”
That lack of love led Winfrey to do well in school and become a speaker because “that’s where [she] got her validation from.”
“I felt love from my teachers, I felt pleasing teachers – made my teachers like me, I felt a sense of satisfaction and worthiness outside my home, not inside my home,” she stated. “I got it from the world. I got it from strangers.”
The Tennessee State University alumna said her family treated her differently after she rose to fame in the 1980s.
She then recalled a moment with Robbins when she and her mom were driving in Chicago. Winfrey claimed Lee suddenly told her, “‘We didn’t have much but we sure had love.’”
“I almost wrecked the car,” Winfrey said about hearing her mother’s words. “Like, what are you talking about? Who are you talking to?”
The former talk show host even asked her mother to repeat herself because she thought she might have misheard. Once she did, it confused Winfrey, who told Robbins, “I don’t remember one moment ever when my mother ever complimented me or said ‘I’m proud of you.’”
Winfrey said she does recall reading at home and being punished and yelled at by her mom for being in the house reading, instead of playing with the kids.
Still, the executive producer of “The Color Purple” found a way to forgive her mother, who passed away in 2018 at age 83.
“But I made peace with my mother. I made peace long before she died,” she said before reflecting on a lesson she learned from Bishop T.D. Jakes’s 2013 appearance on her Lifeclass session.
Winfrey recalled him saying, “I’m a 10 gallon person, you’re a 10 gallon person. A lot of you are 10 gallon people. Trying to get 10 gallons worth of love from pint size people, who can not carry 10 gallons.”
“What I learned from that is expecting people to offer you or give you the love, the attention that you need who do not have the capacity to do it — you have to recognize they don’t have it. So what do they have,” she said.
Reflecting on her mother’s capacity, she said Lee could cook incredible collard greens and cornbread.
“And that was the way she offered love,” Winfrey said.
“A lot of you have grown up with parents — especially if you are my generation or below my generation — who thought because I provided for you, that was love,” she said
Winfrey said her mother and grandmother spent their lives caring for other people’s children as maids. By the time they came home, she realized, “you had nothing left for me.”
She continued, “I recognize that now, and I forgive that.”
Fans reacted to the episode feeling inspired. One person said, “This is deep and powerful.”
Another fan typed, “This has been very enlightening, two pages of notes. Gratitude.” A third person wrote, “Crazyyy needed to hear this omg.”
Winfrey was born impoverished in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Growing up, she was raised by her grandmother, while her mother traveled to find work, and she faced abuse from her grandmother as well as sexual abuse from male members in her family.
Lee moved her to Nashville to live with her father Vernon Winfrey, but was later brought back to live with her mother. She ran away and got pregnant. Lee sent her back to live with Vernon where she would give birth a few weeks later.
After the child passed away, Winfrey used that moment to turn her life around by making honor roll in school.
While attending East Nashville High School in 1971, Winfrey won Nashville’s Miss Fire Prevention contest, an honor that secured her an after-school job reading news at WVOL radio.
Later, she won the Miss Black Tennessee pageant, earning a full scholarship to Tennessee State University where she would major in speech communications and performing arts.
