Successful and a legendary TV host, Oprah Winfrey, is a woman who worked hard for her place in the world. Even though she has no children, she is calling the women who is attending to her academy as her daughters.
Here is the story of Oprah’s troubled past.
As Oprah had struggled a lot in her past, she had overcome everything, every obstacle she faced, and became the person she is today.
Oprah was fourteen, when she became pregnant. She tried to hide her pregnancy, but she gave birth at the seventh month. Her baby was stillborn, and she explained in her show, Life Class, that she saved her baby, as she was feeling detached.
“I saved that baby because I was so disassociated and still do feel such a disassociation. I never felt like it was my baby.”
“I was so ashamed. I hid the pregnancy until my swollen ankles and belly gave me away.”
“Hiding that secret and carrying that shame blocked me in so many ways that I remember being taken to the detention home when my mother was going to put me out of the house at the age of 14,”
Winfrey added, “The experience was the most emotional, confusing, traumatic of my young life.”
She also stated the some of her relatives had sexually abused her from the age of nine to fourteen, which one of them resulted with her pregnancy.
As she was in detention center, surrounded with “bad girls,” she thought that, “now I am officially a bad girl.”
“I’m now for the rest of my life going to be called a ‘bad girl,’ because I’m going to be put in this place.” Winfrey said.
“I don’t even know how this happened to me that I’m in a place for bad girls because I didn’t feel like I was a bad girl.”
With her luck, she was sent back after two weeks, because a woman said to her mother, Vernita Lee, that there were no place left in the center for Winfrey.
Then, Winfrey, her mother and father went on to live together, which she counts this occasion as her savior moment.
“From that moment forward, I felt like I had been somehow saved, that somebody up there recognized that I wasn’t a bad girl.” Oprah said.
“And here I was given another chance, and after I gave birth, at 14 years old to a child who I never even knew how this even happened to me at the time,”
What her father said to Oprah, had saved her as he gave her hope, which Oprah stated, “When that child died, my father said to me, ‘This is your second chance. This is your opportunity to cease this moment and make something of your life,'”
“I took that chance and understood for myself, that now I know better so I can do better.”
Oprah stated that she wanted her secret to be remain hidden, until she was feeling ready to share it with the world.
Oprah’s half-sister, Patricia Lloyd had leaked the story for money, which Oprah described her as, “drug-dependent, deeply disturbed individual.”
Oprah stated, “I carried the secret into my future, always afraid that if anyone discovered what had happened, they, too, would expel me from their lives.”
After her story was known by the public, she had wrote her essay, My First, which she said about, “I took to my bed and cried for three days. I felt devastated. Wounded. Betrayed. How could this person do this to me.”
“I remember (boyfriend) Stedman (Graham) coming into the bedroom that Sunday afternoon, the room darkened from the closed curtains. Standing before me, looking like he, too, had shed tears, he handed me the tabloid and said, ‘I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.'”
She was thinking that anyone would look at her face, and say, “Pregnant at 14, you wicked girl …. expelled!”
But no one did that, and no one ever treated her differently than usual, which she was surprised, as Oprah explained, “I was shocked. Nobody treated me differently. For 20 years, I had been expecting a reaction that never came.”
“I soon realized that having the secret out was liberating … What I learned for sure was that holding the shame was the greatest burden of all.”
In 2019, Winfrey talked about her choice to not having kids, in her interview with PEOPLE. She stated that she thought about having a child while she was with Graham, which she explained, “At one point in Chicago, I had bought an additional apartment because I was thinking, ‘Well, if we get married, I’m going to need room for children.”
As she never became a mother, she stated that she understand what motherhood needs, and the sacrifices it brings, in her career, as she hosted the Oprah Winfrey Show.
“I used to think about this all the time, that I was working these 17-hour days, and so were my producers, and then I go home, and I have my two dogs, and I have Stedman, who’s letting me be who I need to be in the world.”
“I have not had one regret about that,” she explained about her choice to not have any children, as she is feeling that she fulfilled her needs of motherhood with Academy for Girls.
“Those girls fill that maternal fold that I perhaps would have had. They overfill – I’m overflowed with maternal,” Oprah stated.
In 2007, Winfrey had opened The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, in order to create a safe environment for woman in South Africa.
As Winfrey calls her students, as her daughters, the students calls her “Mom O.” The graduating students are being invited for Thanksgiving every year.
In 2022, Oprah invited her graduated students to Thanksgiving, as she does every year. A different guest was added on the list this year, husband of one of the students, Paul. He was welcomed with African songs, as he entered to the house.
Oprah had posted many instances from their Thanksgiving dinner, as they created so much precious memory together.
After the Thanksgiving dinner, Oprah had gave gifts for early Christmas, as she likes to give to the people. The graduation students were shocked, as she was handing the gift boxes over.
For Winfrey, and her daughters, they are one big family, who are occasionally getting together, and talking with each other.
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