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Dolly Parton very much wanted to have children.
During the early years of her marriage to Carl Dean, The two imagined having a family with children and even thought that if they had a baby girl, they would name her Carla.
So the story of Dolly not having children is not simply that she never wanted to become a mother.
It was once a possibility that she and Carl genuinely considered, but life ultimately took them in an entirely different direction.
One important health related factor was Dolly’s endometriosis, a painful condition that can affect fertility.
Dolly experienced serious health problems related to the condition and ultimately underwent a partial hysterctomy at the age of 36, leaving her unable to become pregnant afterward.
That event closed the possibility of Dolly having a biological child of her own.
But what made the story even more heartbreaking was that Dolly later shared that she had carried a sense of what if for a long time, She sometimes wondered whether her life might have taken a different path if she had had children.
Given Dolly’s personality, she believed she would have devoted a tremendous amount of time and love to her child, perhaps even feeling guilty about leaving that child at home while she went on tour.
So for Dolly, a career and motherhood were not simply two separate choices.
She understood that that if she had children, she might not have been able to live the life of an artist in the way she ultimately did.
Later, Dolly gradually came to see things from a different perspective.
She once said that perhaps God didn’t mean for me to have children so that everybody’s children could be mine.
Instead of focusing on what she did not have, Dolly poured her love into her nieces and nephews, the younger members of her family and especially the children.