Dolly Parton and her husband Carl Dean have been married for 57 years, together since they met on Parton’s first day in Nashville, but their family has stayed an intimate group of two with the occasional dog over the years. Despite the stigma of being a married woman with no children, Parton recently shared that she likes it that way.
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“I haven’t missed it like I thought I might,” she recently told Saga Exceptional Magazine. “When you’re a young couple, you think you’re going to have kids, but it just wasn’t one of those burning things for me. I had my career and my music and I was travelling.”
Parton was on the cusp of her breakout hits when she got married to Dean in 1966 in a simple ceremony. Her record company at the time didn’t like the idea of her getting married, but she and Dean did it anyway. Marriage never slowed her down, and more than anything, it provided her with a homebase support system throughout her career.
“If I’d had kids, I’d have stayed home with them, I’m sure, and worried myself to death about them,” Parton continued. “With everything that’s going on, I’d hate to be bringing a child into this world right now.”
Dolly Parton Talks About Not Having Children in Her 57-Year Marriage
However, just because Parton never had kids of her own doesn’t mean her life is empty. She adores her goddaughter, Miley Cyrus, and they often sing duets together such as the rendition of Cyrus’ song “Wrecking Ball” on Parton’s new album Rockstar.
Parton also feels strongly about all the children who participate in her Imagination Library program, which has given more than 220 million books to children all over the world with the mission to promote literacy. “I always say God didn’t let me have children so that all kids could be mine,” said Parton.
Additionally, she and Dean had a dog together in the 1980s, a Boston terrier named Popeye. Speaking of a dark time in her 30s, where “I was going through the change of life and I had some female health issues too [a partial hysterectomy],” Parton explained in her 2017 book Dolly On Dolly that Popeye saved her from taking her own life. In a moment of desperation, Parton reached for the gun she kept in her bedside drawer for protection, but in that moment Popeye came trotting into the room. According to Parton, the moment passed when she looked at her dog, and she prayed instead.
“That was a very hard time,” said Parton. “Thank God I came out of that. I think it was something God meant for me to go through, so I’d have a better understanding of other people’s darker days.”
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