Country singer Dolly Parton is known for quite a few things: her legendary singing career, for one. She's also a fierce advocate for childhood literacy, a strong friend of the LGBTQ community, and a stunning actress, and she's famously never had children.
The singer and her husband, Carl Dean, have been asked about why they don't have children over and over throughout her storied career. She's given answers about how she's a great aunt or how she loves children but it just didn't happen for them. Dolly has opened up even more about why she and Carl never had kids.
In an interview with Billboard, she once explained it like this, "Early on, when my husband and I were dating, and then when we got married, we just assumed we would have kids."
More from LittleThings: Baby's Ultrasounds Come Back Normal, But Her Skin Hardens And Cracks Seconds After Birth
"We weren’t doing anything to stop it," she continued. "In fact, we thought maybe we would. We even had names if we did, but it didn’t turn out that way."
There are a few reasons why parenthood just wasn't meant to be for the two.
Dolly Parton and Carl Dean were married on May 30, 1966. Dolly once shared, "I met him the first day I got to Nashville, in 1964. I graduated on a Friday night, went to Nashville on a Saturday morning with dirty clothes and I went to a Laundromat looking for anything but love. I had just left two boyfriends back home."
It turns out that Carl was immediately hooked. As he told Entertainment Tonight, "My first thought was 'I'm gonna marry that girl. My second thought was, 'Lord she's good lookin.'" Dolly was immediately taken with Carl as well and took him to meet her aunt and uncle pretty quickly.
Carl ended up enlisting in the military soon after they met, and the two waited until he returned two years later to get engaged. Dolly's label wasn't into the idea of her getting married, but the singer explained, "I was so in love with Carl I couldn’t see straight." They got married in Georgia, and then Dolly went right back to work the next day.
The two planned to have children, just assuming it would happen. When their lack of preventing pregnancy failed to work out, they began to try to find out why. It turns out that Dolly Parton has endometriosis, which can severely impact fertility. She ended up having a partial hysterectomy in 1984. She admitted that this was an especially dark time in her life.
Dolly and Carl shifted their focus to their large family, especially all of Dolly's nieces and nephews. As the singer has explained, she is one of 11 children, which means there are a lot of kids running around. She once said, "I’ve loved their kids just like they’re my grandkids, and now I’ve got great-grand-kids! Now I’m GeeGee, which is great-granny. I often think, it just wasn’t meant for me to have kids so everybody’s kids can be mine."
Since motherhood hasn't been in the stars for her, Dolly's had a lot of time to consider how her life and career would have been altered if she had become a mom. In 2014, she said, "I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn’t have been a star."
In the same interview, she did reveal one of the baby names the two had picked out. "My husband and I, when we first got married, we thought about if we had kids, what would they look like? Would they be tall — because he’s tall? Or would they be little squats like me? If we’d had a girl, she was gonna be called Carla."
Dolly clearly has a lot of love for kids to give, and in part that love has helped fuel one of her best projects: the Imagination Library. The nonprofit mails free books to toddlers and preschoolers around the United States and also funds reading initiatives.
Dolly and Carl have clearly made peace with the idea that raising their own children was not part of their story together. The two have a long-lasting marriage that appears to be rooted in a firm foundation of love. Dolly once joked that the secret of a long marriage is to "stay gone!" She added, "I travel a lot, but we really enjoy each other when we’re together and the little things we do."
Dolly has also shared that she plans to "drag him kicking and screaming" into another 50 years of marriage. And truly, if anyone can pull off 100 years of marriage, it's probably the world's truest Queen of Country.
