Oprah Winfrey has opened up on trauma from her past that still haunts her in the latest episode of her podcast.
The celebrated show host turned 71 recently and was in high spirits after her birthday celebrations.
However, on her self-titled podcast, Oprah made a revelation which brought her to tears as she discussed her broken relationship with her late mother Vernita Lee, who passed on in 2018.
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The renowned show host was joined by American psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry, senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas, and discussed her personal pain after a woman called Annie dialed into the podcast to open up about her family issues.
Oprah recalled struggling to find any positive words to come up with about her mom when she was invited to speak about her at a church.
‘I had been asked to come to church to give all these accolades about my mother and I couldn’t think of one thing,’ she said while choking up.
She then revealed her best positive memory of her mother and said: ‘She didn’t abort me. She did the best that she knew.’
‘The best that she knew was not enough to feed what I needed, was not enough to make me feel whole.’
‘…Was not enough to make me feel valued or seen or important to her. It was not. But it was the best that she could do, and I gave up the hope that it could have been anything other than what she had.’
Since Oprah opened up about the pain these memories from her past bring, she’s received loads of support from fans and friends who were touched by her vulnerability.
‘Decades passed. Billions earned. And this still brought her to tears. Parents need to understand and appreciate that what they do and say stays with children FOREVER’, one user commented.
Actress Holly Robinson Peete also weighed in on Oprah’s vulnerability and story on her mom, saying: ‘Wow… this is why we love Oprah. Because she shares and articulates things so well and so intentionally that so many could never express themselves properly.’
Oprah appreciated the final moments she spent with her mother in the last months of 2018 in Vernita at her home in Milwaukee on Thanksgiving Day.
She told People magazine that she struggled to find the right words at first while saying goodbye.
‘In hospice care they have a little book about the little conversations,’ she said. ‘I thought, “Isn’t this strange? I am Oprah Winfrey, and I’m reading a hospice care book on what to say at the end.”‘
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‘She’s sitting in this little room — she loves sitting in this room where it’s 80 degrees. She just watches TV all day,’ she stated.
Oprah continued: ‘What I said was, “Thank you. Thank you, because I know it’s been hard for you. It was hard for you as a young girl having a baby, in Mississippi. No education. No training. No skills. Seventeen, you get pregnant with this baby. Lots of people would have told you to give that baby away. Lots of people would’ve told you to abort that baby. You didn’t do that. I know that was hard. I want you to know that no matter what, I know that you always did the best you knew how to do. And look how it turned out.”‘
Oprah was reportedly left to be raised by Hattie Mae Lee in Mississippi after Vernita gave birth to her in 1954 while she worked away from home in Milwaukee as a housemaid.
The legendary show host was six when she began to live with her mother after her grandmother was struck by an illness.
While she lived with her mother in Milwaukee, she became a victim of abuse and rape by family friends who have not been publicly identified.
Decades later, Oprah went on to establish herself as one of the best talk show hosts in the world and has cemented her status as a legend of the art.
Her mother’s memory has many downsides, but as of today, Oprah, like any other human, would have hoped for a better relationship with the woman who brought her into this world.
