Dolly Parton: The Woman Who Mothered Without Bearing

Today, the Ohio Department of Children and Youth posted a tribute to Dolly Parton.

My son has received many books through her Imagination Library, the very programme the post was honouring.

That is what stopped me.

In this column, I write about how I do life with my son. This week, that story has to begin with some of the first books he ever fell in love with, the ones that came in the mail, free, month after month, from a woman he will likely never know helped shape his early love of reading.

That programme started in one county in Tennessee in 1995. It has since grown across the United States and expanded to Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Republic of Ireland.

Dolly Parton died yesterday, August 25, 2026, in Nashville.

She was 80.

She never bore a child.

She and her husband, Carl Dean, married in 1966 and remained together until his death in March 2025.

Dolly spoke openly about the fact that they had once assumed they would have children. They even had names picked out.

It simply did not turn out that way.

But years later, she spoke about what that absence made possible:

“Since I had no kids, and my husband was pretty independent, I had freedom. So I think a big part of my whole success is the fact that I was free to work.”

And she came to understand that freedom through faith:

“I didn’t have children because I believed that God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine.”

What a way to make meaning out of what life did not give you.

And, in a remarkable sense, everybody’s children did become hers.

Millions of them.

Children she would never meet.

Children like my son.

As a family-strengthening practitioner, what draws me even more is the marriage itself.

Quiet.

Unbothered by fame.

Carl largely avoided the spotlight. She let him be who he was. He let her become who she became.

They found a way to do life together for nearly six decades without requiring the public to understand it.

I share this next part not to boast, but as a testimony.

My wife and I were married for fifteen years before we had our first child.

About five years before our son was born, my wife said something I have never forgotten.

She said that her greatest testimony was not going to be the child.

It was the peace she already carried within herself.

No pressure.

No running from pillar to post looking for alternatives.

Just peace.

Five years later, our son came.

That is why Dolly’s story speaks so deeply to me.

Peace did not begin when the child arrived.

It had already taken root long before then.

That is the part of Dolly’s story I want us to sit with, particularly in Africa.

In many of our families, children are treated as proof that a marriage has succeeded, the confirmation that it is secure.

A woman without a child is too often made to feel incomplete, sometimes even less than human.

Men, under that same pressure, sometimes go looking for children elsewhere, quietly, and the marriage absorbs damage it may never recover from.

Dolly Parton’s life, and in a smaller way, my own experience, challenges that premise.

A marriage can be whole, stable and deeply loving without a child as its anchor.

Children are precious.

But a child should not have to carry the burden of holding a marriage together.

And whether children come, whenever they come, or even if they never come, peace is possible.

There is a saying often attributed to Benjamin Franklin:

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

Dolly Parton did both.

And somewhere in our home are books that came through a vision she carried for children she would never meet.

One of those children is my son.

Rest well, Dolly.

The books you sent him will keep speaking long after you are gone.

#DollyParton #ImaginationLibrary #DollysLibrary #Children #Family

Follower of Christ. Husband. Father. Egalitarian. Goodwill Investor. Attorney. Author. Thriver. Culture-Edge Family Strengthening and Child Safeguarding Pioneer, Innovator and Practitioner. Value-Based Parenting Ideologue. Change Agent. Rebel with a Cause. Three Decades in the Saddle.