NEED TO KNOW
Hoda Kotb is sharing how she’s approached explaining to her daughters that they’re adopted
The former Today host said she initially went one direction until her daughters were older
Kotb adopted her daughters Hope and Haley with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman
Hoda Kotb is sharing how she approached a delicate subject with her two daughters.
The former Today co-host, 61, appeared on a Tuesday, Sept. 23 episode of Today with Jenna & Friends and spoke with host Jenna Bush Hager and her guest co-host Sheinelle Jones about her two daughters.
Kotb, who welcomed her daughters Haley, 8, and Hope, 6, through adoption with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman, shared that as her girls have gotten older, she’s had to figure out how to tell them they are adopted.
“I think for my kids, they were asking me…I was telling them about adoption, and I thought, ‘How do you tell that story to your kids?’ ” said Kotb. “And I said at first, ‘You weren’t born in my tummy, you were born in my heart,’ and they were like, ‘Oh, okay.'”
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But the mom of two said when her daughters got older, she had to explain how babies are born and ended up telling them they came from another person’s tummy.
“She’s like your birth mother angel, and she’s there,” Kotb recalled telling her kids. “God gave her the job to carry you so that she could give you to me. That was her job. And then they said, ‘Our birth mother angel.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Is she alive?’ ‘Yeah, somewhere out there, we don’t know who that is yet.”
On a Sept. 23 episode of the Open Book with Jenna podcast, Kotb spoke with Bush Hager about being an older mom to her two daughters.
“I’ve often thought about being an older mom,” Kotb began. “And it was funny. I was just reading something and, you know, a lot of moms start at 20, 25, 30, even 35, when you don’t know anything about who you are. You’re imparting your parents’ values on your kids. You’re just doing what we all do.”
Kotb admitted that she “kind of gets an ouch” whenever someone refers to her as an older mom. However, the doting mom said that she’s accepted it and found relief in the fact that she comes into parenting with “wisdom.”
“Sometimes when people would say, ‘Oh, you’re an older mom,’ I kind of get an ouch, even though it’s true,” she shared. “Sixty-one with a third grader and a first grader. Anyway, I am kind of sitting in the fact that I come with wisdom now.”
The mom of two added that she believes her daughters are “getting more from me” than they would if she were younger, adding that her life experiences has helped her parent her children.
“And although I still lose it often, I think I lose it less than I would’ve in my 30s,” she said. “But I do feel like they’re getting more from me that you wouldn’t normally get from a parent who was in their 30s who hasn’t lived a life to know.”
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