Hoda Kotb has recalled the “ouch” moment she was mailed a handwritten letter criticising her for becoming an older mother.
The 58-year-old talk show host spoke about the mom-shaming comments during Wednesday’s episode of Today with Hoda & Jenna. As she discussed Ariana Grande’s recent candid video with co-host Jenna Bush Hager, Kotb revealed that she’s also received unsolicited criticism about being a mother of two.
“I’ll never forget this. I got a letter that was addressed to me in somebody’s handwriting to my house,” she told Hager. “I opened the letter and it was something along the lines of, ‘How dare you bring a child into this world at your age. Don’t you know what you’re doing to that child?’”
Hoda Kotb – who adopted daughters Haley, six, and Hope, three – admitted that the letter made her question becoming a mother in her 50s. “It took my breath away because that actually was my ‘ouch’. I was scared,” she said. “Is this something that is smart for me to do? Am I helping, or am I ultimately going to be harming?”
However, the Emmy-winning journalist remembered “feeling terrible” while reading the letter, and realised that someone had “went to all that trouble” to mail the mom-shaming letter to her.
“When I read it, I thought, ‘Someone took a pen and sat at a table and put it, wrote that down, and got a stamp and mailed it,’ went to all that trouble to say that to me,” she continued. “This took care and time and research.”
The Today host ultimately overcame the negative comment when she thought about the impact her own parents have had on her life. “And so when I was feeling terrible, because I was, my dad passed when I was in college. And I remember thinking, we have our parents for a period of time. I know the foundation he left. I know it was worth every second of that time,” she said.
She added that negative comments from critics “can hit you in the place where you’re most vulnerable.”
At age 52, Hoda Kotb adopted daughters Haley Joy and Hope Catherine in February 2017 and April 2019, respectively. In March, the TV personality raised eyebrows when Today viewers noticed she was absent from the morning talk show for more than one week. While her co-anchors initially told fans that she was missing due to a family health matter, Kotb herself later revealed that her three-year-old daughter Hope was in the hospital.
On 6 March, Kotb revealed during her return to the show that her youngest daughter Hope had been in the ICU, but that the three year old was now home. “My youngest, Hope, was in the ICU for a few days and in the hospital for a little more than a week,” she told co-host Savannah Guthrie at the beginning of the broadcast. “I’m so grateful she’s home. She is back home. I was waiting for that day to come. And we are watching her closely. I’m just so happy.”
The news anchor also expressed her gratitude for those who helped her daughter and provided support for her family during the health scare. “You know what I realised too, Savannah? It’s like, when your child is ill, the amount of gratitude you can have for people who helped you out,” she said. “So I’m grateful for the doctors at Weill Cornell, who were amazing and the nurses. And I’m grateful for my family and I’m grateful to friends like you who were there every single day. So I want to say thank you for that. I love you.”
