Hoda Kotb on Being a New Mom After Cancer Left Her Unable to Bear Children
In a new interview with People magazine, Today’s Hoda Kotb opened up about the journey she went through adopting her beautiful baby girl after cancer left her unable to bear a child.
It hasn’t even been two weeks since Hoda adopted baby Haley Joy, and our hearts are still partially melted. Meanwhile, at the Kotb house, it’s all about bottles, diapers and lots of rock-a-by-babying: “We just stayed in the apartment and ate and slept and burped and took naps, and that’s it. That’s all. But it’s fun!” Hoda said. “It’s one of those things where you think you’ve done it all, you think you’ve felt it all. But I just didn’t know that this kind of love existed.”
At 52, Hoda had given up her dreams of having a child, especially after her battle with breast cancer nearly a decade ago. The treatment left her unable to conceive, and to make matters worse, her marriage with tennis coach Burzis Kanga ended less than a year after her recovery.
“One of the things in my life I’ve always wanted was to be a mom,” Hoda told People. “Sometimes in your life, things just don’t work out for whatever reason, so you say, ‘Well, I wasn’t meant to have that.’ But it was really hard to come to terms with it.”
She explains that even though her life looked fabulous, as if she had it all, privately there was something missing. “People would say, ‘Oh, do you have kids?’ And I’d feel like, ‘Ouch.’ I knew inside it was supposed to be for me. One of the reasons was because I couldn’t have children,” she explained. “Finally I said to myself one day, ‘Why can’t I? Why not me?’ I had this ache in me that I couldn’t push away anymore.”
Last year, she made arrangements to move in with her boyfriend Joel Shiffman. “I was afraid to even say it out loud, because then it felt so real,” Kotb said. “I said, ‘Think about it for a day or a week or whatever.’ And he said, ‘I don’t need a day. Let’s get this journey going.’ At that point I blubbered like a baby. It was like the dam burst.”
The beloved host worked with a licensed New York adoption agency, reports People. She left Joel’s name off the process, even though, she said, Haley will still call him Dad.
“I wake up sometimes and go, ‘Oh my God, I have a baby!’ ” she said. “But it feels totally real. I guess if you’ve been waiting this long for something, and you wish for it, pray for it, hope for it, wonder if it will ever be, and then it happens, nothing’s more real. Nothing.”
Read the full interview in the latest issue of People.