Hoda Kotb’s Quiet, Joyful Path to Motherhood and a New Chapter
Maya Rivers here, scribbling in the margins of morning light, because some stories demand a soft, sultry sigh even if they arrive on a bus of plain facts.
A wannabe poet waxing lyrical about the article, even if it doesn’t quite deserve it.
Hoda Kotb signed off from the Today show in January 2025 after nearly two decades on air, but the most luminous audience she ever had waited for her at home: daughters Haley, born on Valentine’s Day and now eight, and Hope, born in April 2019 and six. The veteran journalist’s public career may have dominated morning television, yet her private life—scarred, tender, triumphant—reads like a small, insistently bright hymn to gratitude and choice.
Kotb’s mornings were a procession of strict rhythms: a 3:15 a.m. alarm, a brisk workout, a green juice, shower, and the makeup-and-hair carousel on the Today set before taking her seat alongside Savannah Guthrie from 2017 until her final broadcast. But she always carved out time for a ritual that sustained more than vanity: a gratitude journal kept on her table. As she told Inside Chic in 2016, every morning she writes three things she’s grateful for and one great thing from the last 24 hours, no matter how small—a smile from a stranger, an old man urging her to keep running—because the practice trains her to hunt for goodness.
Joy, of course, has a human face for Kotb. During a 2018 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show she said she would choose a rough day with daughter Haley over any of her prior favorite days, because becoming a mother “changed everything.” The arrival of Hope in 2019 was revealed live to colleagues, an intimate office surprise shared with Savannah Guthrie and Jenna Bush Hager, and greeted with pure delight: “Man, I’m so happy she’s here.”
Her decision to step away from the Today desk and launch Joy 101, a wellness brand where she serves as founder and CEO, is not the kind of corporate pivot shouted from a podium. It’s practical and tender, motivated by something profound: her daughters and their needs. Kotb told E! News that she wanted more time with them, especially after Hope’s Type 1 diabetes diagnosis in 2023. “You only got one life, right? You’re the chooser,” she said, folding career and family into a single, intentionally chosen story.
There is shadow woven into Kotb’s luminous narrative. A 2007 breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment left her grateful but physically unable to carry children; the pills that saved her life also stole a different future, a fact she described as “hard to choke down.” Still, the journalist who arrived at NBC News in 1998 after years as a local correspondent in Illinois, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana absorbed that loss with grace, even imagining earlier a life working with children in a different capacity because motherhood seemed out of reach.
That quiet admission—of pain, of longing, and ultimately of renewal—gives the arc of Kotb’s motherhood a classical tilt. She did not simply happen upon joy; she chased it with intention, gratitude rituals, and the kind of career choices that allowed her to show up for the small, fierce people who changed everything for her. Her story is both public record and private covenant: a celebrated TV anchor who chose to prioritize family after cancer, thwarted fertility, and a lifetime of early mornings.
Even as she steps into a second act with Joy 101 and more flexible days with Haley and Hope, Kotb’s life remains scripted by the same themes she’s long shared with viewers—optimism, gratitude, and fierce maternal love. It is a reminder that reinvention need not be loud; sometimes it is the quiet recalibration toward what matters most.
And so, the curtain falls on one chapter of sunrise broadcasts and opens on another of bedtime stories, glucose meters, and gratitude lists—small rituals that hold the world in place.
Parting line: keep your pen handy; you never know which ordinary morning will become your finest verse.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and E! News, Inside Chic, The Ellen DeGeneres Show
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
