“Sometimes I think to myself, if someone would have told me when I was a kid or a teenager, ‘Hey, when you’re 57, that’s when the magic is going to happen,’ I probably would have said, ‘Oh my God, what a horrible life that will be.' But what I realize is, blessings come right on time,” TODAY co-anchor Hoda Kotb says.
Kotb’s new podcast, Making Space, focuses on the beauty of human resilience. It’s fitting since she’s somewhat of an expert on the subject. Over the past 35 years of her broadcasting career, the Oklahoma-born journalist, who got her start working as a CBS news assistant in Cairo—where her parents are from—has covered the tsunami in Southeast Asia, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in her beloved former hometown of New Orleans, and conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. She’s also a breast cancer survivor—a diagnosis she received in 2007 when she happened to be going through a divorce.
But today, Kotb has two daughters, Hope Catherine, 2, and Haley Joy, 4, whom she adopted with her fiancé, Joel Schiffman. Her children bring her so much happiness “it takes up almost all of the bandwidth” in her heart, she says. Kotb and Schiffman met at a book signing in 2013. And now, the family they share “makes her feel alive.”
“They light me up. I think, 'How did I get these two blessings? I mean, my gosh, who would have thought?' And I feel so grateful I can’t even contain it sometimes. Even right in this moment, saying it to you out loud,” she tells me through tears.
“I look around and think of all the windows in my life, and the most joyful one is this one. I’m in this state of joy, because joy comes from inside. Happiness is...I’m going to a concert, or I’m going to a friend’s house to drink. That’s happy and great, but joy is when you feel it—when you’re just sitting, and I’m having that,” she says.
She adds: “Your life is filled with exclamation points, highs and lows. So, you have a day where it’s graduation, a baby’s born, a marriage, you lose someone…a divorce. These are all exclamation points. But most of life is just Wednesday. Just a regular day, and I think if you can find joy on the Wednesdays when you don’t have something special happening, or some great event, that’s the best.”
On the Wednesday we speak, around noon, Kotb had just wrapped filming the fourth hour of the TODAY show alongside Jenna Bush Hager. She’s Zooming from her office at NBC, which looks quite pristine, despite the fact that all of her fans know she’s prone to clutter. (Bush Hager has given her gentle on-air ribbings over her relatable propensity to hoard coffee mugs.) She’d been awake since 3 a.m., but you’d never know it, since she appears so locked in. To quote every romantic comedy cliché, the magic of Kotb is that she makes you feel like you’re the only girl in the room. Or, err, Zoom.
Of course, since she's been co-anchoring TODAY's early bird shift since 2018, (when she replaced Matt Lauer, she and Savannah Guthrie became the first women pair to lead the morning news program), she's fine-tuned a precise routine to acclimate her to the hours.
When it’s time for her to start winding down at night, around 7 p.m., she and Schiffman will talk for a bit before she retires with “something uplifting.”
“I try not to scroll Twitter at the end of the day to see what’s trending, in case there’s a news item for tomorrow. I try to stay away from anything negative. There’s only so much a human can ingest before you feel that despair, so I always keep a quote book next to my bed.” Now, she has Love Poems from God at her side—which, like Oprah, is one of her favorite gifts to give friends.
“I’ll read a quote, and it just sits with you,” Kotb, who authored her own quote book I Really Needed This Today in 2019, says. “I think the most important parts of the day are how you start it and how you end it, so I try to end it gently.”
She follows that up with a deep belly breathing exercise—and sometimes, a prayer. “I think in my head, God, what a day today was. It’s so easy to cherry pick the crummy things, and we all do. When you think about your childhood you say, 'Oh, well, remember when this one died, and that happened, but what happened between those things?' I try to remember those moments.” And on evenings when her fiancé is traveling, she indulges in the occasional bed Tostito. “There’s no better snack than the secret one,” she jokes. “If he saw what I did when he left town, he’d be like, 'Is that what you would do when no one’s looking?' I call it a feed bag. I just strap it on.”
The rare "late night" nibble aside, Kotb’s morning ritual is similarly cerebral.
“My alarm goes off at 3, and I go downstairs at 3:15 or 3:30, and this is exactly what I do: I light a candle. I write a note to my kids with Post-its—it’s like a whole situation, and now they want a map to find the notes. Today, I hid one in the fridge and wrote, ‘Brrr. I’m cold, so glad you found me. Happy Tuesday!’ Then I do seven minutes of breathing, and it sounds so wacky, but I listen to a book that has a whole bunch of prayers, and then I write in my journal—not stuff that’s a litany of what happened the day before, but something that’s bigger to me, like witnessing an act of service that blows your mind.”
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Kotb then goes on to “scribble about whatever happens to be bubbling up,” and by 4:15, she starts “doing her homework for work.” She says: “I realize how important it is to have a routine, because when you scramble out of bed late… and we’ve all done it, and you're brushing your teeth and running out the door, your day is all out of wack...man, and you can’t get it straight. I try to front-load my day, because the most important part is early, and afterwards, who cares? You can mess the world up.”
Of course she doesn’t mean that. Particularly because her girls are her world and she delights in talking about their routines, which include what she calls FDPs, or Funky Dance Parties. Hope is partial to Paul Anka’s “Good Morning Yesterday,” and the entire household adores Alicia Keys.
When asked if she’d let her children follow in her path and grow up to someday report from, say, Burma, Kotb says, “I don’t know what they’ll do. They’re both super creative and they’re both super funny, and they’ve got such free spirits. I’m going to marvel at what they choose to do, whatever it is. And I literally can’t wait. Hope loves to sing so much, she’ll sing in her crib for an hour with Haley there going, ‘Please mom make it stop.’” And Haley, who Kotb laughs is newly “caught up on the word nipple,” is also “the little ambassador at her school, going ‘Come on, kids, come on,’ like she’s in charge. They both definitely have such distinctive traits that I’m in awe of.”
Kotb says she is considering adopting another child. “They’re amazing kids, and it happened to coincide with a season in my life at work where everything seems to be working. It wasn’t always that way, but in this weird moment, it is. Sometimes you ride a wave, and sometimes you swim upstream, and in this window and season in my life, I get to ride the wave, and I’m going to ride it. And when it turns and I have to swim upstream, trust me, I’ll swim upstream. I’ve spent most of my life doing it."
After Kotb underwent her mastectomy at 43, she later wrote in her book How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee, that her mantra was “This can’t hurt me.”
Now? She says it’s “right on time.”
"Right on time is kind of describing everything that’s happening right now. We’re all jonesing for things, and we want things faster, and we want things now, whether it’s the promotion or the job, or the guy...'Why can’t I meet him, where is he, I wanna have a kid, why not yet, why not now...' It took me this long to realize that everything really does happen right on time. It’s the way of the world, and I’m living proof in a weird way. If you had asked me this 10 years ago, I would have been like, 'Gosh, sometimes life just doesn’t work out the way you want. But wait a minute, and maybe it will."
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Brie Schwartz
Brie Schwartz is an editor, writer, and content strategist. She’s covered beauty, fashion, relationships, health, travel, Disney, decorating, DIYs, food, booze, and everything in between. She was most recently the deputy editor of Oprah Daily, where she helped bring the mission of guiding readers to live their best life to the (virtual) pages. Her writing has appeared in Good Housekeeping, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Delish, Country Living, Esquire, Elle, Marie Claire, Seventeen, The Spruce, Woman’s Day, Women’s Health, and Men’s Health.
