Hoda Kotb is opening up about her bittersweet reason for leaving the Today morning show — and it was all for her children. In an exclusive interview with People, the 60-year-old broadcast journalist gave more insight into how she settled on her decision. “They call me Houdini because I always leave the party early,” she joked. But overall, she’s at peace with the choice she made. “It’s got its pluses and minuses, but it serves me properly,” she explained. “So it works for me.”
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She wanted a new beginning.
“I’ve kind of been contemplating, wondering, thinking about what I wanted this next chunk of my life to look like as I turned 60,” Hoda explained about her process of pondering her exit. She was with Today for 17 years and with NBC for a total of 25 years. “I like adventure, I like new beginnings. I’m a sunrise person and not a sunset person, and I was wondering, what does it look like for me?”
Her children largely affected her decision.
Although not going fully into detail in order to maintain some privacy, Hoda shared that her youngest daughter, 5-year-old Hope, had a sudden medical crisis in February 2023. Though things have become more stable for Hope over the past six months, the family had to work on long-term medical care plans. The former anchor moved Hope and her eldest daughter, 7-year-old Hailey, out of their apartment in the Upper West Side and to a house in Westchester.
“We’re in a place where Hope is thriving. She is improving, we’re watching her, and I think that as time goes on, we’ll have a better handle on it, but we’re already seeing great differences,” she explained. “We have really excellent care, I have people who are helping us out. I feel like she is finding steady footing.”
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Hoda said it made more sense for her to stay at NBC.
“I’ve had yearnings, and you know when something’s pulling you? It’s like you either go toward it or you shove it down and say, ‘Nope, this is the way. I’m going to stay here because it’s safe,’” Hoda said via People. “It does make more sense to stay at NBC. I’m financially secure and I would have job security. I mean, why would you ever not do that? But I’ve been watching my kids and I was thinking to myself, I wonder what I’m missing?”
As her girls are growing up, she began to feel like she was missing more than she wanted to. “I knew that I wanted this decade to be different. I looked at my time like a pie. I was like, this is how much time I get, and now what am I going to do with it and how am I going to carve it up? And I wanted it to be filled with more of them.”
She wrestled with mom guilt for a while.
“There’s the guilt you carry because you can’t be 100% at work and 100% at home. Something has to give if you want excellence,” Hoda advised. “If you’re going to be excellent at work, something has to give at home. And if you want to be excellent at home, I mean excellent, and do all the things, something has to give at work. It can’t be equal.”
Here's some advice she leaves for the person who will have her job.
Hoda believes the person who will get her former job is in for a treat. “Whoever’s interested in that seat, and it’s maybe the best seat in television, I think the best advice I have is to be 1,000% who you are, because that’s really the key,” she said.
“And the other thing, too, is sometimes to me, part of the magic is to be able to delight in the person sitting next to you,” she added. “It’s such a small thing, but sometimes when you’re with someone, if you just let them shine. Give everyone a second, because who wants to be the person at the cocktail party who’s talking all the time?”
There's a lot that Hoda is looking forward to.
Though leaving Today is bittersweet, Hoda is looking forward to this next chapter of her life. “To have kind of a social life will be new for me,” she said. “I’m not going to be playing beat the clock all the time anymore.”
She’s also looking forward to the time she’ll get with her girls.
“I was like, ‘Guess what? Mommy is going to be able to take you to school now,’” she recalled telling her daughters. “They said, ‘Wednesday?’ I go, ‘No, honey, not Wednesday.’ ‘Well, Thursday?’ I go, ‘No, no, no, honey, it’s going to be like after January.’ ‘After my birthday?’ They were horrified,” she said with a laugh. “At this point it’s so far away. ‘It’s after Halloween?’ I go, ‘Yeah, honey, it’s after Halloween!’ A month might seem like forever to them but it’ll sink in eventually.”
