Hoda Kotb‘s journey to both first- and second-time motherhood is a touching one.
“It’s a girl! And her name is Hope!” Kotb could be heard saying through audible tears over the phone as her fellowTodaypersonalities wiped their own eyes.
Shetold PEOPLE in 2017that she thought she would never be a mom: “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,” Kotb said. As a result, friends told PEOPLE she never spoke publicly of her desire to have children.
Privately, though, “there was a hole,” Kotb said at the time. “People would say, ‘Oh, do you have kids?’ And I’d feel like, ‘Ouch.’ I knew insideit was supposed to be for me.”
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Kotb worked with a licensed New York adoption agency — to simplify the process, she left Schiffman’s name off, though she said, “Haley will call him Dad” — and within a matter of months,finalized her adoption of Haley.
But when she began the process of applying for a domestic adoption in 2016, “I didn’t know what to expect,” she previously told PEOPLE. “The process can take two weeks, two months, two years, never!”
“I thought if it’s meant to be, if my child is out there, then it will happen, and if it’s not, it’s the way it was meant to be,” Kotb continued. “I decided to go on with life but just believe.”
But things worked more quickly than anticipated. Within a matter of months, “I’m sitting at my desk, doing a Skype interview, and my phone rang and the adoption agent said, ‘She’s here,’ ” Kotb recalled. ” ‘I was like, ‘Who? What?’ ”
When she held Haley for the first time, “It was like a puzzle piece that just snapped in. I felt it,” she added at the time. “It was as if she had been with me forever.”
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Aside from their sharedlove for the city of New Orleans, Kotb has a very special experience in common withSandra Bullock: They have both welcomed their children through adoption.
The two women bonded over their respective journeys during an interview for theTodayshow in June 2018. “You don’t even know who you’ve inspired,” Kotb said to Bullock, 54, who’s mom to daughterLaila, 6½, and sonLouis, 9.
Kotb toldEntertainment Tonightlast month that while she and Schiffmanwere thinking about another child, they weren’t sure about the timing just yet.
“We don’t know when, but it is something that is important to me and to Joel,” she revealed. “We like the idea of Haley [having] a sibling becauseshe has had such interesting circumstancesto grow up. So it would be nice to be able to share it with somebody.”
“I always had this thing inside me like a voice that I couldn’t quiet,” Kotb recalled toET. “It was a voice that [told me I] wanted to be a mom, but I thought it was too late. You can push a voice like that away for a long time but sooner or later it comes back up, and you have to address it.”
She added, “I think the thing we all need to know [is] when your childarrives for you, that child is right on time. So your time may be when you are in your 30s or in your 40s or your 50s, but your child is right on time.”
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Ahead ofMother’s Daylast year, Kotb revealed whether she planned on giving Haley a sibling — and the final answer might have been still be up in the air at that point!
“Well, how should I say this? I guess‘Never say never’ is the right wayto put that!” she told PEOPLE coyly in May 2018, noting that “everything changed” in her life since she became a parent the previous year.
“I know who I am now. I’m Haley’s mom, and I think I always was,” Kotb explained. “But if you would have asked me years ago, ‘What are you?’ I probably would have said journalist, first. But now I know who I am.”
“And I know who we are as a family and I think that means everything to me,” she added. “[Haley] defines who I am and she also defines priorities and things that matter.”
source: people.com
