Hoda Kotb is feeling nostalgic ahead of her family’s upcoming move to a different New York City residence.
“I literally was sitting at my desk this morning, where I sit every single morning. I light a candle, I have my journal, I do my stuff. And I thought to myself, ‘This is the last Monday I’ll be sitting at this desk,’ ‘cause we’re moving this week,” Kotb, 59, shared on the Monday, June 3, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna.
Her cohost, Jenna Bush Hager, noted that moving can be “hard,” especially leaving a place “where you brought your babies home to.” Kotb agreed, adding that she thought of her daughters’ early days during her quiet morning moment. (The TV personality shares kids Haley, 7, and Hope 5, with her ex-fiancé, Joel Schiffman.)
“I remember them trying to crawl up the stairs and I remember, now, how they race up and down,” she stated. “And I was thinking about the very first time we brought them home and carried them up those stairs in that car seat and placed them in a little thing and all the things that happened there. And I was looking through old videos of them, when they were so little, and it’s like you want to hold onto things and you want to let go. And when I saw these videos of them when they were kids, little babies, I can’t believe I have a 7 and a 5-year-old. And I can’t believe all those memories. … There were so many things that we have built there.”
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The emotional weight of moving from one home to another is something Bush Hager, 42, could relate to, having moved with her husband, Henry Hager, and their three kids — Mila, 11, Poppy, 8, and Hal, 4 — two years ago.
“There was one night we sat on our couch in the empty apartment, all of us, the family and we sat there and it was just this moment. … But I was just weeping because I got the same thing [as you],” she explained to Kotb. “We brought our babies home to this place. Henry and I weathered, you know, beautiful things and hard things. I lost my grandparents in that apartment, and my girls drew stick figures and made me feel better. What it does is it distinctly marks time. You don’t normally get to think, ‘Oh, my gosh. Here we are. Here I’m going.’”
As she prepares for her move, Kotb said her goal is to not “race through it,” adding, “Don’t race through transitions. Don’t race through endings and say, ‘Let’s just wish it away.’ Like, to sit and take a minute and look around like you guys did on that couch.”
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Kotb revealed that she and her daughters were moving “somewhere to a new school” during a March episode of her “Making Space” podcast, later clarifying on Hoda & Jenna that they were not leaving NYC.
“It’s interesting because think about how many times you’ve moved in your life,” she told Bush Hager on March 28. “Every time I moved in my life, and you moved in yours, it was like, all of a sudden, it was a huge adjustment. But the stories I tell about growing in my life come from those.”
