Will Hoda Kotb replace Kelly Clarkson as a talk-show host, giving rise to “Hoda in the Afternoon”? The retired morning-show anchor quickly shut down that rumor Wednesday when she popped back up on “Today” for the first time since her January departure from the show.
“Do y’all think — I want to ask y’all a real question — do you think, if I ever came back to TV, do you know where the only place I would ever come back to is?” Kotb asked her former colleagues after replacement co-host Craig Melvin inquired about that rumor. “Right here. This is the spot.”
“Delete, not true,” she said of the Clarkson rumor.
Something that is true? Kotb revealed that she left “Today” in part to take care of 6-year-old daughter Hope, who was diagnosed about two years ago with Type 1 diabetes. Previously known as juvenile diabetes because it’s most often diagnosed in childhood, the autoimmune disorder can occur in adults as well.
Hope’s health issues arose more than two years ago, she said. Now the child has to use synthetic insulin regularly to stay well, since her condition prevents insulin production by her pancreas.
“As anyone with a child who has Type 1 [knows], especially a little kid, you’re constantly watching, you’re constantly monitoring, you’re constantly checking, which is what I did all the time when I was [at ‘Today’],” she told Melvin and Savannah Guthrie. “You’re distracted.”
Hope, however, is just like “every other kid” except for about five minute at breakfast, lunch, dinner and sometimes overnight, Kotb said.
But being there for her daughter had become nonnegotiable, she told People in a story published Wednesday, so “Today” had to become part of yesterday. No more alarms going off at 3:15 a.m. every morning.
Now she sleeps in until 4:30 a.m. She also just launched a new wellness venture, Joy 101. But her children remain her focus.
“I really wanted to and needed to be here to watch over [Hope]. So, whenever she needs anything, and it can happen at night, multiple times, I’m up — I’m up up up,” she said.
“But I would never, ever want Hope to one day grow up and say, ‘Oh, my mom left her job because [of me].’ It wasn’t that alone. But if you look at it cumulatively, it was a part of that decision.”
Kotb, 60, and ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman adopted Hope in 2019 and sister Haley in 2017. The couple split up in 2022 but remain friends and co-parents.
Hope, Kotb told People, “is a happy, healthy, rambunctious, amazing kid, and we have to watch her. Diabetes is a part of her, but not all of her. I hope it shapes her but never defines her.”
