Hoda Kotb Gets Emotional as She Recalls Memories from Family Home Before Move: ‘So Many Things We Built There’

Hoda Kotb is tearing up as she reminisces on her daughters’ earliest days in their first family home.

On the Monday, June 3 episode of Today with Hoda and Jenna, Kotb, 59, opened up about her upcoming move to a new home, and the emotions that come with moving out of the apartment she brought both her daughters — Haley, 7, and Hope, 5 — home to for the first time.

“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,” Kotb tells co-host Jenna Bush Hager, “And I thought to myself, this is the last Monday I’ll be sitting at this desk because we’re moving next week.”

Bush Hager 42, immediately connected with Kotb about the emotions of relocating, sharing, “Moving is one of those things that actually is hard. There’s something about it where you’re sitting thinking about the desk, but that’s the home where you brought your babies home to.”

“I was thinking about it. Both Hayley and Hope came home there and I remember them trying to crawl up the stairs, and I remember now how they race up and down. And I was thinking about the very first time we brought them home and carried them up those stairs in that car seat. And I was looking through old videos of them from when they were so little,” Kotb shares. 

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"I mean, it’s like you want to hold onto things and you want to let go," she continues. "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.”

Bush Hager, who’s also a mother of three, reflected on her own experience moving just under two years ago, calling it “very hard.”

“I think it’s because I didn’t expect it to be so hard,” she says. “But there was one night we sat on our couch in the empty apartment all of us. And we sat and it was just this moment.”

“I was just weeping because I had thought the same thing. We brought our babies home to this place. I lost my grandparents in that apartment, and my girls drew stick figures to make me feel better. I mean, what it does is it distinctly marks time,” Bush Hager explains.

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Kotb then says she finds that taking that second as a family is essential to the moving process.

“I think what you did, which is important and something I want to do, is take a second. Don’t race through it. Don't race through transitions, Don't race through endings. To sit and take a minute like you guys did on that couch,” she says.

As both hosts wipe their tears, Bush Hager beautifully explains, “It’s gonna hurt a little, and it’s okay. Because why it hurts is because it was so beautiful and because all of your dreams came true in that place.”