Why Hoda Kotb Hasn’t Told Her Daughters She Had Breast Cancer

When Hoda Kotb was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, she faced not only the terrifying realities of treatment, including a mastectomy, but also the loss of her fertility. “It was one of the most difficult parts of the whole thing,” Kotb told SheKnows earlier this month from Washington, DC, where she was advocating for better access to breast cancer screening and diagnostic tests as part of the Alliance for Breast Cancer Policy, created by the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the pharmaceutical company Novartis.

For Kotb, who was 42 at the time of her diagnosis, the news that she would never have biological children was “a crusher,” the Today alum recalled. “You survive something terrible, you do the mastectomy, and then they almost say, as an aside, ‘Oh, by the way, this part of your life isn’t happening.’” The news was “devastating,” Kotb says, explaining, “we just put a pin in what I envisioned to be a beautiful chapter of my life.”

In the years since then, of course, Kotb’s dream has come true in a different way: she and her former partner, Joel Schiffman, share two adopted daughters, Haley, 7, and Hope, 5. “I was able to realize that families come together in many beautiful ways,” Kotb says.

When it comes to telling her daughters about her breast cancer journey, though, Kotb takes a measured approach. “My rule of thumb with them is, if they ask, I’ll tell,” the journalist says, explaining that she doesn’t want to burden her young daughters with “grown-up problems.” The one thing they have addressed? Her mastectomy scars. “Mom had surgery,” Kotb told them simply. “If they asked me, ‘What surgery?’ then I would go on and tell them.”

While they’re not to that point yet, Kotb isn’t keeping her cancer experience secret from her kids. “I want them to know that, after breast cancer, this is what life looks like,” she emphasizes. “Your mom plays tennis, she goes running. Your mom picks you up and throws you in the air. This is what happens after breast cancer.”

Currently, Kotb is using her platform to advocate for better insurance coverage for additional breast cancer screening, which makes her message all the more poignant. Per Susan G. Komen, people diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer have a 98 to 100 percent five-year survival rate; stage 2 comes with a 90 to 99 percent survival rate. That makes this kind of testing even more crucial, as it can lead to earlier diagnoses and better outcomes.

With numbers like that, Kotb says she doesn’t want her daughters to be scared of something like breast cancer — or at least to know that when something so frightening happens, they can come out the other side. “I don’t want them to be so terrified,” she explains. “I want them to know that even when scary things happen, this [positive side] can also be true.”

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