Hoda Kotb is praising Selena Gomez for her candidness.
After the Rare Beauty founder revealed she cannot carry children due to her complex medical history, the Today show anchor—who faced her own fertility struggles before becoming a mom—responded with a heartfelt show of support.
“I think it was something she always dreamt that would happen,” Kotb told co-host Jenna Bush Hager during the Sept. 10 episode of Today. “You know how you kind of write your story in your head? ‘I’ll get married here or there or at this age, and then I’ll have kids,’ and you can kind of imagine it. And I think that was probably the toughest part.”
Referring to Gomez saying she intends to explore alternative routes to motherhood, Kotb—who adopted daughters Haley, 7, and Hope, 5, with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman—added, “Families come in all shapes and sizes, and they are your kids 100 thousand percent.”
The Emilia Pérez star—who lives with lupus and underwent a kidney transplant in 2017—recently opened up about not being able to carry her own children due, telling Vanity Fair that it was “something I had to grieve for a while.”
“It’s not necessarily the way I envisioned it,” Gomez—who dates Benny Blanco— continued. “I thought it would happen the way it happens for everyone. [But] I’m in a much better place with that. I find it a blessing that there are wonderful people willing to do surrogacy or adoption, which are both huge possibilities for me.”
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As for Kotb, the veteran journalist was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 and underwent a mastectomy shortly thereafter. While she is now cancer-free, she recently shared on her Making Space podcast that she couldn’t get pregnant as a result of her treatment.
So being a mom to Haley and Hope is a role she never takes for granted.
“Sometimes I wonder like, ‘How did this happened? How did I get this?'” Kotb told E! News in 2021. “I used to feel almost undeserving of it. But I don’t anymore. Something happened within me where I was like, ‘You know what, I’m worthy of these children, I’m worthy of myself. I’m enough just as I am. I will nurture and love these little girls, as long as God lets me have them for as long as I’ll be here.'”
