When the TODAY co-hosts discussed reactions to the announcement that Hoda Kotb will be leaving her daily duties with the show, Al Roker asked one very important question: “How’s your mom holding up?”
“She’ll be fine,” Hoda said. “She’ll be fine eventually … if y’all don’t mind shouting her out every now and then. I think it would make her feel good.”
“We love Sami,” Al said. “We’ll shout her out for baklava.”
Her delicious baklava is just one of the many reasons Hoda, and her coworkers, are devoted to her mother, Sameha Kotb.
Hoda was a college student at Virginia Tech when she lost her father, Abdel Kotb, who died of a heart attack in his 50s. Through the years, her mother has always been right by her side.
When celebrating the International Day of the Girl in 2021, Hoda said that her mother is her constant cheerleader: “If someone would have told me the odds of having this job all those years ago, it would have been a million to one. It would have been very unlikely. But it ended up happening. Why? Because I had one woman with pompoms who cheered me on.”
Keep reading to learn more about Hoda’s mother, Sameha.
She was born in Egypt
In her autobiography, titled “Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee,” Hoda Kotb wrote that her parents, Sameha and Abdel, were born in Egypt, graduated from Cairo University in 1958 and worked at the same law firm.
When Abdel, who had a girlfriend at the time, invited female coworkers to watch him row with his club crew team, Sameha was the only one who showed up. Abdel broke up with his girlfriend and married Sameha in 1959.
One week after their traditional Egyptian wedding, Sameha and Abdel moved to the United States.
She was a strict parent
“She was a great mom,” said Hoda. “She was strict. They were both strict — like, curfews, ‘You’re not going here,’ ‘You’re going there,’ ‘Who’s that person?’ ‘You’re not going to school dances.’ That was how we lived.”
Sameha set boundaries for her daughters and stuck to them. “You understood what ‘no’ meant. There was no ‘but everyone else is doing it.’ She couldn’t have cared less what anyone else was doing,” Hoda said.
She is always there for Hoda
“If I looked up at every sporting event, my mom was sitting there,” said Hoda. “Every crummy basketball game, every JV whatever, every time I rode the bench — there she was. She was sitting there, saying, ‘That was an amazing shot! I know you were only in it the last minute, but boy, that was amazing.”
Hoda continued, “I think everyone needs an ‘always,’ someone who you look up and you say, No matter where I am, no matter what I’m going through, no matter what I’m doing, I’ll look up, and there they’ll be.”
She is an optimist
“She is probably among the strongest most optimistic people I’ve ever met, because she believes anything is possible,” said Hoda, “And when she looks at me and says, ‘You can do it,’ I honestly believe I can.”
Hoda said, “Every day, there’s something new and unique, and she finds that thing. I think that’s what keeps her young too…she has a curiosity that is insatiable. She still sees the world as a good place.”
In May 2023, Hoda again touted her mother’s glass-half-full attitude. “She falls in love over and over and over again with people, with places, with a new dish,” Hoda said. “She wakes up happy. I don’t care if there’s a hurricane approaching. She’ll look outside and go, ‘Maybe not this moment, but it will be nice in about an hour.’”
She is persistent
Hoda will never forget the image of her mom as she ran up a hill to the Iwo Jima memorial to finish the Marine Corps Marathon at the age of 60.
“We didn’t think she was going to make it,” Hoda said. “I thought, if ever in my life I think I can’t do something, I’m just going to remember this. I’m going to remember watching my mom run up that hill and finish that marathon.”
She is a beloved grandmother
Sameha is known to Haley and Hope as Tata, the informal word for grandma in Arabic.
“I have to say watching her with Haley and Hope is one of the greatest joys of my life,” Hoda told Jenna Bush Hager in 2020.
“There are so many great things about having children, but watching your mom with your children, there’s probably nothing better. I’m watching, like, the years peel off of her as the kids climb up on her.”
She added, “Watching the girls hug my mom is even better than anything.”
She has good taste
Hoda’s mother picks out many of the dresses Hoda wears on the air.
“She’s so good. She’s better than anybody,” said Hoda in 2016. “She knows exactly how bodies work.”
