TODAY co-hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager have talked about the ways that motherhood joins them together as metaphorical sisters, but each woman also has a sister in real life — and they were raised to value that relationship in different ways.
“I think sometimes close sibling relationships are fashioned by the way you’re brought up because a lot of siblings say, ‘We were never close,'” Hoda said, contrasting those siblings with others who make spending time with family a non-negotiable.
“It was always us on a weekend,” she continued. While Hoda’s friends were “doing cool things,” she was hanging out with her sister, Hala.
“Would you say, ‘Hey Mom, can I go to a slumber party?’ and she would say no?” Jenna asked.
“It was always no,” Hoda said. But as a result, she grew up feeling closer to her sister “because you do have each other.” She “would go to the mall, to Tyson’s Corner, because that’s what you do together as a family.”
“For us, for Barbara and me,” Jenna said of her twin sister, “I think it was so important for my mom that she let us be separate. She knew that we had very different personalities and that even our classmates would — not pit us against each other — but be like, ‘Oh, she’s the one that’s good at math,’ and, ‘She’s the class clown.'”
“So what did your parents do?” Hoda asked.
“They let us be completely separate. I mean, we were a unit and we spent so much time together,” Jenna said. “But I think they wanted us to sort of be individuals and not feel like we had to compare ourselves.”
Jenna noted that she and her sister were in separate classrooms and went to different camps, but when Barbara was going to apply to a prestigious college and Jenna heard they had a “twin policy,” she wanted to “ride her coattails to Stanford.”
Their father, former president George W. Bush, told Jenna, “Absolutely you will not apply. You’re going to ruin her chances!”
