Hoda's Lost It

As most people who are culturally literate know, Hoda Kotb (pr. KOT-bee) is co-host of Today with Hoda and Jenna, the latter being President G. W. Bush’s married-with-children daughter. People magazine recently did a story on Ms. Kotb’s bedtime issues with her four-year-old, Hope. I happened to stumble onto the story a week or so ago and decided that Hoda Kotb needs my help, which I’m offering, free of charge. Please help me get the word to her.

In the People piece, Hoda described her bedtime routine with Hope, which includes Hope asking her mother, “Can I have something special that I’ve never seen before?” Hoda promptly proceeds to rummage through drawers and closets in their home until she finds something that Hope will regard as special and has never seen before. She then presents her offering to Hope and Hope goes off to dreamland, presumably clutching her special thing that she’s never seen before.

This happens every night, mind you. A grown woman, a single, adoptive mother, fulfills a ludicrous instruction from a four-year-old in order to get said preschooler to go to sleep. When Hoda told this story, her cohost, Ms. Bush Hager, told her, “Oh no! You’ve started a terrible thing!” and then began suggesting items Hoda could use to pacify Hope at bedtime. Huh?

Bush Hager asked if Hoda wished she had never started the “something special” ritual.

“Yes! Yes!” Hoda replied. “Every night. It’s a lot of pressure.”

Clearly, motherhood is slowly driving Hoda Kotb insane. Not blubbering, incoherent insane, but privately insane. She is losing her ability to think clearly.

If I could, I would ask Hoda Kotb to explain to me – slowly, so that my 75-year-old brain can keep up – how it is that a grown woman takes orders from a four-year-old child (not that the specific age matters), and ridiculous orders at that? Instead of teaching your daughter to look up to you, Hoda, to want to become like you, you are teaching her that adult women do what children tell them to do. That children rule. Don’t you realize that turns your daughter’s world completely upside down? Unfortunately, she is much too young to know that she needs your unequivocal authority as much as she needs your unconditional love.

Unconditional love without unequivocal authority quickly morphs into enabling, codependency. I should mention also that unequivocal authority without love that is unconditional morphs into abuse of one sort or another.

The problem, as it would appear Bush Hager tried to tell Ms. Kotb, is that mother-child codependency is becoming the norm, if it has not already. What Ms. Kotb is submitting to is the message to mothers that their first responsibility is to keep their children in a perpetual state of happiness.

To accomplish this impossible dream, mothers are to pay as much attention to their children as they possibly can, do as much for their children as they possibly can, solve all their children’s problems, ensure their children’s success at everything by any means necessary, be their children’s live-in therapists, make bedtime the most special time of the day (to hopefully mitigate the inevitable separation trauma), and on and on goes the to-do list of the Twenty-First-Century Good Mommy.

Women of my mother’s generation and before did not think any of that defined the responsible mother. There was no Good Mommy Cult back then. Up until recently, by the way, I called it the Good Mommy Club, but I’ve decided it functions more like a cult. It keeps its members in line, for example. Mothers enforce those ludicrous standards on one another.

The consummate irony of this is that it’s the state of things in the mother-child relationship. Mind you, it’s the state of things fifty years on from women declaring their liberation from destructive norms and stereotypes. I mean, give me a break! You gotta be kidding me! This is the liberated woman?

Mothering in the post-psychological age involves putting one’s child at the center of one’s attention and constantly doing the Good Mommy cha-cha-cha while circling the child, feigning never-ending glee. Was that too sarcastic? No.

If sarcasm helps move one female parent to come to her senses and stop self-demeaning, then sarcasm it will be.

Working mothers like Kotb are arguably the worst of the lot. They’ve been led to believe that their absence from their children’s lives for nine hours a day, five days a week, inflicts upon them a psychological deprivation of some apocalyptic sort. When Good Mommies are at home, therefore, they double down on the Good Mommy cha-cha-cha.

If there’s a husband on the scene, he is watching all this, trying to figure out what he’s supposed to be doing other than following his ex-wife-now-full-time-and-most-frantic Good Mommy’s instruction. Actually, he knows he’s no longer a husband. He’s the mere parenting aide. His job is to carry out assignments and fill in for the GM when she needs a break. It’s a thankless job. The harder he tries to do the right thing, the more he is told he is not helping.

Is this you? Did I just describe your family? Some of you out there in ReaderLand have enough moxie left to admit it. Some of you will remain in denial. I get it. Denial is a form of narcotic. It dulls reality, renders it temporarily tolerable. It’s a very destructive thing, denial.

After a very satisfying forty-seven-year run, I retired my syndicated newspaper column last May. For one thing, I wanted to write stuff that wouldn’t pass the filters your typical newspaper editor is wearing. Like, this. I hope it reaches you, Hoda.

Copyright 2023, John K. Rosemond