Джойан Ланден и Хода Котб обсуждают критику за рождение детей в возрасте за 50 лет

Joan Lunden was a trailblazer in many ways. She was the longest running female host in morning television, bravely posed bald for the cover of People magazine during her cancer treatment and negotiated bringing her newborn daughter to work at “Good Morning America” so she could breastfeed — an unusual accommodation for 1979 television. And it wasn’t just in the workplace where Lunden found herself pushing boundaries. During the August 12 episode of the “Making Space” Podcast, Hoda Kotb asks Lunden about her choice to have children after 50 — a decision Kotb herself made when adopting her daughters at age 51 and 53. Lunden has seven children. After having three daughters with her first husband, she had two sets of twins through surrogacy with her second husband when she was 52 and 54 years old. “Why just couldn’t you adopt? Why are you having kids at this age? How old will you be when they graduate?” Joan Lunden There was a strong reaction when she announced she was having children in her 50s. “I remember in People magazine they write in letters because there was a picture of me with my surrogate, which said, ‘She’s having my baby,’ and of course everybody has their opinions.” She recalls what people wrote: “Why just couldn’t you adopt? Why are you having kids at this age? How old will you be when they graduate?” “How did you handle or what did you think of the way that was received? Because now it’s like everyone’s got pom-poms out,” asks Kotb. Lunden reacts to the double standard of older motherhood with the way older fathers have historically been treated: “Men have divorced and remarried in their 50s and 60s and married 30-year-old women for the last how many decades?” “Like, hello. I’m pretty vibrant. It somehow is just not allowed for us, for women,” she continues. “It’s a personal decision. You have to know that you are a physically fit, vibrant woman, I guess, to do it…Everybody gets to make their own choices.” Kotb says that while it’s become more accepted for women to have children later in life, she received similar criticism after deciding to adopt her daughters in her 50s. She recalls one letter in particular — sent directly to her house — that stuck with her. She assumed it was from a fan who wanted an autograph. Instead, the letter read: “How could you do this? Do you ever think about how you might be leaving your children?” Hoda reveals how deeply it affected her: “I sobbed because secretly that was — even though I believe all the things you said, I told myself that too, and I believe it — there’s a tiny part that was like, ‘Is this, you know?’” Alluding to her possibly making a decision that would negatively affect her children. “I know how to use a calculator. I know about math, and I know how it will be,” she adds. Ultimately, she put the woman’s letter in perspective. “I quickly dismissed it, thinking, ‘Well, she’s probably got some issues. She probably has an older mom, or something happened, and she’s now mad at me.’” Everything in your life, I feel like, happens right on time when it was supposed to. Hoda Kotb But Kotb doesn’t pretend that the criticism simply rolls off her shoulders. Instead, she tells Lunden: “People’s opinions are real.” She asks Lunden how she has handled decades of public judgment. But Kotb acknowledges that with the criticism also came an outpouring of support. “For that one letter, which I remember — which kind of bugs me that I remember it — there were hundreds of letters that came,” she says. “I’ve met people who said, ‘I adopted because you did.’” “The example you’ve set over the years, I’m sure people looked at you and went into jobs and went into motherhood and survived cancer,” she tells Lunden. “For the ones who are in the cheap seats up there, you know, heckling — so what?” “Everything in your life, I feel like, happens right on time when it was supposed to,” Kotb says.