Hoda Kotb’s next chapter after leaving TODAY early next year will be devoted 100 percent to her daughters.

In September, Hoda announced that she would be leaving the show to spend more time with her daughters, Haley, 7, and Hope, 5. In a new interview with People, published on Oct. 9, Hoda shared how mom guilt impacted her decision to depart TODAY after 26 years at NBC News.

“There’s the guilt you carry because you can’t be 100 percent at work and 100 percent at home,” Hoda tells the magazine in her cover story. “Something has to give if you want excellence.”

“If you’re going to be excellent at work, something has to give at home. And if you want to be excellent at home — I mean excellent and do all the things — something has to give at work,” she continued. “It can’t be equal.” Hoda with her daughters.Nathan Congleton / TODAY
During Hoda’s Sept. 26 announcement on TODAY, she told her colleagues and viewers that her 60th birthday celebration put life into perspective.

“I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60, and to try something new,” she said. “I remembered standing outside looking at these beautiful bunch of people with these gorgeous signs, and I thought, ‘This is what the top of the wave feels like for me.’ And I thought it can’t get better, and I decided that this is the right time for me to kind of move on.”

Moving on meant spending more quality time with her daughters after the family moved out of the city.

“Obviously I had my kiddos late in life, and I was thinking that they deserve a bigger piece of my time pie that I have,” Hoda said during her departure reveal. “I feel like we only have a finite amount of time.

Hoda will remain part of the NBCUniversal family and co-anchor TODAY until early next year. Just recently, in an Oct. 7 “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” appearance, she said her last day at TODAY is still a long ways away if you ask her daughters.

“I was telling them, ‘Mommy is going to be able to take you to school,’ and they go, ‘(Gasp) Wednesday?’ ‘No honey, not Wednesday.’ ‘Next week?’ I go, ‘No honey, not next week. Probably somewhere January, February,’” she told Jimmy Fallon about her daughters’ reaction. “(They said) ‘January, February?’ I might as well continue working forever. For them it’s like ‘til the end.”

For Hoda, who told Fallon she wakes up at 3:15 a.m., the decision is about watching them grow and being there for them at the start of their day and on.

“I was like, they need a little more of me, and I need more of them. And, so, I think it’s all going to work out beautifully,” she said.