Inspiring Words: Katie Couric
This television journalist and single mother talks about the importance of spending time with family
After bidding her viewers good night each evening, Katie Couric heads home to resume her other job—as a single mother of two teenage girls. Five times a week, at 7:00 p.m., the anchor departs her desk at CBS Studio in New York City to have dinner with her daughters, Ellie, 17, and Carrie, 13. "Eating together has always been extremely important to me," says Couric. "We used to be more like the early-bird special, eating around 5:30, because I went to bed so much earlier," [when she hosted The Today Show] "but now, as Ellie puts it, the hour we eat dinner is very Euro."
Couric has raised her girls on her own since her husband, Jay Monahan, passed away from colon cancer in 1998. Since then, she has worked tirelessly to raise money for research and to promote prevention and early detection of the disease, most notably undergoing a colonoscopy on live TV in 2000. Rather than being embarrassed by that moment, the girls couldn’t be more supportive. "Once when Ellie was around 9, she said to me, completely unsolicited, ‘Mom, I’m so proud of you for the work you’ve done with colon cancer,’" Couric says. "That really meant a lot to me."
Couric admits that Mother’s Day isn’t her favorite holiday, but she enjoys any excuse to spend more time with her girls, and she makes the most of it. "My daughters always make an effort to do something sweet," she says. "They agree to do anything I want them to for the day. That usually means taking a walk in Central Park or playing multiple games of Scrabble or Boggle—and cleaning our apartment!"
