Jenna Bush Hager had an emotional weekend dropping both her daughters off at summer camp.
“Little tears under my big sunglasses,” Jenna told her TODAY co-host Hoda Kotb on July 8.
Jenna shares daughters Mila, 11, and Poppy, 8, and son Hal, 4, with husband Henry Hager.
Mila’s camp, which is in Texas, is the same one her mom attended as a child. Jenna has called sleep-away camp “a right of passage” and this year, instead of greeting her sister with hugs at the end of the summer, Poppy joined her at camp.
The first-time camper had several concerns about going away.
“Poppy was like, ‘But what about the spiders in the bathroom?’ and I was like, ‘You’re going to become friends with the spiders in the bathroom,’” Jenna told Hoda. “She’s like, ‘But what about the heat?’ I’m like, ‘It’s going to become normal to you ... it’s hot there.”
Fortunately, Mila played big sister.
“Mila was totally like, ‘OK, so here’s what you do, Poppy,’” said Jenna, adding that her eldest gave her sister a tip to avoid feeling sick in the heat and grab more space in the bathroom.
Although Jenna is sad — “Two of my three hearts are far away from me,” she said — the girls will have a blast together.
“The first year I dropped Mila, I had a real issue,” said Jenna. “I felt like something was wrong."
The separation also felt different than when Jenna’s parents, former president George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush, dropped her off at camp as a kid.
“Were your mom and dad crying?” asked Hoda.
“No — they high-fived each other because both of us were gone,” Jenna said, talking about her twin sister Barbara Bush. “I even wrote them letters like, ‘Dear mom and dad, here are my friends,’” listing her cabin mates. “And then the next letter was, ‘Dear mom and dad, that last letter was a lie. I have zero friends.”
Did Jenna ask her parents to pick her up from camp early?
“No, because they would never have done that,” said Jenna. “But I prayed for it ... and nobody came.” Jenna grew to love camp, despite her “rough” first year.
Jenna's early feelings about camp were similar to Mila’s in the beginning.
In 2021, Mila wrote her parents a letter from camp that Jenna said, “broke my heart in a million pieces.”
“Dear Mom and Dad, I miss you,” Jenna quoted the letter that year. “I wish I could be with you.” Mila conclusion: “P.S. Daddy, how much longer ‘til you pick me up? I miss you too much. I need to stop crying. So goodbye. I miss you terribly, Mom and Dad.”
Jenna told Hoda that both she and Mila had cried during drop-off.
“It was just this feeling of ... she’s old!” said Jenna. “How is she old enough to go away from me for three weeks?”
CORRECTION (July 8, 2024, 4:31 EST): An earlier version of this article misstated the name of former president George W. Bush's wife. It is former first lady Laura Bush, not Barbara Bush.
