Joanna Gaines Gets Real About ‘Grieving’ Missed Time with Her Children to Focus on Her Growing Business

HGTV star Joanna Gaines is an expert in all things home design, but when it comes to parenting, she’s still learning every single day.During an appearance on “Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb,” the mother of five got real about a tender moment she recently experienced with her oldest daughter, 19-year-old Ella Rose Gaines.At the helm of a home and lifestyle empire, Joanna always seems to have her hands full with new projects. And as she prepared to send her second child away to college, she started to worry that she hadn’t balanced it all quite as well as she hoped to.“Mom guilt never goes away. It’s something you have to manage,” said Joanna, 48, before recalling an honest conversation she had while driving Ella to the airport.“I remember crying a little bit and thinking, ‘OK, this is the moment I can just say I’m sorry for anywhere I wasn’t present,’” she recalled. “For months, what I was grieving was, ‘I wasn’t home the whole time.’”Loading...Chip and Joanna Gaines are parents to five children; Drake, 21, Ella, 19, Duke, 18, Emmie, 16, and Crew, 8. joannagaines/InstagramExplaining that she was a “stay at home mom for a portion” of Ella’s childhood, Joanna feared she missed out on key mome...