(BEST OF) Mothers & Sons with Ocean Vuong and Chase Melton

We Can Do Hard Things

Treat Media and Glennon Doyle

Relationships, Education, Self-improvement, Society & Culture

4.8 • 42.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2026

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This conversation will stay with you. When Glennon and her son Chase sit down with his hero, Ocean Vuong, something shifts: mothering reveals itself as more than a role—it’s a force that finds our kids through books, voices, and people who see them when we can’t. A raw, beautiful conversation about raising boys, surviving what shapes us, and the quiet truth every parent carries: we don’t do this alone. - How art and connection can “mother” us - What boys are taught about survival—and how that’s changing - The moment a child feels truly seen - How grief opens us to deeper human connection - Gratitude for the ones who help raise our kids About Ocean: Ocean Vuong, author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius Grant" and the winner of the Whiting Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In Time Is a Mother, Ocean's newest poetry collection available now, he reckons with his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. Follow We Can Do Hard Things on: Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pod Squad, welcome back to our best of series. The conversation we're sharing with you today is without a doubt in my top five.
0:08.4	Today, we're doing a mothers and sons episode, but not in the way we've been taught to think about mothers and sons.
0:15.0	This conversation with the incredible poet and novelist Ocean Wong is a conversation that really brought home for me
0:24.3	the truth that mothering is not a role. It's a force. It's not necessarily an identity to have
0:32.1	or an identity to hold. It's a energy inside us that we unleash or don't. It's something we do for each other. It's something
0:41.3	that can come from anyone, from any person, from a book, from a voice that just finds you
0:49.0	right when you need it the most, and that moves you forward, that nurtures you forward. What was so special
0:57.0	about this episode for me is that my son, Chase, sits down to do it with me. My son Chase joined
1:04.7	me an ocean for this conversation and I felt what it feels like in real time to watch your kid meet one of
1:15.3	their heroes and to watch your kid be seen by one of their heroes, to watch someone else
1:22.5	really bring out and hold parts of your kid that you couldn't quite reach yourself that you maybe had
1:29.6	never actually seen before. Ocean talks about learning how to survive as a boy in America,
1:36.6	about losing his mother, about finding connection to every human being through that loss,
1:41.9	and about choosing not to disappear, but to stay and complicate and
1:46.7	create. That is something he says in this conversation that has never left me. Listen for what he
1:54.1	says about masculinity. In here, in this episode, I get to say something out loud that I think
2:00.5	so many of us carry quietly.
2:02.7	Just gratitude for the people who helped mother our children in ways that we could not.
2:07.9	Thank you to Ocean.
2:09.4	Here we go, Potsquan.
2:35.5	Hello, everyone. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. I just told my son Chase, who's here, that I feel more nervous than I feel when I speak on a stage in front of 5,000 people because of the person we're speaking to today. So today we are speaking with Ocean Vuong.
2:38.9	And my son Chase is here.
	...

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