(BEST OF) Mothers & Sons with Ocean Vuong and Chase Melton
5/12/20261 hr 6 min
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
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsGlennon Doyle· Host0:00
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. Today, we're doing a mothers and sons episode, but not in the way we've been taught to think about mothers and sons. This conversation with the incredible poet and novelist Ocean Vuong is a conversation that really brought home for me the truth that mothering is not a role, it's a force. It's not necessarily an identity to have 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 that can come from anyone, from any person, from a book, from a voice that just finds you right when you need it the most and that moves you forward, that nurtures you forward. What was so special about this episode for me is that my son, Chase, sits down to do it with me. My son Chase joined me and Ocean for this conversation, and I felt what it feels like in real time to watch your kid meet one of their heroes and to watch your kid be seen by one of their heroes, to watch someone else really bring out and hold parts of your kid that you couldn't quite reach yourself, that you maybe had never