Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Guests
Glennon Doyle is creator of the online community Momastery and founder
and president of Together Rising, a nonprofit for women and children in
crisis. Her books include Untamed and Love Warrior. She
also hosts the podcast, “We Can Do Hard Things.”
Transcript
Krista Tippett, host: Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed has been a
sensation of 2020 and beyond, and now she’s launched a new podcast
titled with words of hers that have become a cultural force: We Can Do
Hard Things. Meanwhile, her wife, the soccer icon Abby Wambach,
has her own bestselling books and is hosting a new TV show, “Abby’s
Places,” on ESPN+. I had a conversation with the two of them before
they were quite so much in the public eye together, and it’s a window
into the passions that brought them here. Abby first became a hero to
many as an Olympic gold medalist and World Cup champion.
Glennon first entered the American imagination as a “Christian
mommy blogger,” but she and her online community, Momastery,
evolved into a community of giving and activism, with a nonprofit
called Together Rising. What follows is a conversation about courage
that is both serious and playful as it turns up in their lives apart and
together, from addiction to social activism to blended-family
parenting.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Abby Wambach: I mean, Glennon and I talk a lot about this notion of
despair. Sometimes she says it to our 10-year-old, who has fallen down
in a soccer game. She’ll say, “No time for despair.”
[laughter]
And I’m looking at her, and I’m like, what kind of language are you
using?
Glennon Doyle: No, you said, “This is a soccer game, not a poetry
reading.”
[laughter]
Wambach: Trying to be nice about it.
Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
Doyle: Oh God.
Tippett: That’s how I always said it — I know. And then I hear people
saying “muh-mastery” …
Doyle: Oh, that’s my favorite.
[laughter]
Doyle: It’s like, noooo. I’m sweating.
Tippett: I know. I was so sure. Was it in 2011, the “Don’t Carpe Diem”
post that had 4 million shares and really took off in a new way? And I
just want to read this, briefly, because it’s just very beautiful, and a lot
of us have been here. “Every evening Craig walks through the door” —
that was your husband at the time — ”smiles hopefully, and says, ‘How
was your day?’ This question is like a spotlight pointed directly at the
chasm between his experience of a ‘day’ and my experience of a ‘day.’
How was my day? I look down at my spaghetti-stained pajama top,
unwashed hair, and gorgeous baby on my hip, and I want to say, ‘How
was my day? It was a lifetime. It was the best of times and the worst of
times.’”
[laughter]
“‘I was both lonely, and never alone; I was simultaneously bored out
of my skull and completely overwhelmed. I was saturated with touch,
desperate to get the baby off of me, and the second I put her down, I
yearned to smell her sweet skin again. This day required more than
I’m physically and emotionally capable of, while requiring nothing
from my brain. I had thoughts today, ideas, real things to say, and no
one to hear them.’”
Doyle: Everyone’s like, “I can’t imagine that she’s divorced now.”
[laughter]
“That must’ve been lovely to live with.”
Tippett: So Abby, you’re a two-time Olympic gold medalist, a
Women’s World Cup champion, FIFA World Player of the Year, on
Time’s list of 100 Most Influential People, praised by President Obama
at the White House. Your book that you published — when did you
publish that?
Wambach: 2016.
Tippett: It’s called Forward. And there’s a line in there where you’re
describing just two weeks after your retirement, which was just the
height of being celebrated. And you have a sentence in there — you’re
speaking to yourself — “You are barely brave enough to leave your
hotel room.”
Wambach: Yep. You know, when you spend over a decade in a
spotlight, in one way or another — our national team gained
popularity in 1999, when our team won the World Cup and Brandi
Chastain ripped off her jersey. I wasn’t on the team then, but I got
there a few years later, won a couple Olympic gold medals, and then
finished off my career winning the World Cup in 2015, and I retired a
few months later. And so you have certain levels — I had certain levels
inside of me — that I could go and train, and I can compartmentalize
the fame. I always said that we had a perfect amount of fame on the
women’s national team, because it was not like a celebrity, where
people were following us with cameras. We were revered and
respected, and the downside is, we didn’t get paid enough to deal with
it. [laughs] We could’ve gotten paid more, but then, maybe, if we’d
gotten paid more, we would’ve been too famous.
But I just remember that time, being so exhausted. A couple weeks
after my retirement, I was going on a media tour after the whole
thing, and I just felt like, for once in my life — and I was really
struggling at the time. I was really deep into my own addiction, and I
was really living a hidden life behind that hotel room door, because I
was traveling all the time. And I just remember feeling like, if people
only knew that actually, I am terrified to walk outside of this hotel
room. And somehow I was able to do it. Somehow, I was able to
survive. My agent still can’t believe that the amount of traveling that I
had to do during that time, that I was able to stand up and — knowing
how I was feeling, after I turned in the manuscript of this book, he
was like, “I didn’t know you were feeling any of this stuff.”
Tippett: And you’re out there making presentations and being
received as a role model and a mentor and a hero.
Wambach: And a hero. For me, that’s what the irony was, is I just was
internally feeling so scared and lost. When you have created this
identity — I had this identity of myself as a soccer player, and now this
identity was being completely shifted, and I didn’t know what the hell
to do. And I found myself on a stage, months after my retirement, next
to Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning — they were giving me this Icon
Award.
Tippett: Is that ESPN?
Wambach: Yeah, for the ESPYs. And I was so happy to be there, and
grateful and everything. And as we turned and walked offstage, I
looked at both of those guys, and I thought, wow, all three of us are
walking into very different retirements. And at that point —
Tippett: Well, and to be clear, and one of the ways you use to describe
that is that they were walking away with fortunes.
Wambach: Of course.
Wambach: Yeah, and I think that that, for me, that’s when the rage
started to come to the surface. And — yeah, courage.
Doyle: Courage — it’s always got rage in it.
[applause]
Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, with Glennon Doyle
and Abby Wambach.
In the book you wrote, the chapters are all ways people had seen you
and categories you’d …
Wambach: Labels, yeah.
Tippett: … sometimes walked into willingly, and sometimes it had
been an armor. So it was everything from — or how you’d seen
yourself. It would be: “Fraud,” “Tomboy,” “Rebel,” “Teammate,”
“Lesbian,” “Manic,” “Depressive,” “Captain,” “Leader,” “Romantic,”
“Hero,” “Addict,” “Failure.” And then the last chapter is “Human.”
Somewhere, you said you had created yourself. All these categories
that were both generated from you and generated externally helped
create you, but shut you off from becoming human, fully human.
Wambach: Glennon has said this a lot: we’re all kind of like Russian
nesting dolls. And as we get older, we keep putting on all of these
costumes. And that’s what I thought, for me, growing up, that’s what I
thought I had to do to mature, to age, to get wisdom, is to put on all
these different costumes and see which one fit. And I think that now,
having gone through a lot of my life — and granted, I’m still fairly
young, at 38 — but I realize that the more you can actually take those
costumes off and get down to that little, small, immobile Russian
nesting doll, that is who you are, your true, true self. That is the
humanity of all of us. And we all are in there.
Tippett: This is very random, but I just want to share it, because when
I was reading, I was thinking — you ended with “Human,” which
seems like the simplest, most elemental thing of all, but is really the
work of a lifetime. I was thinking about — there’s this — when I
studied theology, Paul Tillich wrote The Courage to Be. And he’s called
an existentialist theologian. And I read it when I was older, because I
always emphasized, when I thought of that “to be,” that “being.” But
the book is actually about the courage it takes. The courage is the
work.
So there’s your little theology for today.
[laughter]
OK, so big life-turning: I kept thinking of — what’s the language —
inflection point, but really more like earthquake, I think, where your
stories converge. And Glennon, you left a marriage. You had just
written a book about repairing. [laughs]
Doyle: Yeah. It’s been a doozy, you guys.
Tippett: [laughs] So the two of you met and married — and here’s me,
rushing through epic history again — and are now co-parenting your
three children together, and actually co-parenting together with their
father, in a really modern family.
Doyle: I mean, we don’t like, live in the same house. [laughs] It’s not
that modern.
[laughter]
Tippett: You don’t live in the same house, no. [laughs] But you’re
working together.
Doyle: Right, yes.
[laughter]
Wambach: Trying to be nice about it.
Tippett: But has that been a revelation for you, because you walked
into the middle of a boy’s life? And he’s a teenager, right?
Wambach: Yeah, and it’s different. When I first met Chase, he was 13
maybe, going on 14. The girls were a little bit younger — 12 and 8,
maybe, 11 and 8 years old. And I think that because he was a little bit
older, a little bit more baked, in terms of his maturity, you kind of
have to process with a boy differently, on some level. He wants to stay
a little bit more to himself. He’s studying more for school.
But we talk a ton about how we don’t want him to feel dehumanized,
living among a bunch of women. So there’s times where — this is a
truth: sometimes I found, when I first got into the family, I found that
Glennon was more apt to push the girls to do some of the house
chores.
Doyle: I can’t believe you’re saying this. We’re going to have so many
talks.
[laughter]
Wambach: And I would be like, “Why doesn’t Chase have to do the
dishes?” And she’s like, “You know what? I think you’re right.” So
we’ve come down — we’re like, “Chase, you need to do the dishes.
Even though you have homework to do, you have to do what has been,
historically, a ‘feminine’ job, a role of a woman in the house.” We
want to make sure that that’s an equal, shared chore for Chase so that
he doesn’t feel left out.
[laughter]
Doyle: I was stunned — stunned at myself.
I wonder if you would tell the story that you told when you, I believe,
gave the commencement speech at Barnard — is that right?
[applause]
That when you retired — and we never got to talk about what it’s like
to be retired when you’re 38.
Wambach: It’s OK.
Tippett: OK, next time — that your sponsor, Gatorade, surprised you
at a meeting with a plan for your send-off commercial and that the
message was “Forget me,” which made you really happy.
Wambach: Yeah, I went in there — and I’ve done work with Gatorade
for my whole career. I’ve been a Gatorade athlete, at the time, for I
guess it was 15 years. So when I walked in the offices, and they sat me
down, and they showed me that they were going to make this
commercial that was going to be my commercial, my retirement
commercial — well, first of all, I was very honored. It feels like rarified
air, to be the athlete for a campaign for Gatorade. And then the
messaging that they wanted to get across to the consumer was this
“forget me” idea.
And for me — I know that sounds so bizarre, because most athletes are
egomaniacs and crazy into themselves, but I really feel deeply that the
legacy I wanted to leave is making sure that I am leaving the sport
better than I found it. And so often — you know, I hold the record for
most goals scored, for any person on the planet.
[applause]
Tippett: Of any gender.
Doyle: You know carpentry? It’s just boards and nails, carpentry,
right? Jesus was one.
[laughter]
So there’s this thing happens in carpentry, where the mainstay of a
building is a joist. And so every once in a while, the joist starts to
weaken because there’s a load put on top of it that’s too heavy. So
when that happens, they say, “OK, bring some extra boards.” And
they put an extra board to the right of the weakening joist, and if that
doesn’t make it strong enough, then they bring another board, and
they put it to the left of the weakened joist. And with an extra board to
the right and an extra board to the left, the joist becomes strong
enough to withhold any load. And do you know what that carpentry
system is called? “Sistering.” I mean, it’s like the guy carpenters were
like, “Oh, we can’t name this ‘brothering.’ That’s too much intimacy
there.”
[laughter]
“So that looks more like what the ladies would do.”
But it’s just the most beautiful, to me, example of how women support
each other, and for life, because sometimes the load on us just gets too
heavy to carry by ourselves. And the mistake we make when that
happens is, we think that we’ve done something wrong. We think
we’ve made a mistake, we’ve gone wrong somewhere, because it can’t
be this heavy.
But if we never had to ask for help because we couldn’t carry the load
anymore, then we would miss out on the best part of life, which is just
sistering and being sistered. Or champion each other. Go get the ball,
score the goal.
Wambach: Same thing. Same, same.
Doyle: Yes.
[laughter]
Tippett: And I’m using the language of, we need to “accompany” each
other, which is just another, in this universe of words, but also
realizing that that’s also tricky, when we — saying “Forget me” is very
complex, and you also have a story about coaching your 10-year-old
daughter’s soccer team and somebody asking you, “So you retired.
What did you retire from?” [laughs]
Doyle: Halfway through the season, you guys.
Doyle: Right. So they got the awesome memo, and ours sucked.
[laughter]
So anyway, that’s what I figured out. It took me till my kids were 10 to
realize that that parenting memo was complete b.s. and that when we
don’t let our kids fail, and we don’t let our kids feel, they don’t learn
how to become human. So one of my greatest challenges in my
personal life and in my parenting is just to look at my kids and say,
“I’m not going to protect you from this. I’m going to let you fail here.
I’m going to let you feel that. Yes, yes — life is that hard. It is that hard
to be human, and I’m not going to grab that from you.”
We talk about — we’re trying to raise these kids who don’t think they
have to be fire avoiders, who don’t have to constantly avoid the fires of
their lives and of their relationships and of the world, because they
learn over and over again that they can walk through the fires,
because they’re fireproof. That’s what we learn, when we keep
showing up for hard things and we keep making it through: that we
don’t have to skip the hard things anymore, because we somehow
always survive and end up stronger.
Tippett: I want to ask you, in closing, just each of you, just for a
moment to reflect on what makes you despair right now and where
you’re finding hope.
Doyle: You want me to go first?
Wambach: I think that what makes me feel despair is just how lost it
feels like parts of our government feel to me. And what makes me feel
hopeful is that I know that it won’t last forever.
Doyle: Well, I mean, I think, for me, the despair and the hope come in
the exact same place. I keep hearing all over the place, “Oh my God,
what’s going on right now? Everybody’s suddenly so racist, and
everybody’s so homophobic, and everybody’s so —” and OK, but like,
the people have always been like that. [laughs] It’s just that now we can
see it.
Wambach: And people are talking about it.
Doyle: Right, now it’s at the surface. So when you ask people who
actually have been affected by racism their whole life, when you ask
people of color, they’re not super surprised right now.
[laughter]
They’re like, “OK, so thanks, everybody.”
Wambach: “Welcome.” [laughs]
Doyle: “You just got to the party.” Right? So that’s why I think the
despair and the hope are in the exact same place. And I think about
this all the time, because we give destruction — we’re too scared of it.
We’re too scared of apocalypse. Like, who wants things to stay the
same? Not me. You know? We get so scared of the ends of the world.
As women — the first story I ever learned about God and being a
woman was, “OK, so everything was great, and God put two people in
a garden, and — no, no, first, one person in a garden. That was Adam.
And then he gave birth to Eve.”
OK, so we’re supposed to take that one on the chin, first. OK, all right.
So men give birth to women. OK, it’s not what I’ve seen in my life, but
— got it.
“And then everything was fine until the woman wanted something,
and then she went for it, and then all hell broke loose, and everything
was terrible forever. Thank you for joining us. Go in peace.”
[laughter]
And then we’re like, why are women so confused about what they
want, and food? I don’t know, she just wanted an apple. What if she
wanted a freaking pizza?
And what I think about over and over again is, what that story does,
what every story we learn about being a woman does is make us start
to fear what we desire. Women have to fear what we desire. What
women want is bad. What women want is scary, which makes us
doubt ourselves over and over again. “What do we want? We don’t
know what we want; we don’t even know where we want to go to
dinner. Who knows? We don’t know.”
But what I find, talking to women all over the world, is that what
women want is so good that if women started to go for it, power
structures would tumble. So doesn’t it make sense that every single
power structure would have to make women doubt what they desire?
Because if women went for what they desired, the world would
crumble.
Wambach: That’s good.
Doyle: And other worlds, based on equality and justice and love and
peace would have to be rebuilt in their place. So what I want women
to do is just go for the apple and let it burn.
[laughter]
[applause]
Tippett: [laughs] Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach, thank you so
much. And thank you for having us.
[applause]
[music: “Noizy Birdz” by Raphael Treza]
Tippett: Glennon Doyle is creator of the online community
Momastery and founder and president of Together Rising, a nonprofit
for women and children in crisis. Her books include Untamed and Love
Warrior. She hosts the podcast We Can Do Hard Things.
Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA Women’s
World Cup champion, and six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete
of Year Award. She’s written two books: Wolfpack and Forward: A
Memoir, and she’s host of “Abby’s Places,” on ESPN+.
[music: “Noizy Birdz” by Raphael Treza]
The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme
music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice
that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.
On Being is an independent, nonprofit production of The On Being
Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I
created this show at American Public Media.
Our funding partners include:
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The Osprey Foundation, a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and
fulfilled lives;
The Charles Koch Institute’s Courageous Collaborations initiative,
discovering and elevating tools to cure intolerance and bridge
differences;
The Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family
foundation dedicated to its founders’ interests in religion, community
development, and education;
And the Ford Foundation, working to strengthen democratic values,
reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and
advance human achievement worldwide.
Books & Music
Recommended Reading
Wolfpack
Author: Abby Wambach
Forward: A Memoir
Author: Abby Wambach
Untamed
Author: Glennon Doyle
Love Warrior
Author: Glennon Doyle
Music Played