Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

It's a terribly exciting day.

Today we have Rosie O'Donnell.

We're not doing a bio for Rosie because Rosie is in a league of their own.

I'm mute like my kid.

Okay, my favorite thing about this episode.

She's talking about growing up, losing her mom, and how living in Ireland is healing her for the very first time.

She talks about the first time she ever got a hug when she was 12 and the teacher that changed her life.

My favorite part of the whole show was when she talked about the letter that she wrote to you, Abby, when you got your DUI and how it came out of her daughter's struggle with substance abuse.

Just a deeply human, deeply Irish conversation.

Also, I made this connection today that maybe a league of their own was like a really big, important reason in the start of women's sports and the rise of women's sports in this country.

I made that connection today.

Thank you, Rosie.

Look at you connecting dots.

The O'Donnell dots connected today.

You're going to want to stick around.

Oh my God, I have been waiting for this moment my whole life.

How are you?

How are you guys?

I feel like I know you.

I watch you all the time.

I listen to what you say.

I love the money you're raising for charity.

I'm like, look at them doing good in the world.

And you being so honest when you tell the truth about what you're going through, very freaking inspiring.

Oh, Rosie.

Back at you.

Yes.

We have learned from the best.

Yeah.

Well, you're doing great is all I can say.

And hello, sister.

Hi, Miss O'Donnell.

Look at you.

It's such a joy to be with you.

Excellent.

Well, I love the sister bond you guys have.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Rosie, what's on your mind right now?

I'm trying to keep steady.

I'm trying to keep my mental health in check.

You know, my shrink said to me last week, make sure you call your psychopharmacologist.

So I did.

And I said, you know, my shrink wanted me to make sure that I'm calling you and having a check in.

And, you know, he was like, I think you have a justifiable reaction to the realities that's happening in the world right now.

So don't think this is all on you.

This is like the world in crisis.

in our lifetime and who could have ever predicted this, right?

I'm so glad that you said that.

I feel like it is probably more of a sign of a mental disorder if you are not breaking down right now.

I feel the same exact way.

I feel like I want to say to my therapist, why aren't you this upset?

You know, and why aren't you this upset?

How many babies do we have to see taking their last breath?

How do we have to watch snuff films every day on what should be the mainstream media?

It's absolutely overwhelming to me and shocking.

And I try to keep it all in check while doing what I feel is my civic responsibility.

What are your strategies?

Yeah, help us.

The reason I'm asking you that.

is because I'm not asking anybody that whose strategy seems to be hiding and not facing reality and not speaking up or using their agency in the way they can.

You are using your agency in such beautiful ways.

So you, I am asking, and what else do you do to maintain your one wild and precious life?

You know, I have to say, I have this little angel of a human.

who's 12, who has autism.

And the gift of this child, you know, I was 50.

I had had a heart attack.

I got a call from the lawyer saying there was a birth mom who didn't want a dad in the family.

And did I know any lesbians who were waiting with a current home study?

And I keep my home study updated all the time, just in case a phone call like this happens.

And he was 50 and I had just had a heart attack and it was my first open adoption.

this is my fifth child and i had some foster kids as well in the interim but my fifth adopted child and they had been diagnosed at two with autism and it's been the most wonderfully beautiful expanding experience emotionally of my life and so i'm very lucky to have that grounding me i'm very lucky to have her the truth of who

she is and what she goes through.

You know, yesterday we had a hard day.

She's 12 years old and has only had seven meltdowns in her life.

So that's every other year, right?

For an autistic kid, it's pretty miraculous.

And yesterday was one of them.

And I woke up late at 7 .30.

It's normally 7 and they like the routine, you know, and...

Why did you wake me up so late?

I don't like this food in my lunch.

I'm not wearing these pants.

I'm not, you know, everything went wrong.

And then she broke and they broke.

Sorry, she, they.

Sorry.

I got they on my arm, see?

So that they would know I'm trying.

But every time that I say she, they say to me, looks like your tattoo's not working.

So, you know, they keep me on my toes.

I can tell you that much.

But...

All of the stress of having moved here and, you know, we've only, we only got here in January and that's a lot for an autistic kid, a lot for a 63 year old woman, you know, but I knew because I read Project 2025, what was coming.

I knew that this would be the reality in America now.

And I knew that my emotional health would not be able to take it.

I wouldn't be able to be in LA where I was and watch them taking people off the streets.

I knew I couldn't watch the desecration of everything that Americans hold dear and sit there in my, you know, lovely house in Santa Monica and not know what to do.

I knew I had to protect myself and this little non -binary autistic 12 -year -old from...

all the horrors that were about to happen and they have you know and uh i'm grateful every day that i'm here i'm grateful every day that people in my life believe me because i'm not a traveler ladies i don't travel i don't go to europe you know like i like to stay in the united states where i can say i think it's my appendix it could be my gold letter in the emergency you know i like to know where

my kids are i like to know Well, I've never been a world traveler.

So when he got the nomination and then I read Project 2025 and then he actually won, I said, okay, here we go.

We're going to implement the plan.

And the plan was to get to Ireland as quickly and as quietly as possible.

I was never one of those celebrities who said, if he wins, I'm going to go because I never imagined that he would win.

the first time or the second time, but I knew I had to leave.

And so we did it and we got out before the inauguration, which I thought would be the safest thing to do.

And then, you know, what has happened was expected by me, but it still is shocking and so disorienting to think that this is America and my children, my grown children are there.

It's the country that I love and, you know, he's threatening to take away my citizenship, which you can't do, although with the Supreme Court there, you never know what they'll give him the right to do because it changes every day.

It's less and less like America.

And, you know, I try to keep my head above the water and keep treading and use my voice whenever I have a platform.

and speak to like -minded individuals to encourage and inspire me.

I look at all the people standing up to him and we're all in shock and we're all in trauma and we have our own trauma experiences that we relate to him.

And how do we as a country heal?

And one way that I think it is, is to forgive the people who finally see the light.

I see so many times on TikTok, say, I'm sorry.

Didn't know.

I was lied to by The Apprentice.

I was lied to by Fox News.

I believed it.

I'm sorry.

And then you see people on the left saying, you know, you did this.

It's your fault.

Screw you.

You deserve what you do.

No, no, no.

It's time to welcome everyone back from the cultish reality that they've been living in, the lies that they've been living in.

And say, we are America.

Remember who we are.

Remember what we fought for.

Remember where we were before we heard his name in a political context that was actually viable.

Rosie, do you ever, I feel so confused about how and where to use my voice because I believe, like I quit social media for a long time because I felt like, oh, this is a nightmare and it's not a place, it's not a responsible thing for a leader of any kind to even host people on this site.

because I am bringing them here and it's a cesspool of what is destroying us.

But also, I don't know where else to use my voice.

I also don't want to abandon everybody right now.

That is the place where brave, sane voices can speak out.

But Rosie, I feel like Abby and I were talking last night to a friend.

We might just have to truly get the hell off of social media to save our souls.

Well, I believe that.

I believe that in many, many ways.

But, you know, in another way, if you had the luxury of being given a microphone of any capacity in today's world as a woman, as a gay woman, as a woman period, because, you know, there's a war with us and we are next in their hierarchy of who they can take out, you know, the brown people, the black people, the trans people, and next it's the women.

and the gay people all together, you know?

And I mean, you don't need to be a brainiac to figure that out.

I lost her audio.

Hold on one second, Rosie.

We lost your audio.

I lost your audio.

Did you lose her audio, Amanda?

Maybe we accidentally pressed mute.

Sorry about that.

I don't know what happened.

I turned off my phone in case it was that.

But I have to say, and everyone who's terrified there in America, I understand.

And, you know, people who say, why did you go, you know?

I had to.

I had to protect myself.

It was self -preservation, number one.

I didn't do so well when he was in the first term.

I was overeating.

I was over drinking.

I was depressed beyond an ability to articulate how depressed I was.

And my friends said, get your ass here.

You're talking to some Irish girls here?

All three.

Yeah.

What is it like there?

What is it?

I've never even been, and I feel it in my bones.

What is it like to live there?

What is it?

Well, I have to say, Glennon, it's been glorious because everyone has been so welcoming.

And I know that Billie Eilish said this and people got honor for it, but I'm going to confirm what she said.

There's something about walking down the street and seeing so many people with your face.

No, I'm not saying that's what I chose or I wanted to only see people like me.

And I don't think that's what Billie Eilish was saying either.

But there's something about seeing your genetic heritage, your DNA on the faces of the people you pass in the street.

Like I'm confronted with my family and myself on a daily basis.

I go to the Tesco shopping and I see an 88 year old woman.

taking the peaches and squeezing.

And I think had my mother lived, that's what would have been my mom.

And I see a 10 year old girl and I'm like, oh my God, that was me.

And, you know, it feels here like it felt to me in the seventies in America.

It feels much more innocent.

It feels much more community based.

It feels much more empathetic and caring.

It feels, uh, now mind you, this, whole country is the size of West Virginia, I believe, or North Carolina, you know, it's, it's tiny comparatively.

And so the culture that you feel here overwhelms and inspires on a daily basis, the commercials for rugby have me crying, right?

They're like, you know.

When you play one of us, you play us all.

And then everyone in the stands comes down and puts their arms out.

And I'm like sobbing at home, watching it on TV, you know?

I mean, there's a culture here that is not obsessed with materialism and celebrity.

And that has been exceptionally freeing for me.

That when people do recognize me or see me, you know what they say?

They say, welcome to Ireland.

You belong here.

We're glad you're here, Rosie.

Hope you're doing well.

That's what they say to me.

Nobody says, could I have your autograph or could I have your, or what do you know about this celebrity or that?

They're not a celebrity based culture.

And I remember reading years ago when Beyonce and Jay -Z were here with their babies when they were little and they were in one of the greens, you know, which is the park, but they call it the green here.

And, um, they were not bothered the whole day and they were kind of like.

around like, what is this?

But that's what it's like.

It is not a celebrity defined or a celebrity obsessed culture, which is unbelievably freeing for me.

I bet.

So much of what we're talking about, it seems to me that, you know, the trauma of living through what we are right now.

And I'm wondering about, you know, you in many ways going to the place where you are descended from.

What has that done for you and the trauma of losing your mom so young?

I mean, that was, you were 10 and I just imagine that there's a, that place in you that is still there.

Has this, has this done anything for you being so close?

Oh yeah.

Well, first of all, after my mother died, my father took his five bereaved children.

to Donegal, as close as you could get to Northern Ireland without being in it, in 1973 at the height of the Troubles.

Oh my God, that's a whole story.

He took us to a war zone, right?

But he didn't know and he was suffering and he was trying to figure out what do I do?

And so now that I see, I was 11 when we came here that summer.

And now I brought an 11 -year -old over with me.

And they turned 12 while we were here.

And I think of how the cycle of life, the circle of life, how it all comes back around.

And, you know, when I was here, when I was young, it was scary and it was overwhelming, but it was also kind of unifying for our family.

There were all these cousins and aunts and uncles that we didn't know that were all on my father's side.

And.

It felt like home in a way.

And then sadly, when we got home, everything of my mother's had been taken out of the house at my father's request by the neighbors and the aunts and uncles.

So there was nothing left in my house of my mom's besides her Barbra Streisand albums, which no one knew that she would listen to every day when we came home from school.

So that was the only connection that I had to having.

dead mother because you couldn't talk about having a dead mother.

Nobody was, you know, watching Oprah back then going, how do you deal with a dead mom for your children?

You know, now there are millions of books and there are people like Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters, Legacy of Loss.

That book helped heal me in so many ways.

That workbook and her work that she's done in this area.

You know, it's a hole inside you that I don't think ever goes away.

And for me, I know it hasn't.

And it's shaped every part of my life.

It's shaped every facet of my being a mother.

To try to be a mother while you're motherless is very difficult because, you know, you don't have...

All those memories of what you went through.

You know, when my children at the normal age of teenagers started pushing away and demanding their independence, I completely had a breakdown.

You know, I was like, wait a second.

What is this?

I didn't do this.

She died before I could do this.

Why are you doing this to me?

I love you more than anything.

This is horrible.

You can't be treating me like this.

I did everything that I imagined I would have wanted if I had a mother.

And it's still you're pushing away.

Well, that's human nature.

Kids have to push away.

But, you know, tell me that 27 years in therapy and I still don't believe it.

It's another abandonment.

The closest person to you abandoned you, your mother, and again.

Yes.

And this, you know, this boy, my oldest boy, Parker, I made him go to therapy with me when he was 14.

And he was like, you know, I want to go out with my friends and see movies and hang out with them.

And, you know, and I'm sobbing for 40 minutes of the session, like crying, saying, we used to be friends and he used to tell me things and he doesn't.

And finally, at the end of the session, the doctor said to him, do you have anything to say?

And he said, yes.

Do you think you could adjust her medication?

Okay.

And you know what?

He was right because they did adjust it and it all worked out a little bit better.

So I'm just saying, you know, it wasn't really wrong of him, but that's, you know, when you don't have a mother and then you're faced with these maternal.

hurdles that if you did have a mother, you remembered, oh, I went through this with my mother, but we got past it.

And then I, you know, went to college and it got better.

You know, I didn't have that to know, you know, it's very hard, but it's, it's, it's brought me closer to my mother.

I finished, uh, the fringe festival in Scotland with a one woman show that I wrote about my mother and mothering, um, this little.

autistic child that I have and all of my other children and what I did right and what I did wrong and coming to terms with her death.

And I had tried to do this for many, many years, even with playwrights helping me and I never could do it.

But once I got here, I was able to do it.

Wow.

Why?

Why do you think?

I think because I was able to sort of see her as a whole woman.

I was, you know, she wanted to come to Ireland and never got to come.

And my whole life I set up with her details, like she died at 39.

So by 40, I was going to retire.

And I did.

I left my show when I turned 40 and people were like, why did you leave your show?

I'm like, first of all, they told me I had Oprah money and I did.

And I said.

there's no reason to work.

So I'm going to go take care of my kids, you know, because I never got to have a mother come to see me play basketball or see me in a play at school.

And that's all that I wanted.

I used to dream of it when I was on the basketball court.

I would like make a shot and then I'd look around to see if she was there clapping, you know, because that was the primary pull of my life.

I remember Nora Ephron saying, are you ever going to get over that?

And I said to her, I don't think so.

you know, because it was defining.

Part of you believe that she didn't die, that like, yeah, that you kept looking for her places, like maybe she just went away and she's coming back.

So.

Well, I thought she was kidnapped like Patty Hearst because Patty Hearst had been kidnapped right around that time by the SLA.

And I remember there was a photo of her with longer hair and a beret and a machine gun and a bank.

And I remember thinking, well, this could have happened to my mother because when no one tells a kid something, you'll make up anything in order to find some sort of reason for it to all have happened.

And so I remember thinking, well, when my mother.

gets free of the SLA and she comes back, you know, so I thought maybe she would fly in and see me at my games, you know, cause I was a big athlete in school and, you know, I thought maybe she would see me in the plays I was doing.

But, you know, when I got out of, of high school, I went to college and that was the first time I had to tell my roommate that my mother had died.

It was the first time I admitted it.

And I was afraid when she died.

Wow.

And Diane Kennedy, nice Irish girl from Boston, said, you talk about your dad a lot, but you never mention your mom.

And I remember thinking, do I do what I've normally done, which is to lie?

Like I would lie to people on the phone when they'd say, is your mother home?

I'd say, no, she's in the shower because I didn't want to say the truth.

And I didn't really believe the truth.

I guess I couldn't believe the truth, you know.

So I said to her, no, my mother died when I was 10.

And she was like, what?

You know, because it was very rare.

There was no other kid in our school that had a mother die.

You know, in our elementary school, we were it.

And my mother was the head of the PTA in our elementary school.

And so after she died, they put a plaque up on the wall.

And it was...

stone wall.

So I remember thinking it looked like a grave and it said, Roseanne O'Donnell, what we are given, we shall keep.

And I remember thinking maybe that's where her body was in the middle of school, you know, like the things that kids will tell themselves if you don't tell them the truth, you know, so it's why I'm, I'm a very, very fierce truth teller in my life in every capacity.

And, uh, it hasn't always served me, but it's the only way I know how to live.

It may not have always served you, but it's always served the rest of us.

Oh, well, thank you for saying that.

That's very sweet.

When you lose your mom that early, do you just lose your sense of safety on the planet?

Yes.

And if so, have you ever found that again?

Because the abandonment issue is really interesting.

It's like you're abandoned by your safe place with your mom.

I also understand the very, having a very, very hard time with kids separating and not doing that gracefully.

And then the country not becoming a safe space.

Like, is this, do you ever feel safety?

No, I don't really.

But I try to not buy into it.

When I am forced to watch like I was as a kid during the Vietnam War.

murder and mayhem and chaos on TV, which I did in the 1970s, when before my mother died, right around that same time Saigon was falling.

And it was on the news 24 seven.

You know, I would cry and say to my father, you know, we have to help them.

We have to help them.

How can we help them?

And he would say, go to your room.

You're not allowed to watch the news anymore.

because it was too painful for me.

I was too, I felt too much for my own family to understand, you know, like they would often say to me, this didn't happen to you.

Like it doesn't happen to me in order for me to feel it.

You know, Shrink once said, most people have a window and then a glass pane and a screen and a shade.

and curtains and shutters.

She said, and you, all your windows are open to the outside.

So everything comes in.

You don't have any way to kind of filter it.

That's very helpful.

That's my wife.

That's a very helpful.

I feel very connected to you, Glennon.

I know all about you.

I've read all about you all these years.

We never really got to have this kind of one -on -one conversation, but I've always felt based on what I know about you and what I've felt and observed all these years that we were very similar in our essence, you know, and that, you know, you are the pain that you feel for others.

I feel as well.

And, you know, it's what inspires you to do the great work with your foundation and to give away all of this money and to throw light on the darkness.

You know, the day after 9 -11, I called every celebrity I knew.

But now, mind you, I was not in a good place.

And I'm admitting that.

So I don't know how my calls were received.

You know, mind you, I'm hysterical and screaming at, you know, Julia Roberts, you have to give a million dollars.

You have to, because my goal was the next day to have a hundred million dollars, not by anyone's name, just from the entertainment community thrown at what we thought would be the survivors and the burn units.

And, but there weren't any, right.

But.

At the time, that was what I thought.

So how do you throw light on the dark?

And every time that I hear of something else that your foundation has done, I think she's doing exactly that, right?

You can't just sit by and go, yeah, I'm not going to worry about that.

You know, and these billionaires who I don't understand, that they don't understand the joy they would get from opening.

An emergency room named after Rosa Parks in every city in the country might be a good way to spend some of their money instead of just amassing more and what it would do for them spiritually and emotionally.

The more -ness, I think, is at the heart of everything.

I do, too.

I have this weird memory of the first time I sat with Oprah.

At the end of the interview, she said, we were just talking about my book.

And then she looked at me and said, what is at the heart of racism?

And I was like, fuck.

And I said, fear.

And it still bugs me probably every night because that's not true.

I think what's at the heart of it is greed.

Greed is the driving force, the moreness, the conquering, the inability to sit and be grateful for what you have, the drive that keeps these men needing more land, needing more power, needing whatever.

That's the thing.

Then they make up racism.

They make it up.

They would just think about America like we needed more, more, more, more, more.

So we have to create a way of thinking that makes people think that a different group is less than them so that we can justify bringing the slaves over so that we can justify genocide.

So we have to make this up in their head.

We have to create a poison.

that makes them think, that dehumanizes, so that they can use these people's labor to build what we don't need.

So true.

And now it's exactly what the president and his administration is doing.

Right.

It's exactly that, to diminish, deride all of these people and fraction them off and call them the doers of bad deeds and make them.

And their lives a joke so that you can put them in alligator Alcatraz.

Yeah.

You know, when you're saying keep spreading light, it feels to me like a life and death situation just internally, like a soul life or death.

Because it's one thing for me to point greed, greed, greed.

This is what's doing it.

And then it's another thing to look at my own hoarding.

in my own life, if it's a sickness that I can see, I can see it now.

I can see it.

We can all see what unchecked hoarding and greed and individualism does.

And we're looking at it.

So it feels...

Like it's the most important thing in the world then to say, if that is true, Maya Angelou said, if I'm human, nothing human can be foreign to me, which means what is unchecked in them is also inside of me.

And so I could have this equal and opposite reaction where I am looking inside and saying, if that's poison, then let me get it out of me.

Let me live with such...

generosity and sharing and unhoarding and community.

Let me just do the polar opposite and see if it doesn't bring magic to me and the people around me.

But at the end of the day, as Joni Mitchell says, it all comes down to you.

It all comes down to you because you can have these great philosophical understanding and this kind of meta.

concept of all the ills of the world.

But at the end of the day, it comes down to you.

And if you're still hoarding food, clothing, love, money.

If you're still doing that in your own life, you see how hard it is.

It manifests specifically with individual people.

But on a sociological scale, it manifests exponentially, right, with all these billionaires and how we keep track of the billionaires and how, you know, we're saying very casually on the news, if they say it on the news, you know, Trump has made this many billions of dollars since being in office.

There's an emolument.

laws, ladies and gentlemen, he's a grifter.

What will it take for America to really look and see that?

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Rosie, what was your favorite thing about having your show?

Do you have a favorite moment?

I think my favorite moment was when this young boy did the opening announce and said that he had a Titanic postcard that his grandfather had given him because he had survived the Titanic and he was trying to sell it on the air in order to get his best friend's mother a bone marrow transplant.

And I called the producers of the movie Titanic and they were not interested in helping.

But I called the producers of the musical on Broadway, the Titanic, and they said they would love to do it and that they would give the full price that the bone marrow transplant cost.

And we had the entire cast come on as a surprise and sing and then take the postcard and give this boy a check.

to give to his best friend's mother who happened to be there as well.

So those moments, the human interest moments are the moments that I remember.

Now, of course, Barbra Streisand, I don't even, I can't watch it still.

People like go, I watch it every year.

I'm like, I've never watched it because I put it on and I start to cry.

So I can't even watch it.

The whole thing, you know?

Yes, because it felt like my mother was walking through the curtain.

It felt like, You know, now listen, she is exactly 20 years older than me, Barbra Streisand.

She's 83 now.

I'm 63.

She's born on April 24th.

She'll be 84.

And, you know, she's not old enough to be my mother, but my mother revered her and loved her so much.