Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom From Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans by Sheinelle Jones - 11

How Do You Raise Five Boys? Forty Pounds of Chicken Breast and Half a Cow at a Time

Diane Walters, Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski’s mom

When I launched the “Through Mom’s Eyes” project and started talking with moms of successful, accomplished kids from all walks of life, my twins were five, my oldest was eight…and I was stretched thin. Very thin. I was trying to juggle being productive in my career and being a present mom—and the struggle, as they say, was real.

Six days a week, my alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. And even though I loved my job and was used to the predawn wake-up calls, it was sometimes tough to open my eyes and get moving. I would finish a live broadcast, and then dash through the daily obstacle course of meetings, on-location shoots, and promotional commitments; I’d pick my kids up from school when I could and squeeze in their varied list of extracurriculars before trying to get us all back home for nightly dinners together. Lots of folks will tell you that morning TV is one of the best jobs a mother of young kids can have and, trust me, it is—but it isn’t easy.

So, as I prepared to interview Diane Walters, the mother of legendary NFL tight end Rob Gronkowski and four other sons, all of whom became professional athletes, I had lots of questions but just one theme: How in the world had she done it?

By “it,” I mean, succeed at raising five big, strapping sons, with booming voices, irrepressible energy, and bottomless appetites, who not only excelled at the sports they loved enough to make careers out of them, but who also excelled in school and in life. Each of Diane’s boys—four pro football players and one pro baseball player—received athletic college scholarships. Just how rare is “the Gronkowski phenomenon”? Researchers at Yale University have calculated the odds of having three sons playing in the NFL at one in thirty-one million. Going for four? You have a better chance of winning the lottery—twice! So, clearly something special was happening in Diane’s household and the proof was in the payoff—times five.

Most famously, Rob, whose legions of fans know him as “Gronk,” spent eleven seasons in the NFL, first with the New England Patriots, then with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. A four-time Super Bowl champion and five-time Pro Bowl selection who also made the NFL’s 100th Anniversary All-Time Team, Rob, who retired (for a second time) in 2022, holds the record for the most touchdowns by a tight end in a single season.

Super impressive, right? And, when it comes to sports stats, that’s not even the half of it. Yet what Diane genuinely seems proudest of is that her boys—including Gordie, Dan, Chris, and Glenn—are good guys who remain tight-knit. They run their family businesses together and are raising their own children to be close too. Given that, and all of their material success, I thought for sure Diane must hold the keys to the kingdom of maternal success and while I didn’t expect her to just hand them over, I was hoping she could at least draw me a map.

It turns out Diane is one of those women who would hand another mom in need the map, the keys, and the car with a driver (so you can grab a much-needed nap in the back seat)—if she could. She has wisdom to share, and she believes that, as a mom, she did a lot right. But Diane is also quick to point out that she learned plenty of lessons the hard way—by sheer trial and error—as every mom must. And some of those lessons, she simply can’t remember. It’s not that she wasn’t one hundred percent in it with her boys. It’s just that decades of sleep deprivation will do that to you.

As for that precious map I was hoping for, her main directive is that, in parenting as in football, there’s rarely a straight, clear path to success. You gotta just keep matriculating the ball down the field, no matter what.

When we try to get into the specifics of exactly how she did that, Diane can’t define in detail how she made it all work—not that her way would work universally, anyway. Every mom knows that every kid is different. So, “When people say, ‘How did you do it?’ ” Diane muses, she can’t hand over a playbook. Instead, she has a standard answer that’s both short and true: “It was a lot of work and no sleep,” she says.

I imagine that any mom who spent two decades of her life as chief cook, caregiver, and counselor to five kids—chauffeuring them to and from school as well as an estimated eighteen thousand practices in a half dozen sports at multiple locations over that time—would be similarly challenged. When the demands we face are at their peak, there’s no time to think about how to get things done—you just do and keep doing. And when that peak lasts for years , it can often feel like a game of survival.

Even with the help of the boys’ father, Gordy, Diane’s husband at the time, life was so overwhelming that she just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Some nights, to save time the next morning, she wouldn’t merely lay out her clothes, she’d wear them to bed.

With the first four boys each born barely a year apart, those early days were intense. “Two and a half minutes to take a shower [at night] was the only time I had to myself for years,” she recalls. “Everything is so fast, it’s just a blur.” But if there’s one thing Diane has stayed clear about, it’s that organization kept her and her household sane. Diane is one of the most organized moms I’ve ever met! In fact, each time she was pregnant with another child, she packed her hospital bag way in advance, left family meals stockpiled in the freezer, and had all of the other kids’ clothes, schedules, and schoolwork in order for the days she’d be away.

That kind of attention to her kids’ needs seems to have helped create a home where each of her sons felt individually seen and cared for. In fact, she says, laughing, even today, “They all write the same thing in cards to me: From your favorite son .” Maya Angelou famously said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” It’s easy to forget sometimes that our children are “people” too.

You wouldn’t need more than a few minutes with Diane to see why each of her boys feels so special. Diane is one of those people who is totally present and oozes warmth when she talks. She’s not self-conscious or waiting to jump in and get her point across; she calmly makes you feel like every word you say matters. And even as a longtime empty nester, she’s still the consummate caregiver. When she encourages our Today Show crew to gather around and dig into her famous chicken soufflé, it’s easy to see why her house was always the one where everyone wanted to be—and why her sons still eagerly gather around her table.

But surely, with so much talent—and testosterone—under one roof, there had to be big, ugly brawls and crazy levels of competition. Between having twins and two boys who are soccer players, I see it with my own kids—and I’m conflicted about the best approach to take as a mom. On the one hand, I know competition can fuel growth. On the other hand, everyone deserves to feel loved and celebrated by their family in their own right, and too much competition might lead to hurt feelings or division in the family. So, in our house, I’m always guarding against my kids feeling like they’re competing with each other. Not to be all Pollyanna, but I want my kids to support each other and feel like they’re a team.

Diane let me know that two seemingly opposing things can be true. Her boys “totally were competitive,” she says, adding that even when it brought them to blows, she mostly stayed out of it. “But at the end of the day they would root for each other. If one could do something, the next one could do it better. They totally thrived off of each other, one hundred percent.”

As for her hands-off approach, even to their fighting, “There’s no sense wasting your breath,” she says. “If they’re not getting hurt, you just let ’em go.” In a pinch, a big green wooden spoon, which she still keeps handy, served as the ultimate referee during more than a few early brotherly battles in Gronk Nation. But usually, as quickly as a fight would erupt, it would end. And, as parents, we need to stay mindful that most kids get over things quickly. “Yes, they would fight,” Diane says, but they’d be mad at each other one minute and then “run out the door and go play basketball.”

I wondered how, in the midst of almost constant mayhem, you spot one kid’s unique gifts, no less five boys’ individual talents and strengths. “You don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘ You’re going to be a professional baseball player and you’re going to be a professional football player,’’ Diane says. Instead, she noted when her kids were serious about honing their skills and where they took initiative. The guys also kept setting and resetting the bar for one another.

While most kids were sound asleep in the wee hours before school, hers were working out and practicing. Of course, even with their dedication and obvious skills, she knew there was no guarantee any of them would make a career out of professional sports.

“You might think they’re good in your little town, then you move them to the city and now you’re competing against the state, and then the country,” Diane says, noting that even hyper competition at home is no match for what your children will face in the larger world, in any industry. “There’s a lot to it.”

To help her kids pursue their dreams, she explained, the whole family had to be all in. For example, her oldest son, Gordie, wanted to play baseball in college and then the pros. Since scouts didn’t typically go to where they lived in Buffalo, they had to film him themselves and travel to different schools to show those films. It took a strategic plan and a significant commitment of time, effort, and resources to get him noticed. Luckily, it paid off.

But alongside her willingness to fully support her sons’ athletic ambitions was an unshakable resolve that school came first. Diane made it clear to her boys that “getting an education was huge, because sports don’t last forever.” Clearly, they listened. Chris was accepted to Harvard, Dan was a Rhodes scholar, and Glenn graduated with two majors and a minor. Today, they’re all retired from sports and on to business ventures. Mom always knows best, doesn’t she?

“I also tried hard to make sure they were very good, respectable men,” Diane says, her voice filled with pride. Expecting to get an earful about the tough love and hard choices it takes to raise a bunch of boys with the grit, discipline, and determination to succeed as athletes and in life, I asked—redundantly, I thought—“So, were you a tough cookie?” I almost fell over when she shook her head, no.

“Not at all,” she says. “I didn’t make them clean up their rooms. They didn’t really have chores. If their bedrooms were a mess, if that’s how they wanted to live, that was fine—I’d just shut the door. Otherwise, all you do is end up yelling at them all day long, and I didn’t want to do that.

“I had a couch and a TV in the family room and, because there was a sense that in having other furniture they were just going to break it, I didn’t have anything [nice]. You don’t put white carpet in your house and expect five boys not to get it dirty,” she adds, shrugging. “In other words, don’t do the things you know are going to be a problem.”

Sure, the idea of choosing your battles makes sense, and yet I was confused. If you don’t demand discipline and enforce it, how do you get disciplined kids? Especially five of them? One key, she explains, is clear, ironclad expectations around the things that matter most to you. Another is role modeling, which the boys did—consciously or unconsciously—for one another.

“You came home, you did your homework,” she says. “If you have a hockey tournament Saturday and Sunday in Toronto, that means Friday night you need to do your homework. They were self-motivated and inspired each other.”

Now, let me pause here for a second because I know what you’re thinking: Yeah, right! Or, Not my kid! That was my first thought too. But a common thread I’ve found among the stories of accomplished adults is that many were self-starters as kids. They may not have loved doing homework, but if getting it done was the gateway to their being able to pursue their passion, they did it. They often embodied that quote that Denzel Washington made famous in his movie The Great Debaters : “Do what you gotta do, so you can do what you wanna do.”

Somehow, Diane’s family managed to do that too, and more. While it was clear that her boys were ultimately most interested in football and baseball—as a family, they tried virtually every sport, including skiing and golf. In fact, Gronk played mostly hockey and basketball until he was in high school.

While Diane left the home front football scrimmages to the guys, she says, “I played a lot of baseball with them in the backyard with tennis balls. We would spray-paint the grass with lines, [we] had team benches and put signs up on the fence around the yard.” Am I playing outside enough with MY kids? I wondered. As the door to one area of my mom-insecurity creaked open in my mind, another one slid out.

“How did you feed them?” I ask, barely hiding my horror at even the thought of having to feed five boys and their father multiple times a day.

“They ate everything, anything, and at any time,” she answers. “It was constant. Just constant. I had two freezers and two refrigerators. I would buy forty pounds of chicken breast and half a cow at a time.” Say, what?

I stop her right there, wanting to make sure I had not misheard. “Half a cow?”

“Yes,” Diane repeats. “Half a cow.” She then describes going to the grocery store with two carts. She’d push one cart full of groceries with a baby (or two) riding in the front, while her oldest pushed the other grocery cart with another sibling (or two) riding in it. Weekly. I felt a little weak just thinking about it. And, keep in mind, as the boys grew and the demands on their schedules intensified, there had to be meals on hand to accommodate their different needs at all hours of the day and night, with zero days off. That’s right: zero.

Diane’s strategy was to keep an ever-expanding, ever-ready rotation of casseroles in those freezers that the boys could heat up on their own whenever they got home from practice. Suddenly, I understood why almost every NFL and NBA mom I ever met has a signature dish. Diane; Shaq’s mom, Lucille; Kevin Durant’s mom, Wanda—they all have these go-to, one-pan, deep-dish, easy-to-prep meals that are satisfying, especially to a kid who is burning up mega-calories a day. And their kids rave about them! Diane’s boys’ favorite is a recipe passed down from her mother that tastes almost like chicken and stuffing, only creamier thanks to plenty of added milk and eggs. I can vouch that it’s yummy! And Diane insists it’s super quick and easy to make—even for a kitchen novice, like me.

I have to confess something here: I always feel a little self-conscious when moms describe their most beloved homemade dishes. Cooking is one of my weak spots, and I feel guilty for not “enjoying” my time in the kitchen. I try to make sure our whole family sits down to dinner together most nights, but I’m more of a spaghetti and “taco Tuesday” (even if it’s Thursday) type of cook. Although I get inspired watching social media cooks do their thing, I haven’t attempted to make a single one of the recipes that they make look so yummy and easy. So, I definitely don’t have a go-to casserole, and hearing about the moms who do makes me feel like I’m denying my kids entree (or entrée!) into some special Happy Memories Meal Club.

But here’s the thing: as my kids will tell you, they don’t like casseroles. In fact, they don’t even like it if their meat and potatoes touch—so this casserole-triggered FOMO is clearly my issue, not theirs. And it’s not as if Diane implies that her casseroles were the key to her kids’ happy childhoods or her being crowned best mom on the block. For her, a family full of gigantic appetites dictated by constantly changing schedules was simply a daily problem to be solved, and hearty, freezable one-pan meals was a solution.

Diane had no illusions about competing on Top Chef —and no desire to. Providing food for her family was a purely practical matter that, over time, happened to become part of her love language, not just to her own kids, but to their teammates who ravenously consumed her casseroles through the years. Even the name of her signature dish—Chicken Sue Flay—gives down-home and delish vibes, not to be taken too seriously. I have total respect for all the killer-cook moms out there who manage to gourmet it up for their families every morning and evening and send the kids off to school with beautiful Bento-boxed lunches, but I have also learned that there’s no one way to get the job done well.

Diane’s approach to meal making reminds me of my college roommate, who’s a wiz at whipping up kid-friendly dinners for her own three children. She once saved the day for me when I texted her for help figuring out how Uche and I could get our kids to eat more veggies. My friend texted back immediately: zucchini french fries! She walked me through how to cut the zucchini and coat the pieces with seasoned panko before baking. They were a huge hit, and I felt so grateful that my mom-hive had come through once again.

In families, food is never just food. It’s an expression of care and love, built around all the things that make every family unique. But, at their root, meals are simply meant to satisfy. And that means not just different traditions and tastes but different schedules, budgets, allergies, and expectations around what mealtimes should be versus what they, practically speaking, can be. Maybe that’s why I’m always interested in how other moms use meals to impart values and feed their kids’ spirits, not just their stomachs.

The journey from Diane’s frozen casserole days to the here and now, when her grandchildren are scarfing down her Sue Flay, is sometimes tricky for Diane to wrap her mind around. The first time she went to Gillette Stadium in Rob’s rookie days with the Patriots, a girl in front of her had a jersey that said “Gronkowski” on the back. Why is she wearing my son’s jersey? Diane wondered, genuinely confused.

Eventually, she would get used to seeing her son’s name on jerseys, whether at a stadium or in the supermarket. And, while that can be a thrill, watching your children play professional sports is an emotional roller coaster. Even when they’re adults, they’re still your kids—and it’s not easy to watch them take hard hits on the field and process mistakes and losses in front of a global audience. You never get comfortable with the physical risks, Diane says, but she has no regrets about encouraging them athletically and is proud of what her kids have accomplished and the choices they have made.

What’s extra gratifying now, she says, with a sweet, satisfied look in her eyes, is seeing how all of her sons express their appreciation for the sacrifices she made over the years—through the countless practices and freezing cold games, the wins and losses, frustrations and injuries—and reflect on it all so fondly.

One day at a time, one hockey practice, bandaged bruise, and reheated casserole at a time, Diane helped build a supportive foundation for her boys to stand on and ultimately become their best selves. Isn’t that really all any decent mom is trying to do? But when you’re in the thick of it—changing diapers, blowing noses, breaking up fights, or helping with a fifth-grade project that, even as a full-grown person, you can’t quite figure out, it’s easy to wish for better days. Or to maybe just wish that you were a better mom.

These days, when I find myself sliding down that rabbit hole, I think of Diane and check myself. I try to find gratitude even when I’m exhausted and my family’s routine couldn’t seem more impossible or less fun. I try to recharge my can-do spirit even if all I have at my disposal is a too-short shower. And, on the days when I realize my kid forgot his water bottle or shin guards, or I’m shivering on the sidelines of a blowout game as a cold, steady drizzle mirrors my mood, I take a deep breath and close my eyes for a sec, conjuring Diane’s most powerful, most reassuring words: “When you get to be my age, you can stand in the shower until that hot water tank goes empty.”

In the meantime, I’m all in, one hundred percent.

The secret to my mom’s happiness is that she’s constantly falling in love. She’s falling in love with a new book, a new movie, a new restaurant, a new friend she met on the Amtrak train…that’s what keeps Mom young. She’s always falling in love…over and over again. Of all the lessons she’s ever taught me, that is by far the most important.

—Hoda Kotb, cohost, The Today Show