Drew Barrymore recalled the horrifying moment she witnessed one of her daughters come off her e-bike during a family vacation in France. The actress revealed during an appearance on Thursday's The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that her daughter had to be rushed to the hospital and "spent days in an E.R." after she "ripped her whole elbow open" after the scary encounter with her electric bike. Drew did not reveal which daughter had the accident. She shares Olive, 12, and Frankie, 10, with her ex-husband, Will Kopelman.
Drew explained that she was supposed to meet up with Stephen's wife, Evelyn Colbert, but her plans were derailed after her daughter's fall. "The last time we were supposed to get together, my daughter ended up having an accident," she revealed. "I was like calling her," she added, prompting Stephen to ask if her daughter was OK. "She's fine, yes. Everything's fine," she assured him.
Detailing the accident, Drew said: "My daughter, actually she got in an e-bike accident. In France, which sounds so fabulous. Yes, so we were in fabulous France and then she had an e-bike accident." Despite the scary situation, Drew praised her daughter's quick thinking to stop the bleeding. She added: "She was like a mile out in the mountains and ripped her whole elbow open. We spent days in an E.R. in and out. But she ripped off her bra and turned it into a tourniquet."
After Stephen praised her daughter's emergency response, Drew took no credit for preparing them for such situations. "No! That's just who she is," she said, adding: "And I just marvel at her." When Stephen insisted that she "must have done something right" to raise such resourceful daughters, she joked she could only hope to be "that cool."
Following her divorce from Will in August 2016, after they announced their split that April, after four years of marriage, Drew admitted she was crushed that her daughters weren't growing up in a "traditional" household. "Everything to me was very devastating and took me a long time to recover from, if it wasn't in the traditional family dynamic that I swore I would do for my family because I did not grow up that way," she explained on The Drew Barrymore Show in March.
Reflecting on her childhood experiences, Drew continued: "It's weird stuff like that. It's soup when you're sick. I remember all the kids at school would go into the office to call their parents when they were sick, and I could never get a hold of anybody. And I was so jealous of those kids who would call and be like, 'Mom, Dad, come pick me up.' I just would sit there and be like, 'What's that like?'"
Drew grew up estranged from her mother, Jaid Barrymore, and emancipated herself from her actor dad, John Drew Barrymore, when she was 14. While Drew's family dynamic is not what she hoped for, she has learned to be "confident" as a mother despite her troubled childhood.
"If you don't grow up in a perfect way with a perfect family, you fear the blueprint and you go, 'I want to do things differently," she explained in a January episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. "I felt unconfident, like this was the stakes of my life, and it took a few years, honestly, to have that confidence."