It’s just me today, and I’m trying something a little different. After a couple of episodes where I mostly ranted, I wanted more structure. So this week comes in two parts: the Weeds, what’s been weighing on us, and the Wonder, what’s been getting me through.

The weeds are easy to name. The conversation about women online is focused on everything that isn’t working, and it should be. But it can leave you feeling hopeless. Two steps forward, five steps back.

The wonder surprised me. It’s the writers of Ted Lasso Season 4. Yes, it’s sentimental. Yes, it wraps everything up in a bow. And they still walked straight into the hard stuff: motherhood, ambition, pregnancy, what happens when a woman is the boss. I sit with struggle in my office every day. I don’t need my TV to do it too.

No spoilers, I promise.

What we talk about:

* Why Ted Lasso Season 4 felt like it was written by women

* The women’s issues the writers weren’t afraid to take on

* Rebecca and the question of whether she’s really a feminist

* Why “sentimental” isn’t a flaw right now

* The beach read of television, and an episode that deserves the Emmy

* More wonder: the Minnesota women (and fans) who made me feel welcome in sport

* The bar in town that only shows women’s sports

* A new segment, Tourist in My Own Town: a weekend up north at Breezy Point

* What I’m reading: Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan

➡️ Website: https://thewonder.life/

➡️Join Our community: https://wonder.myflodesk.com/womenofwonder

Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. 🌿

Until next time, keep looking for the wonder in the weeds. And maybe you are the wonder.

It’s just me today, and I need to talk about something that’s been on my mind all week.

At a congressional hearing, Senator Eric Schmitt tried to catch Jack Smith in a lie about being at an Atlanta Hawks game. He was actually at a Maryland vs. Iowa women’s game to see Caitlin Clark. The Hawkeyes, not the Hawks. It would be funny if it weren’t so telling. In this episode I dig into the layers of that moment: the disregard for the truth, the doubling down, and the fact that it never even crossed his mind that women play basketball.

Then I zoom out to a week of news that hit women from every angle: Title IX clawbacks, a Senate bill on college athletics, the Cornell case, and an LSU football player back on campus. And I bring it home to the question I always come back to as a parent. We’ve taught our daughters how to protect themselves. Have we taught our sons to step in?

What we talk about:

* Why every topic my Gen Z daughter and I pick ends up being about women

* The Hawks vs. Hawkeyes hearing moment, piece by piece

* How women’s sports get erased by the people claiming to protect them

* Title IX and the college sports bill

* The Cornell 57 and the LSU case

* Raising upstanders, not just “good guys”

* The uncomfortable conversations I had with my own kids, starting when they were little

* Punishment vs. consequences (more on this next time)

* What I’m watching: the new season of Ted Lasso

Content note: this episode discusses sexual assault.

Until next time, keep looking for the wonder in the weeds. And maybe you are the wonder.

Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. 🌿

Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

Faith was four years old when she started singing “Our Song” everywhere we went.

The grocery store. The car. The little ice cream shop where the lady behind the counter thought she was the cutest thing she had ever seen.

She has been a Taylor Swift fan for as long as Taylor Swift has existed, and I have had a front-row seat watching my daughter grow up right alongside Taylor’s career.

So when we sat down in a coffee shop to plan our next XwhyZ episode, it was only a matter of time before we landed here.

Faith came in with a thesis, a notebook full of research, and a warning:

We have never been able to be normal about this woman.

Her argument is that Taylor was never really the underdog.

She has been a businesswoman since she was 16, running her own career in an industry built by and for men, while playing the girl next door who wears T-shirts and sits on the bleachers.

That gap between the relatable persona and the mogul is where a lot of our complicated feelings come from.

We loved her when she was humble, then got tired of her acting surprised.

We love her success, then bristle when she asks for more of it.

And then we got to the part where we actually disagreed.

Taylor Swift Is a Billionaire. Now What?

Taylor Swift is a billionaire.

Dolly Parton never was, because she gave so much of her money away.

Faith wants Taylor to put her name, and not just her money, behind a cause and ask her fans to follow her there.

I found myself defending her, which surprised both of us.

She’s 35. She just finished the biggest tour in music history.

And I keep coming back to the same question:

Why are women held to an impossible standard where success only counts if you give half of it away while championing 77 causes at the same time?

We don’t settle it.

That’s kind of the point.

Having complicated feelings about Taylor Swift feels a lot like having complicated feelings about a friend you grew up with.

You love them. You wish they’d do a few things differently. And you’re not going to feel the same way at 20 that you did at four.

And somewhere out there, a brand-new twelve-year-old is hearing “Fifteen” for the first time and thinking it was written just for her.

In This Episode

Faith and I talk about:

* Why Faith says Taylor Swift was never the underdog

* The Life of a Showgirl backlash, and why not everything has to be her best work

* The double-edged sword of being “relatable” as a young woman in the public eye

* Folklore, the pandemic, and the start of what Faith’s sister calls the Taylor Swift “mass psychosis”

* The $1 countersuit, and what it said about who she was at 21

* Political neutrality, great power, great responsibility, and whether that line belongs to Spider-Man or JFK

* Dolly Parton, billionaires, and whether Taylor owes her fans more than she’s giving

* The Gen X vs. Gen Z split on what we expect from the most famous woman in the world

This Week’s Wonder

Put on the Taylor Swift song that makes you dance around the kitchen.

Then find a charity you believe in and give it a little something.

Because maybe you don’t have to choose between enjoying someone’s success and expecting more from the people who have the power to make a difference.

What Should We Talk About Next?

Got a topic you want Faith and me to take on next?

Leave it in the comments or send us a message.

And if we got a fact wrong, please politely correct us.

Facts only, not our opinions. 😉

My Gen Z kid handed me an article, and it turned into a whole conversation about who actually gets listened to.

I want to tell you how this episode started, because it is very on brand for us. We spent the first few minutes arguing about the countdown, me taking a sip of coffee right in the middle of the intro, and a genuinely unhinged bit about my Minnesota loon mug. If you have ever wondered whether Faith and I have our act together before we hit record, please let this put the question to rest. We do not. That is sort of the whole charm.

But then Faith brought me an article, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

It was an opinion piece in the Hollywood Reporter, and the headline alone was designed to make you mad. The gist was that the industry has gone soft, that the “quarter zips have taken over,” that the suits have lost their nerve, and that what Hollywood really needs is to bring its “monsters” back. Faith read it and got angry. Then she read it again and landed somewhere more interesting than anger, which is usually where the good conversations live.

Because underneath the provocation, we kept bumping into the same question. Who gets to show up as a mess and still be taken seriously? When a man rolls out of bed and shows up in a wrinkled shirt, he is a genius who cannot be bothered. When a woman does it, she is unprofessional. We are held to an impossibly high standard, and a lot of men are held to almost none, and somehow that gets framed as the natural order of things.

Here is the part that stuck with me most, and I said it out loud on the mic so I would have to sit with it. When a system stops working for men, they get to change the system and call it progress. When the same system does not work for women, women get punished for trying to change it at all. Once you see that pattern, you cannot unsee it. It shows up in offices, in who gets funded, in whose anger is treated as a real signal and whose is treated as an overreaction. It shows up in our own relationships, in the quiet math of money and power we do not always say out loud.

That is really what this episode is about. Not one silly article. The much older, much bigger habit of not listening to women, and what it looks like to notice that from two different generations at the same kitchen table.

Talking about it with my daughter is its own kind of gift. She sees things I was trained not to name. I have context she is still gathering. Somewhere in the overlap is the actual conversation, and I think that overlap is worth recording.

We wrap up with a couple of things worth your watchlist, including Elizabeth Meriwether’s Furious and Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, because we cannot help ourselves.

Come listen to the whole thing. Bring your own mug. And if this landed for you, subscribe so the next one finds you.

Keep looking for the wonder in the weeds.

Cristie Ritz-King, PsyD is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I found Chelsea Laliberte-Barnes the way I find most things that stop me in my tracks: on the internet. It was a short video of her talking to her camera, ten years after a federal law passed in memory of her brother, finally getting to meet the congresswoman who co-sponsored it. Eighteen years after his death, she was a blubbering mess. And she was also a woman who had spent those eighteen years building a movement.

That is the whole show, right there. That is the thing I keep trying to say.

Chelsea lost her brother Alex to an overdose when she was 23 and he was 20, during the early stages of the opioid crisis, before most communities knew what they were dealing with. Out of that grief, she and her family started Live4Lolly, named for his nickname. They had no idea what they were doing. Today it is one of the largest harm reduction and recovery providers in Illinois and the Midwest.

What I loved about this conversation is that Chelsea refuses to hand you a formula. Harm reduction, she explained, is not only about naloxone and clean syringes and testing strips. It is seatbelts and sunscreen. It is asking someone how you can serve them today instead of demanding they meet you in your world first. As she put it, harm reduction is radical love through acceptance. And that framework turns out to describe a lot more than drug use. It describes how to live.

A few things from this episode I keep sitting with:

* Healing is not a place you arrive. Recovery is an active verb. You are always healing, and a hard day at year eighteen does not mean you are doing it wrong.

* Meaning-making does not require a law. It can be leaving the house. Talking to one person. Brushing your teeth.

* We were never properly introduced to grief in this culture, even though it is one of the few things guaranteed to all of us.

* Most of us avoid the gray because black and white feels safer. Chelsea’s whole life is proof that the gray is where the real work, and the real people, are.

We also talked about where the wonder is right now, when the actual earth is on fire and the news gives you a fresh thing to grieve most mornings. For both of us, it is the people showing up. The ones who are done sitting back. My own kids carrying naloxone in their glove boxes the way my generation carried spare change. A generation you cannot fool.

If Chelsea’s fierceness comes through even a fraction as much here as it did live, you are in for something good.

You can find Chelsea at chelsealalibertebarnes.com and on Instagram at @mentalhealth.chels. She is in private practice in Illinois and started a group called Liberal Moms of the Northwest Suburbs, getting women into community doing uncomfortable things together.

What I’m reading:

* The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. A twisty whodunit set in the Adirondacks with a sharp haves-and-have-nots undercurrent. The opening is a little disorienting, with each chapter a different person across two timelines. Hang in there. It pays off, and the ending is not what you think you figured out.

* Unleash the Girls by Lisa Z. Lindahl, the woman who invented the very first sports bra, the jog bra. A great story about women’s entrepreneurship in the seventies that feels remarkably familiar now.

Until next time, keep looking for the wonder in the weeds.

Everyone prepares you for freshman year. Nobody prepares you for the second one.

In this XYZ segment of Wonder in the Weeds, Faith and I talk about the sophomore slump from both sides of it. I am the Gen X mom who has now sent two kids off twice, and Faith is the Gen Z daughter who calls sophomore year “the year I made all my mistakes.” We had been circling this conversation for months and finally sat down and did it, cameras and all.

Freshman year comes with scaffolding. Dorm parents, RAs, study hours in the lobby, and a general agreement that you are allowed to make a fool of yourself. Sophomore year, that support quietly disappears and the expectations go up. You are not new anymore, but you are not an upperclassman either. You are the forgotten child of the university, and most people are too embarrassed to say out loud that it is hard.

We get into the honors credit that almost did not happen, the retail job Faith quit a week before Christmas, the bad apartment her dad and I knew was a mistake and let her sign for anyway, and the night she called me from a parking lot with a man following her. Every one of those stories comes back to the same tension: when do you step in, and when do you let the natural consequence do the teaching?

For the parents reading, my honest position is that this one is black and white. You cannot jump in and rescue your kid from a very adult problem at their very adult university. You can acknowledge it. You can offer options instead of instructions. You can ask, “do you want a suggestion, or do you just need to vent?” What you cannot do is fix it without also telling them you did not think they could.

For the students, Faith says it better than I can. Let all of your feelings be felt, and then do not let those feelings make your decisions. Some emotions you can talk yourself out of after 72 hours. Some demand to be felt and will not be negotiated with. Learn the difference, and do not sign a lease or change a major in the middle of the second kind.

This conversation is for you if you are dropping a kid off for round two and nobody told you it would hit harder than the first time. If you are 19 or 20 and privately convinced no one in the history of the world has felt what you are feeling. If you are standing in the middle of the mess like a half cleaned out closet, certain you should never have started. Or if you just need to hear that growing pains are still growing pains at 20, and that most of the time the answer really is to get up and go to class.

Cristie Ritz-King, PsyD is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sending a kid to college is different every single time, even when it is the same kid and the same school.

In this episode I talk through what I wish I had known as a parent dropping kids off at college, both as a mom on my third and final one and as a therapist. I get into why you should not try to be the parent you see on TikTok, why now is not the time to cram 18 years of wisdom into three weeks, and how to tell the difference between pain and discomfort when your instinct is to swoop in and fix everything.

I also get practical. The proxy permissions and FERPA forms you need signed before they turn 18 and disappear into a dorm. The university calendar dates that are actually your job to know. What to buy before you go versus what will already be picked clean off the shelves in a college town. Bank accounts, emergency money, and what happens when an ambulance bill shows up in your mailbox.

We come back to the four pillars of explicit parenting throughout: know yourself, know your relationships, be consistent and persistent, stay curious and not judgmental. Because the medical emergency kit that made one mom feel calm got her sons roasting her online, and neither one of those outcomes is about the Band-Aids.

This one is for you if you are dropping off for the first time, the third time, or the twelfth time. It is new every time.

Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

Cristie Ritz-King, PsyD is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.