We got all the way to the end of a really good conversation about artificial intelligence and I realized I had never pressed the button.

Carla’s response was not annoyance. It was relief. She said she has been so immersed in AI, where everything is perfect and programmed, that a human forgetting something felt like a gift.

So we did it again. And this one was the same conversation and a completely different one.

Here is where we each started.

Carla spent the last year and a half working in East Africa on mental health. In Kenya there is something like one certified therapist for every 100,000 people. She built a program putting counselors into schools, and it worked so well she wanted to spread it across the region and could not, because there were not enough therapists to spread. So her team built a chatbot instead. Swahili, English and Sheng. Running on WhatsApp, because that is what people already had. Crisis keywords built in. School counselors reporting back every month with new slang, because the language kids use for wanting to die changes faster than any guardrail can keep up with.

She came in as someone who has seen AI be the difference between something and nothing.

I came in ranting. I had done a whole episode about AI in the therapy office. Note taking software listening in on sessions. Recruitment emails landing in my inbox weekly, offering me more money than I make as a therapist to go help these companies do my job. It struck me as funny in a bleak way, being paid well to train the thing that would put me out of work.

But my real objection was never about my job. It is that these models are built to give you what you want. That is the design. Take you in, learn you, feed it back. That is the exact opposite of what a therapist does. We are trained not to hand you answers. The work is getting you to a place where you find them yourself.

And then we both moved.

Carla realized partway through that she has not been using AI as a therapist at all. She has been using it as a coach. Situational. Eleven o’clock at night, at a crossroads, no one awake to call. She writes a careful prompt, she asks for brutal feedback, she gets something she had not considered. That is a skill. She has it because she is 56 and has been wordsmithing professionally for twenty years.

I moved on access. I have never had a problem with video therapy, because getting into someone’s home who cannot leave it is a good thing. Rural mental health deserts are not just a Kenya problem. There are plenty of them in the United States. If a tool fills a gap where there is otherwise nothing, I am not going to argue against nothing.

Then Carla told me the piece that gave me actual chills.

Her students had human counselors first. They sat with Joseph at school. Then they went home to the village where there was no one, and they opened the chatbot on their phone. And I said, I would bet money they were hearing Joseph in their heads when they read it.

That is what makes it a tool. It was an extension of a person they already trusted.

Which brings us to the thing that worries both of us, and it is not the technology.

I work with a lot of people coming out of abusive relationships. What abuse does is erode your sense that you know anything about yourself. Rebuilding that self trust is most of the work. So when one of them tells me they asked ChatGPT what to do, my answer is no. You already know the answer to that.

Now picture someone who never built it in the first place. Ten, eleven, twelve years old. Identity not formed yet. And here is a machine that always agrees, always affirms, always has an answer that fits the shape of the question.

Carla can ask a bot if her shoes match her outfit and disagree with it. She has fifty six years of knowing herself. She said she watches people panic when Claude goes down, and it is not about the outage. It is that they have stopped trusting their own work.

We talked about insurance, because you cannot talk about access without it. Sliding scale sometimes still puts therapy out of reach. Carla’s version of a good outcome is one session a month with a human, with AI as scaffolding in between. My worry about the in between is whether you bring it back to the human to process, or whether you are just going to the machine because the machine will finally tell you what to do.

She also told me about a guardrail they could not build. They wanted the chatbot to hand a person off to a live human in a crisis, and it does not work. Someone would have to be reading the conversation, and users wanted privacy above almost everything. So it ends where every one of these ends. It gives you a number and trusts you to call it.

Two more things worth your time.

The first is that they did not bring the technology to Africa and hand it over. They built it with the people using it. Focus groups. Counselors on the ground. Pushback taken seriously. It is called Tumaini, which means hope in Swahili.

The second is what came out of that pushback. A deaf counselor told her the chatbot did not work for the deaf community, and Carla did not understand why, because the words were right there on a screen. He explained that Kenyan Sign Language structures sentences differently, and the same words in the same order can mean something else entirely. So they rebuilt for that too. Nobody would have caught it from the outside.

Where I land.

The one finding that shows up over and over in psychological research is that the relationship is what makes therapy work. Not the modality. Not CBT or DBT or whatever the current devotion is. The relationship. It is the healing mechanism.

Carla put it better. The relationship is the thing. Period.

The weeds here are obvious. A machine that agrees with everything, a generation that may grow up without ever building self trust, and an industry that has spent thirty years telling us it wants to make the world better.

The wonder is that there are people inside it who mean it. Carla belongs to a whole set of organizations built around using this well. The group her team worked with is called Tech To The Rescue. Rescue. That word is doing real work.

It is a tool. It is not the answer. Keep looking for the wonder in the weeds.

Guest: Carla Birnberg writes at carlabirnberg.substack.com about consistency, habits and the daily choices that make change stick. Find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlabirnberg/

I have been on the internet for a long, long time. Longer than my kids have been alive. And the single most-viewed thing I have ever put out into the world is a nine-second clip of my daughter saying she doesn’t know how to be a girl that guys like.

Not the essays. Not the years of writing. Nine seconds of Faith being honest on a Tuesday.

That clip is still bringing ten to twenty new people to this show every day. It has outrun everything else we have made, and it has been doing it for months. I am not complaining. But I have watched enough comments roll in to know that a lot of those people arrived with a picture of my daughter, and of me, that does not match either one of us.

So this week we sat down and cleared some things up.

What the clip does not tell you

Faith is not a person who spends her days thinking about dating. She has steady work through the end of next year. She financed a car by herself. She has friends she has kept since she was sixteen and she is on the phone with them constantly. If you drew her wheel of life right now, nearly every spoke is turning.

Dating is the one that isn’t. Which is exactly why it takes up so much room in what we talk about here. Nobody makes a podcast segment about the parts of your life that are working. That is not what finding the wonder in the weeds means.

There is a lesson in that for me too, and I said so on the mic. Maybe she should spend a little more time on what is going well instead of the one thing she has decided is a deficit.

The other misconception, which is about me

I get asked this directly and indirectly, and the polite version goes something like: is Faith doing this podcast because you want her to?

The answer is no, and she explains it better than I could, so I will let her have it in the episode. I will say the part that got me. She said she thinks people her age need to see what a working relationship between an adult kid and a parent actually looks like. Not a perfect one. A working one, with real disagreements in it.

There is a whole genre of content out there about breaking up with your mother. Sometimes that is the right call and I am not going to pretend otherwise, I have sat with plenty of people for whom it was. But the internet does not do “sometimes.” It does absolutes. And the absolute version is that any friction means estrangement, and any closeness means enmeshment, and there is apparently no third option where you just love someone and occasionally find them annoying.

The part I keep thinking about

Faith gave me credit on the show for something I want to write down, because I want to remember I did it on purpose.

She said I don’t treat her like the six-year-old she used to be.

I am the youngest of six. I am fifty-two years old and there are still moments where my siblings talk to me like I am five. So somewhere along the way, as a teacher and an aunt and then a parent, I made a decision to meet kids where they actually are developmentally, because nobody ever extended me that courtesy.

Here is what she doesn’t see, and what I said out loud for the first time in this episode. That is work. There was a night recently where she came to me upset and every instinct in me went oh my God, that is a six-year-old standing in my bedroom. I had that thought. I just had it hours later, after the fact, instead of in the moment. In the moment I got out of bed and I did not act annoyed that she woke me up.

We talk about the duck on the pond, gliding along, legs going like hell underneath. That is us. It looks easy and largely it is good, but not because it just happens.

She is doing her half of it too. At twenty-three she has gotten to a place where my disagreeing with her does not automatically mean I think she is stupid. I don’t know that I could have done that at twenty-three. I am not sure her siblings do it now.

Wonders

The relationship itself, obviously. The fact that we can say “we need to talk about something” and then actually do it, on a microphone, in front of you.

All of you, Gen X and Gen Z alike, who send messages and share the clips and tell us this is landing. That is the wonder.

And one more that nobody warns you about: your kids’ friends. You get your own kids, who are already wonderful, and then you get all of these other kids as a bonus. I waited until they graduated college to follow them all back on Instagram, because following teenagers felt strange, and now I am fully caught up on every one of them. What a deal.

Reading, watching, listening

Faith is reading My Friends by Fredrik Backman and she read a passage out loud to me that I will not spoil here. I have been telling anyone who will listen that it is the greatest thing ever written by anyone ever, which is a sentence I stand behind. His writing is infuriatingly good. Word, sentence, page, paragraph. I have physically put my Kindle down out of something like admiration aggression.

She also makes a case for Beartown that stopped me cold. Listen for it around the 34-minute mark.

And because I contain multitudes, I am also watching Elle, the Legally Blonde prequel, on Prime. It is not the literary masterpiece Backman is writing. It is also not nothing. Consider it a palate cleanser.

Come back next time. We are doing internet weddings, and yes, we have to talk about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.

Take care of yourself.

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

This week is more wonder than weeds, and I am not sorry about it.

I moved here almost a year ago and I have spent almost every day since trying to connect with people. Volunteering. Golf. Pickleball. Three book clubs. It honestly feels like homework.

Then the 4th of July came. Here in the US it is supposed to be this big patriotic thing, 250 years, fireworks, the whole deal. I was not feeling it. Not in a global sense, not with where this country is right now. And on a smaller scale, that used to be our day. We loaded the kids in the car before sunrise, drove to the beach, and stayed for sixteen hours. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, everyone in sweatshirts on the sand for the fireworks. We are nowhere near a beach now. We do not know enough people here to do anything like it.

That disconnection is the weeds this week.

So I went looking for the good, the way I always tell you to. And it turned out the good has been sitting right in front of me all summer. Sports.

The World Cup

My youngest is home for the summer and completely in it. I started watching games I had no reason to care about just to sit next to him. Then something else happened. Every time I open my phone the news is heavy and divisive, and the World Cup is the one thing cutting straight through that. I am crying over videos almost daily. A family walking to a watch party gets handed real tickets by a stranger. Mexico loses in Mexico, and the England fans spend the night talking about how incredible the Mexican fans were. Football fans do not have a reputation for kindness. That is what makes it land.

The Knicks

I am not an NBA person. I lived in that area for seventeen years and I know a lot of Knicks fans, and I watched New York get a week and a half of pure joy it badly needed. Nobody expected that team to get there. The whole thing read like a movie. Watching real Knicks fans, the ones from the Bronx and Queens, celebrate from a thousand miles away was contagious.

And then the Lynx

Here is where it got personal.

My oldest sister was a basketball person. She played before Title IX. She coached. She was a sports journalist before she got too sick to write. When the Mystics came to Washington in the late 90s she got season tickets and dragged me along, back when they hung blackout curtains over the empty upper bowl. She died a few years ago.

The first time my daughter and I walked into Target Center for a playoff game, she was there. I know how that sounds. I have not felt closer to her since we lost her. We both cried through most of that game, and it was not about the score. It was the energy of the room. All I could think was how badly I wish she could see how big this has gotten. Every seat full. People standing on the concourse. Nothing like the half empty arena we sat in together.

So this season I did the math on a few individual games, realized a season ticket cost about the same, and bought one. For myself.

The part I did not plan to say out loud

For years I let myself believe I was not a real fan.

My husband and my son carry stats around in their heads. Field goal percentages, injury reports from six seasons back, the full history of every roster move. I do not do that. And somewhere along the way I decided that meant I was not entitled to the sport.

I also never wanted the pink bedazzled version of the jersey. Pink is not a team color. I just wanted the t-shirt everyone else gets. Why does there have to be a fan and a girl fan?

I decided this year that he does not own sports. I know this game. I know when someone is good, when they are not, why, and what a team is missing. I always did. I just handed that over for a while.

Why the WNBA specifically

The teams actually like each other. The media works overtime inventing rivalries and grudges, and then you sit in the building and watch a former Lynx get welcomed home by a crowd that is about to root against her. They compete hard once it starts. Before that, there is respect.

And as a woman it is the first professional sporting event I have walked into that felt like mine. Not tolerated. Not quizzed on how much I know to justify my seat. Mine. And what surprised me is that it does not feel like it only belongs to women. It feels like it belongs to anybody who shows up wanting to cheer for somebody.

Two hours of that refills something I need in order to keep doing the harder work.

Reading, watching, listening to

Watching: I Will Find You on Netflix, from the Harlan Coben books. A man in prison for killing his son breaks out because the boy might still be alive. Eight episodes, lots of turns, good acting. My hairdresser vouched for it, which is how I make most decisions.

Reading: I am in three book clubs, which tells you everything about how hard I have been trying. One is at a bar in Minneapolis called A Bar of Their Own. It is a bar just for women’s sports. Abby Wambach showed up on Zoom to their last meeting. We are reading a book about the invention of the sports bra. I love you, Minneapolis.

Listening: a couple of Lynx and WNBA podcasts that quietly replaced some of my political ones, plus the small handful of women in country music I actually like. Golf cart music.

If you have never been to a WNBA game, go. The league keeps expanding, there is probably a team coming near you, and the officiating is bad but everybody says so every week, so hopefully that gets fixed. The Valkyries are fun. Las Vegas is fun. Go find one.

That is your wonder for the week. Women in sports.

Keep looking for the wonder in the weeds.

Website: https://thewonder.life/ Women of Wonder: https://thewonder.life/wow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WonderintheWeeds Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcritzking Spotify:

Hello and welcome back to Wonder in the Weeds, where we talk about surviving and thriving in a world full of constant change, challenge, and grief. Today, the weeds are the ones growing in my feed.

Here is how this episode happened. I recorded a whole show about sports and becoming a fan again. I was pleased with it. Then I read about our president interfering with the US World Cup match, and I did not want that episode out in the world anymore. Then it was one more thing, and one more thing after that. By the end of the week I had written crazy stuff on the internet on my notepad, and that became this.

So I recorded a rant. And then I made myself go looking for the other half.

If you are not willing to be seen standing up for the thing you stand up for, shouldn’t that give you some pause?

I can’t solve that problem. But I can tell you what I found when I went looking for the people who are using the internet well right now, and there are more of them than the algorithm would have you believe.

In this episode

The photograph from the DC Metro that I think everybody should have to witness

Why I couldn’t leave my sports episode alone, and what FIFA has to do with it

The voices actually worth following right now, including one man I am not going to name

Why my kids and their friends are the reason I am hopeful

What getting off the internet is actually for, and why it is not giving up

Reading, watching, listening to: the Tamla Horsford story, and why I had never heard of it

This one is for you if your feed has been heavy lately, if you can’t look at it and can’t look away, and if you have been quietly wondering whether it is just you. It isn’t.

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

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WonderintheWeeds

Listen on Spotify:

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Join the Women of Wonder community: https://thewonder.life/wow

Have a topic you want me to cover? [email protected]

It’s just me this week. Faith is out being a busy Gen Z human (working, auditioning, and she got cast in a show!), so you get me and a couch full of snoring dogs.

I came on to talk about the thing she and I have been trying to record about for weeks: creativity, and what happens to it when the world feels too heavy to make anything at all. I’ve been a writer my whole life, first for myself, then blogging back when we all opened our Blogspot accounts and wrote about motherhood into the void. That writing was how I connected with people. It’s still where the creativity lives for me, and lately it just hasn’t been flowing.

I think two things are tangled up in that. The first is the obvious creative block. The thoughts are there, but the follow-through to sit down, flesh it out, and keep to a schedule isn’t. The second is bigger, and it’s the one I really get into this week: what is my responsibility, and what is my lane?

Back in the early internet days there was an unspoken rule. When something huge happened in the world, you paused your regular content and said something, or you went quiet, but you didn’t just keep posting your lunch like nothing was happening. Now the rules are gone, everybody judges everybody, and I keep circling the same questions:

* What’s my responsibility? I’m not a journalist. I’m a counselor, a psychologist, a mom, a transplant to a new city. Do I speak on what’s happening, or point to the people who know more?

* What do I do with my privilege? I’m a safe woman in a safe house who doesn’t look like the people they’re coming after. That’s exactly why the question matters.

* Who am I to talk? And when I don’t talk, why does that feel wrong too?

So I do talk about it: the 15 Minnesotans arrested this week on federal charges that sounded made up, hauled off in a tactical-gear spectacle for the “crime” of protecting their neighbors. Fourteen released by that night. Meanwhile two people were shot dead in the street by federal officers and there’s no investigation at all. ICE never left Minneapolis. The news just stopped covering it.

Here’s where I landed, at least for now. The wonder isn’t always in the weeds. Sometimes there’s no bright spot inside the fight itself. But I can lift my head up, get out for a little while, and go fill up on the bright stuff. For me right now that’s the rise of women’s sports. It fortifies me to go back in and keep digging. I don’t have the answers yet. But I’ll keep showing up here and sharing the walk-through, and I hope that’s enough for now.

Reading, Watching & Listening To

* Watching: Sports, all of it. Lynx and WNBA games, the World Cup (I’m always more excited for the women’s, but I’ll take the men’s), the Knicks’ run, and, because my son is home from college, whatever he puts on: Giants baseball, any baseball, any World Cup match he can find. Can’t “recommend” it exactly, but it’s a lovely escape and a great way to connect with a kid who’s home.

* Listening: Post Moves, the WNBA-centered podcast with Candace Parker. The recent episode with Leslie Jones was pure joy. The game talk, the athlete talk, and Leslie is hilarious.

* Reading: Have a Great Summer by Francesca Cocchi, a lovely little rom-com set on the exact stretch of the Jersey Shore where I raised my kids (Monmouth and a little Ocean County). Made me deliciously homesick. Give it a shot even if you’ve never set foot there.

The weeds are so thick right now, but keep looking for the wonder, because it’s what helps you get through them.

Reflection posts and show musings drop on Substack twice a week. Subscribe, share it with a friend, and sign up for the weekly emails.

Join the paid Women of Wonder community for Monday discussion prompts and monthly live calls: https://thewonder.life/show/

Comparison is the thief of joy, but knowing that has never once made me stop doing it.

This week Faith and I get honest about how comparison hits differently at 24 and at 50. She opens up about measuring herself against her dad and me at her age, chasing milestones that keep moving, and comparing herself to a “fake version” of who she’d be if she’d made different choices. I share what my twenties actually felt like behind the row home and the marriage everyone seemed to envy.

We get into social media highlight reels, the strange pressure of a life with no rubric, why “life is long” changed the way I think about all of it, and how we’re both learning to turn the gaze inward instead of out.

Plus a Sondheim quote, a dad quote worth writing down, and a reminder that your dreams are allowed to change.

Our wonders this week: my ongoing iced coffee experiments and Faith’s role in A King for All Time at Hopkins Community Theater.

Timestamps0:00 Why comparison, why now1:15 Comparing to social media vs. real life1:50 Comparing to your parents at your age4:00 The “fake version of me” trap5:45 New York, the Knicks, and homesickness9:30 The comfort of the familiar12:00 No rubric: growth with no mile markers18:00 The wheel of life check-in20:30 Life is long24:00 Dad quote + Sondheim quote28:00 Dreams are allowed to change30:00 Be here now31:20 Wonders: iced coffee + A King for All Time34:45 Outro

Reflection posts and show musings drop on Substack twice a week.

Join the paid Women of Wonder community for Monday discussion prompts and monthly live calls.

Join here: https://thewonder.life/show/

I keep referencing “explicit parenting” on the show, so this week I finally explain what I mean.

It started with a little book I wrote over a decade ago, Explicit Parenting: Tips from the Trenches for Raising Good and Happy Humans. It pulled together everything I know as a teacher, doula, childbirth educator, and trauma therapist, plus what I’ve lived as a wife and mom. Over the years it turned into a framework I use for parenting, relationships, and honestly just living.

The name throws people off (yes, “explicit” gets funny reactions online), but the idea is simple: say the thing. Don’t make your kids, or anyone, guess at your meaning. The less we leave for interpretation, the better off we are. Kids who aren’t given the explanation will fill in the blanks themselves, and they usually fill them in with “I must be the problem.” We don’t want that.

In this episode I walk through the four pillars:

* Tuning In. Know yourself first. Your triggers, your strengths, your expectations, your attachment style. None of the rest works without this.

* Know Your Relationships. Get clear on your expectations and boundaries, and focus on the relationship you want long-term, not just the milestones. Come back to the relationship.

* Lead With Curiosity, Not Judgment. Swap “they always do this” for “I wonder why they’re doing this.” Kids rarely mean to hurt you as much as we assume.

* Consistency and Persistence. The hardest one, and the easiest once the first three are solid. Show up the same way, and when you mess up, repair it.

The glue holding it all together is grace, for yourself and everyone else. And if you’re worried about whether you’re doing this parenting thing right, that worry is the proof you’re already doing a great job.

Timestamps0:09 Why this episode1:08 The little book that started it4:03 Where “explicit” comes from5:55 Just say it: don’t make kids interpret8:20 The four pillars9:08 Pillar 1: Tuning In10:13 Pillar 2: Know Your Relationships15:47 Pillar 3: Curiosity over judgment20:00 Pillar 4: Consistency and persistence23:04 Grace as the glue24:57 If you worry about it, you’re already doing great26:45 Outro

Reflection posts and show musings drop on Substack twice a week.

Join the paid Women of Wonder community for Monday discussion prompts and monthly live calls.

Join here: https://thewonder.life/show/

What happens to a country when curiosity disappears?

I’m by myself on the couch this week, sitting with something that’s been frustrating me lately: how little curiosity and nuance there seems to be in the world right now. Everywhere I look there’s an extreme view on one side, an extreme view on the other, and almost nothing in between. We assume the other person is evil or dumb instead of stopping to ask whether they’re just working with different information.

So I put on my trauma therapist hat. My theory is that curiosity is a privilege of safety.

When you’re stuck in survival mode, your nervous system doesn’t leave space for questions, nuance, or seeing the gray. After years of chaos and a global pandemic, a lot of us are still living in that defensive posture even when the danger has passed.

In this episode I get into the ICE detention protests, why the angriest voices are always the loudest, why you’re probably aiming your anger at the wrong person, and the small things we can actually do to feel safe enough to get curious again.

Plus my reading recommendation this week: Your Heart Was Made for This by Oren Jay Sofer.

Turn off your phone, get out into the world, talk to real people, and stay curious.

Resources mentioned

* Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love by Oren Jay Sofer

* Say What You Mean by Oren Jay Sofer

* Women of Wonder community on Substack: https://thewonder.life/wow/

Find more over on Substack, including the Women of Wonder community: https://thewonder.life/wow/

This Week’s Weeds: There’s No Buffering Yourself From Empty Nest Grief

I’m flying solo this week (Z is off chasing the theater dream; she’ll be back), and it’s fitting because this episode is about exactly that: my kids not being here.

Here’s the thing I got wrong about empty nesting. I thought the women who struggled were the ones who’d lost themselves in motherhood. I made sure that wasn’t me: I wrote, taught, got certified in yoga and meditation, and earned a master’s and a doctorate while raising three kids. I judged the sad empty nesters (bratty of me, I know) and assumed I’d be fine.

I wasn’t prepared anyway. What I’m grieving isn’t the chaos of little kids (I genuinely don’t miss that). It’s the clearly defined role. The bowling banquets, the snack shop, the PTA, knowing exactly what my job was. For 22 years, everything I pursued fit into the spaces around parenting. Now there’s just space. And no instructions.

Add a move to Minnesota where I literally GPS my way home, and you get the moment a friend asked me “so what are you up to now?” and I had no answer.

In this episode:

* The empty-nest myth I believed (and why preparing didn’t protect me)

* Six months of “dogged pursuit of connections”: pickleball leagues, golf trips, and volunteering, and why I’m exhausted anyway

* The golf weekend that woke up my inner junior-high girl: alone on the first floor while everyone else roomed upstairs

* Why old triggers roar back when you’re worn down, and what they’re pointing to

* Reaching back for “Cristie Ritz-King”: the girl who pitched on the softball team and tried out for field hockey having never played. She’s still in there.

* Being a “freshman in adulthood”: not retirement, not young parenthood, just new

* My honest wrestle with whether talking about empty nesting is “enough” when the world is on fire, and why I’m sticking with the personal

This Week’s Wonder

Change is a gift. I have the time and space to choose who I become next (questions that weren’t even an option when I was in survival mode). And the internet, for all its junk, is full of genuinely rich, nuanced, fact-based creators helping us learn and grow. That’s wonder, too.

Watching / Listening:

* 🎬 The Four Seasons (Netflix): Season 2 opens on the Jersey Shore and made me openly weep with homesickness

* 🎙️ If Books Could Kill: The palate cleanser I need from political podcasts

* 🎵 My “Cristie Ritz-King” playlist: Queen Latifah, The Cure, Public Enemy, REM, U2. My daughter’s friend thinks I’m hip. I’m just 17 at heart.

If something here resonated, I’d love a review, a share, or a hello. And remember: keep looking for the wonder in the weeds. The sun will come up tomorrow.

Welcome to another episode of Wonder in the Weeds! This week it was just me. No Gen Z counterpart in the chair, though I promise we talked about her plenty.

I just got back from five days on the road. I drove two of my three adult kids out to Colorado to see family, called the third one from the car so it would feel complete, and somewhere along those thirteen hours I realized this is exactly the relationship I always hoped I’d have with them. So this one is more wonder than weeds. It’s about what it actually feels like to parent your kids once they’re grown, the relationship you can build on purpose, and a little hope for anyone still in the thick of it. So grab a warm drink, get comfortable, and tune in.

Key Topics We Discuss

* The Sitting on the Beach Question: The one thing I ask every parent I work with, picturing the adult relationship you want years before it arrives.

* Friend vs. Mom: Why I hesitate to call my kids my friends, and the kind of teasing and honesty that only works because the love underneath it is clear.

* It Wasn’t an Accident (But It Wasn’t All Me): How intentional choices shaped these relationships, and how much my kids shaped each other in ways I never saw coming.

* The Humbling Conversations: What I learned hearing my kids describe the same memories completely differently than I remember them.

* Finding Your Identity in the Empty Nest: Figuring out who I am now that showing up for them isn’t my full-time job.

Episode Chapters

* Welcome to the Episode

* A Bag Full of Good Intentions

* The Relationship I Always Wanted

* The Sitting on the Beach Moment

* Still the Mom, and Also Just a Guest

* The First Time They Get Sick Away From Home

* Drop-Off Day: Two Kids, Two Very Different Stories

* Grace, Humility, and a Little Hope

* The Wonder: A Big Old World Out There

Resources Mentioned

* The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon — dense, not a quick read, but a rich story about a midwife in the late 1700s and a whole lot of early women’s rights. I almost gave up on it and ended up really glad I didn’t.

* Noah Kahan — still on the album, still not sorry about it. A lot of this trip was scored by him.

Leave a comment below and tell me what kind of relationship you’re hoping to build with your kids, or what you’re reading, watching, and listening to right now. I’m in a serious rut and I need the help.

Keep looking for the wonder in the weeds, and until next time, take care of yourself.