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09/05/2026

This is my favorite thing Chelsea said.

She changed federal law in her brother's name, and she says brushing your teeth counts just as much. If you have ever felt like you are grieving "wrong" because you are not doing something big with it, please hear this.

Some days, meaning-making is leaving the house. That counts. 🌿

Full conversation on Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

with .chels

09/04/2026

Chelsea reframed addiction for me in a way I haven't stopped thinking about.

We treat it like a crime to punish.

She treats it like a seatbelt.

Harm reduction isn't enabling, it's radical love through acceptance: meeting people where they are, with dignity and choice. If no one has ever explained it to you this way, listen to this one. 🌿

Full episode of Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

with .chels

09/02/2026

I found Chelsea Laliberte-Barnes on Instagram and immediately knew I had to have her on.

When she was 23, she lost her brother Alex to an overdose. What she did with that grief became the largest harm reduction organization in the Midwest and a federal law in his name. And 18 years later, she still comes undone by it.

That is the whole reason I make this show: grief doesn't end, and you can still build something beautiful right beside it. 🌿

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

with .chels

08/29/2026

Faith said something in this one I haven't stopped thinking about.

Some sadness you can decide to be finished with. The boy didn't like you back, it's been 72 hours, you're allowed to move on. That's fine. That's healthy, even.

Grief doesn't take instruction. Her aunt has been gone four years and it still shows up when it wants to.

The trouble starts when we make life decisions inside the feelings that demand to be felt. Change the major, quit the school, blow it all up. Feel it first. Decide after.

This week Faith and I talk about the sophomore slump from both sides. Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. 🌿 Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

08/28/2026

For years my kids didn't know I had anxiety. That was by design.

Faith figured it out in her twenties, and the way she describes it still makes me laugh: whoa, my mom is a whole human.

I told her the truth. I worry every single day. I just have practices so I don't get my worry all over everyone. I meditate, I journal, I do it before you wake up and while you're at school.

Hiding it was the job for a while. Letting her see it is the job now.

This week Faith and I talk about the sophomore slump from both sides. Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. 🌿 Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

08/28/2026

I knew that apartment was wrong the day she showed it to me. Too far from everything, roommates on opposite schedules, and she is the most extroverted human being you will ever meet.

I was paying the rent. I could have said no.

I said what I thought, once, and then I let her sign it. She spent a year learning exactly what she needs in order to feel like herself.

Everybody needs to live in one bad apartment. Sometimes you don't know what you want until you're standing in the middle of what you absolutely do not.

This week Faith and I talk about the sophomore slump from both sides. Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. 🌿 Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

08/27/2026

My daughter calls me frustrated and I start solving. She never asked me to solve anything.

So now I ask first. Do you want help with this, or do you just need to say it out loud?

It sounds like a small thing. It changed how we talk. I need to know whether I can set it down when we hang up, or whether I'm carrying it around all week.

They're old enough to hear that from you. You're allowed to be a person in the conversation too.

This week Faith and I talk about the sophomore slump from both sides. Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. 🌿 Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

08/26/2026

She wrote the whole paper. Ten pages, honors credit, graded and done. Then she realized she never filed the contract that would have counted it.

Every instinct I had said call the honors college. I know how that office works. I could have fixed it in an afternoon.

I didn't. She went to eight different professors and fixed it herself. What she told me afterward is the part I keep coming back to: it mattered more to her that she was the one who solved it.

If I had stepped in, she wouldn't have learned that she could. She would have learned that I didn't think she could.

This week Faith and I talk about the sophomore slump from both sides. Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. 🌿 Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

Nobody warns you that sophomore year is tough for the moms too.There is so much hype around sending your kid to college ...
08/26/2026

Nobody warns you that sophomore year is tough for the moms too.

There is so much hype around sending your kid to college that first year that you are emotionally prepared for not being emotionally prepared. And then sophomore year comes around and you think you are ready. And you're not.

You have them home for the summer. You bodily get used to having them in the house again, the routines, the grocery shopping, all of it. And then you have to send them off again. And it's a gut punch. This is my third time and I still wasn't ready for it.

Here is the part nobody tells you. Freshman year, everybody expects your kid to mess up, so they look out for them. RAs, dorm parents, orientation, all of it. Sophomore year all that support falls away and they become the forgotten child of the university.

Faith put it perfectly. She said sophomore year was the year she made all her mistakes. And she's still here. Both of my older kids had a hard sophomore year too. It is almost universal. And it turned out those mistakes were how she figured out who she was.

Which brings me to the hardest part. I am always fighting the urge to jump in and rescue her. Every single time. And I fight it, because you cannot jump in and rescue your child from a thing that is a very adult problem at their very adult university.

Homesick doesn't mean they made a bad decision. It means they're growing. And so are you.

This week Faith and I talk about the sophomore slump from both sides. Listen to Wonder in the Weeds wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. 🌿 Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

08/21/2026

If you have tracked your kid's location their whole childhood, that has to get renegotiated now. They are grown. Neither one of you benefits from you knowing where they are at all times.

And yes, I have Find My on all three of my kids. We all have iPhones.

Here is the difference. They know I have it. They know I will occasionally look just to see they're near campus. I don't alert them. I don't check in. If I see them somewhere unexpected I don't text asking where they are.

It was a conversation, not something I did behind their backs. That is what makes it fine.

Where do you land on this one? Tell me. On or off.

New solo episode of Wonder in the Weeds out now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Link in bio. 🌿 Also on Substack: critzking.substack.com

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