The Wonder Weeks

But for adults

That’s me getting a baby massage, because growing is hard.

Many of you who are fellow parents will have heard of The Wonder Weeks, the app that tracks the mental and emotional leaps and bounds of babies and toddlers. However you feel about it, I’d like to discuss its primary downside: that it stops at toddlerhood and doesn’t help us navigate mental and emotional leaps and bounds as adults.

It tracks developments in babies because before they’re vocal (and, frankly, even when they are vocal) it can be hard to tell what the hell is going on with them. One week they’re sleeping through the night, eating well, happily cooing at you. The next you’re midnight-panic-googling “is Colic still a thing at 8 months?” The idea is that you open the Wonder Weeks app and it says “your baby is in a ‘stormy’ week because their little eyes can now see color rather than just black & white’” or some other important and expansive thing.

The reason I bring it up is because I could really use this for myself, today, at 37 years of age. I would love, when I am not feeling like myself, to open an app and have it say “you’re in a stormy week because your brain is learning to set boundaries! What a big leap!” It would make sense because I’ve found that whenever I’ve had an aha moment or finally understood something in therapy or recognized (and shifted) some negative behavioral pattern, it has invariably followed a period of feeling off. Sometimes it’s two days of just huh, I wonder if it’s hormones?. Sometimes it’s five weeks of why can’t I shake this!?. (And still sometimes it really is just this scene from Fleabag.)