In The Guardian, Adewunmi writes that her second child arrived with an unwelcome surprise. The assumed edge of experience evaporated the moment pregnancy, a toddler, and newborn logistics collided. She catalogs what parents are supposed to remember—feeding schedules, teething remedies, diaper patterns—and the unnerving speed with which that knowledge vanishes.

What makes this stick is treating parental memory as what it is: a casualty of stress. The cultural script says the second baby should be less dramatic because the panic is gone. Wrong. The panic just mutates into management panic, time panic, bandwidth panic. That matters because a lot of social judgment toward parents rests on the idea that experience should smooth the whole thing. Sometimes experience just teaches you how much work was hiding in the blur the first time.