Going to Two Is Wild

I thought I had it figured out. I really did. I had the schedule. I had the village. I had the nanny, I had Nakia, Diedre and Ebony, and I even had the girls’ father cohabitating. I had learned — painfully, slowly, with more grace than I would have expected from myself — that:

• It was okay to need help.

• Structure was not a cage.

• It was a gift.

Flow state was a defense mechanism, not a virtue. I had done the work. I had earned the exhale.

And then Leighton arrived. And I had to learn all of it again.

That is not the dramatic part. The dramatic part is that when I went back through my notes — actually sat down and looked at what I’d written about becoming a mother for the first time with Lexington — the lesson I walked away from that season was the exact same lesson I was being asked to learn again. Enjoy the time. Keep progressing with the schedule. Cuddle time is cuddle time. Sleep is sleep.

Word for word. The same list.

And here is what I know now that I did not know then: recalibration is not a one-time event. It is a recurring condition. Every major life change does not just ask you to adjust — it asks you to go back to the beginning of the checklist you thought you’d already completed. The road does not get shorter because you have walked part of it before. You just know what kind of shoes to wear.

Going from one to two was wild. Leighton was born when Lexington was still in pre-primary and honestly— It was fine. It was still great. The village was intact. Leighton fit into that rhythm the way youngest children tend to — she would tense her little body at the sound of the bus coming around the corner because she already knew her sister was about to fill every inch of the house.

(Lexington once came home, looked at Leighton, announced she was so cute she just wanted to bite her — and then bit the girl. That is a different kind of reset entirely.)

The time management piece did not break until COVID. Leighton was about a year and a half, maybe two. Lexington was in school. And suddenly I was waking up early to work, working out, teaching both of them — and joining calls. At the same time. And I still felt relatively calm, because that is what I do. I managed it. I structured it. I kept the system running.

But time management became a skill that season in a way it had not been before. And the lesson I wrote down — enjoy the time, keep the schedule, cuddle time is cuddle time — that lesson was back on the table. Not because I failed to learn it the first time. But because life had escalated the stakes and was asking me to apply it—again, but this time at a higher level, with more complexity.

This is the part nobody tells you about growth: you do not graduate from the lesson. You earn the right to learn it more deeply.

There is a woman reading this right now who feels like she should be further along than she is. Who has already done this particular piece of the work — already processed the overwhelm, already built the structure, already given herself permission — and who cannot understand why she is standing in the middle of it again.

She is not regressing. She is first resetting, then she is recalibrating.

The lesson repeats because the road repeats. You are not back at the beginning. You are on a new floor of the same building, and the view from here is different. The work is different. You are different.

It just doesn't always feel that way at 9AM when you’ve been on calls and the children are awake, school is starting in your home office, and the chaos of the morning surrounds you.

I see you. I was you. I am, some days, still you.