I don’t see anyone claiming to be perfect, but it is inconceivable to me having been a mother for so many years, that someone could forget or be careless like that with their own child.
It would take just seconds to have checked the back seat to see if the child was still there or not. They couldn’t have made this a habit in 7 months?
I don’t think this is a situation where she put the child in the car, and just breezed by daycare to work, quite a few other contributing factors. They work at different times, so maybe she didn’t routinely take the baby. She has a lot of stress on her attentions given her position. Maybe this wasn’t supposed to be her day in. A lot of things.
But even if it was her going to work routinely, maybe the projects she was working on that day were life and death and she was mentally prepping, maybe traffic was a bear on the way to work and rattled her, running late, couldn’t find a park, calls her husband to help and decides to have him drop the child off.
The biggest factor here is that at least one parent doesn’t feel they can stay home with the baby for a few years. Mom or Dad. Not just this family, but across our whole society.
And yeah, I never forgot my kids, but I stayed at home with them. But I am accutely aware of the mistakes I did make with them and how it could have turned out tragic and feel a deep sense of relief that we survived, but grief when I see parents who weren’t so lucky.