The Slow Unfolding: An Embodied Goodbye to Breastfeeding

There’s a tenderness to endings that we don’t often make room for in motherhood.
And I’ve noticed that many transitions in motherhood are huge on a personal and relational level but they happen without big declarations or perfect timing. They seem to occur in the spaces between one thing and another. It might be in the way your child begins to need you differently or the subtle shifts of your own body saying, something is changing or needs to change now.

Listening to the Body’s Wisdom

For me, breastfeeding has been such a big transition and one that consumed my heart and mind for many months in the lead up to it ending. I fed my twins for two years. It was both beautiful and hard. My body worked endlessly to nourish two tiny humans, and in the early days it felt like my entire existence was wrapped around feeding, soothing, surviving. There were challenges, things that didn’t work how I imagined, times when I doubted my capacity or wondered if I could keep going. Things like latching issues, blocked milk ducts, supply issues and even breast feeding aversion.

What I learned through that time is that no feeding story looks the same.
Some of us breastfeed or chestfeed, some pump or mix feed, some make the choice not to or simply can’t. Every path is layered with its own ache and grace, its own invitations to meet the limits and wisdom of the body. However we feed, it’s never just about nourishment. It’s about connection and relational bonding too.

The Slow Process of Weaning

For me, weaning happened slowly, over many months. It was a gradual loosening, a gentle unwinding that happened with intention and a lot of back and forth. I felt both sad to end this special ritual with my little ones and at the same time very ready to create space for a new way to connect and tend to them.

Against the “Get Back to Normal” Narrative

Culturally, we are told to move quickly through these transitions. To get our bodies back. To get our lives back. To be productive again - thanks Captialism. The world around us rarely pauses for the sacred thresholds of motherhood; it rushes us through them, as if our worth depends on how efficiently we can return to who we were before.

But the truth is, there is no single way this transition should look. Some parents choose when and how they stop feeding. Others have that choice taken from them through circumstances like returning to work, custody arrangements, health concerns, mental load, medical reasons. Each ending though is a profound moment of change that deserves to be felt, not fixed.

The invitation is not about how long or how slowly we wean, but about staying connected to what is true in our bodies as it happens. To feel the tenderness, the ache, the relief, the grief. To acknowledge that a chapter is closing, whether it was by choice or necessity, and to let that awareness be enough.

When we meet these transitions with presence, something inside us can settle. The story doesn’t have to be tidy. It doesn’t have to be fair. But when we let ourselves feel it, even a little, we honour the body that carried us and the life it gave.

Giving and Receiving

Motherhood, in all its forms, is an ongoing cycle of giving and receiving, of expansion and return. There is no straight line. No clear ending. Just layers of connection that shift and change as we do.

If your feeding journey has been painful, or short, or long and tender, or never what you hoped for, please know this: your body has still mothered in the truest sense. Through touch, through gaze, through the countless small ways you have stayed present when you could have turned away.

So if you find yourself in a moment of transition, whether you are beginning, in the middle, or nearing the end, I hope you can let it unfold in a way that feels real for you. Let your body guide you. Let your heart feel what it needs to feel.

You don’t need to rush your way back to normal. There is no “back”.
There is only this ongoing becoming, this return to yourself, again and again, through the body that has held so much life.