Everyone prepared me, in various ways, for the challenges of starting to nurse. Almost no one warned me that weaning my youngest — a decision I made willingly, at the right time for both of us — would come with a grief I did not expect.
Ecclesiastes 3:1 names a season for everything, and I have learned that includes small endings as much as large ones. Weaning was not a loss in any dramatic sense. It was still a real one — the end of a particular closeness, a chapter of mothering that would not come again with that child. I have since told many mothers in my practice that it is completely normal to grieve an ending you also chose. Both things can be true at once.