I did not wake up one day and decide to become a lactation consultant the way some people decide on a career. It grew out of my own hard nursing season, the hours I spent afterward reading everything I could find, and the friends who started calling me before they called anyone official because I had “been through it.”
Paul writes that God comforts us in our affliction so that we can comfort others with the same comfort we received (2 Corinthians 1:4). I did not understand that verse as a career plan until I noticed the pattern in my own life: every mother I helped in those early years was helped because of what I had survived, not despite it.
The certification itself took years — clinical hours, exams, continuing education that never really stops. But underneath the credential is a much simpler conviction: no mother should have to sit on a bathroom floor at 3 a.m. feeling like a failure over something this hard and this common. If my worst weeks can shorten someone else’s, that is worth every hour of study it took to get here.