I have breastfed my twin babies for the past 11 months. The vast majority of it has been through pumping rather than nursing.

I desperately wanted to breastfeed but faced numerous challenges right after my babies, Piper and Harrison, were born. They both had lip and tongue ties, which made nursing difficult for them and really painful for me. Shortly after we came home from the hospital all three of us got thrush, which made nursing more painful and only cleared up after a three-week course of antibiotics. We couldn’t get an appointment to get their ties clipped until they were three weeks old, so we started nursing in earnest much later than the experts recommend, by which point I had already settled into a fairly regular pumping routine. Eventually, after a lot of work, I was able to nurse them both, but with two babies and two jobs I have always been mostly a pumper.

I became an exclusive pumper (a term I really hate) in May, when they both stopped needing to nurse for comfort and I got lazy about keeping up with it. I missed it—once you figure it out, nursing is nice, and it’s so much less of a hassle than pumping and bottle-feeding, and, stubbornly, I wanted to continue with it because I just worked really hard to make it happen in the first place—but you have to keep doing it to keep doing it, and that just stopped being practical after awhile. The last time I attempted to nurse was with Piper a week before a trip to Seattle in July. She had clearly forgotten how to do it and I felt bad and weird shoving my boob at her, so after that I just didn’t try again.

I started weaning from the pump this week. I had planned to get them to a year but I have a business trip at the end of October, two weeks before their first birthday, and I have zero interest in lugging a pump through the airport and transporting four days’ worth of milk back on an airplane just to muddle through those last 14 days. I am very proud of what my body has been able to do over the past 11 months—I look at how big and beautiful my babies are and am amazed that my body, for the most part, literally fueled all of that growth—but I am also ready to be done pumping.

Because: pumping is really hard. It is a lot of work. It is very isolating and exhausting (I spend literal hours in rooms by myself extracting milk from my body). If you want to avoid that constant isolation, you must quickly become comfortable with your breasts being on display for people you never, ever imagined would see your breasts (my list includes my mother-in-law, my dad, multiple friends of varying closeness, and a handful of doulas). It is planning your day in three-hour intervals—every single day, for months—so you don’t miss a session. It is obsessing over your milk supply and your daily output. It is toting a milk cooler back and forth on the metro, and washing and sanitizing pump parts multiple times per day, and pumping in weird places (the White House, an airport, the car, a plane, the wine closet at a restaurant when you’re sitting in Virginia for six hours waiting for the president to finish golfing on a Saturday).

Pumping at a restaurant in Virginia while the president golfs (film)

It is never drinking quite as much wine or coffee as you want, and staying up later than you’d prefer, and not going to things you’d like to go to because you aren’t sure if you’ll be able to pump while you’re there and because chances are you have nothing to wear anyway, thanks to your enormous nursing boobs.

To give you a sense of the scale of this process in my life: as of this morning, I have pumped 16,296.9 ounces of breast milk in 1,740 sessions. Each session varies a bit in length, but I would estimate in total this encompasses roughly 1,305 hours, or 54.4 days. (Days.)

Ultimately, I am very proud to have done this and I don’t regret doing it, but it is time for me to be done.

One of the lactation rooms at my office (film)

I am now six days into weaning, and what I did not expect from this process was to have mixed feelings about doing it. I am weirdly emotional about weaning from the pump and I have struggled to pinpoint exactly why. Part of it, I’m sure, is just the change; if you spend 11 months wholly dedicated to anything it is difficult to wake up one day and decide that it’s time to flip a switch and be done. It’s hard to skip pumping sessions without a jolt of panic, and to look at a smaller-than-normal daily output and not be alarmed by it. A lot of work goes into maintaining a milk supply, but the reverse is true on the back side—it is somewhat astonishing how quickly the body adjusts to producing less milk. This is the point—breastfeeding is a system of supply and demand, your body tailoring itself precisely to what your children require—so while this is evidence that the system is working exactly as it should, it is still weirdly hard to watch.

There’s a hormonal aspect at play here—having mixed feelings about weaning is very, very normal and an expected part of the process. But I think the largest thing for me is the fact that it’s a big milestone, for both me and for my babies. They have depended on me for their main source of nourishment for their entire existence and now they won’t, which is right and the logical order of things, but it also feels like the end of an era to me, like I am admitting how fast they are growing and letting them go a little bit.

little babies, big world (Piper on a flight to Seattle, July)

I realize this is objectively ridiculous. They are 11-month-old babies. They depend on me and Brandon for literally everything, and ultimately the food you provide to your children (particularly in that first year) is a parenting footnote, and yet here I sit, emotional. While I haven’t nursed in months, I am still technically breastfeeding, and there remains a connection between me and them in the course of that routine. Looking at photos and videos of your babies helps your letdown reflex (the process by which breast milk is expressed), so when I pump I spend time thinking about and connecting with my kids in that way, even while they are miles away at daycare. It’s a nice part of my day, and I will miss it.

Weaning also aligns nicely with what is perhaps my main emotion as a parent: nostalgia. I am painfully nostalgic for everything related to my children. I am nostalgic for how tiny they were when they were born, and for those very long and hard days we spent cooped up in our rental condo when I was on maternity leave, for their noisy newborn naps and their scrawny, red, brand-new limbs. I am equally nostalgic for how fun and cute and amazing they are now, for how Piper will clap her chubby hands together and bounce a little and smile expectantly, waiting for us to reply, “Yay, Piper!,” and for coming up the stairs to find Harrison standing in his crib, his hands hooked over the side rail, his mop of blond hair tousled and the proudest, biggest grin lighting up his little face. If it’s possible to be nostalgic for the future, I am that, too; for how big they will get and the people they will be, so the fact that I am nostalgic about no longer producing breast milk for them probably should not have taken me by surprise, but still, it did.

Whenever I get like this (often, these first days), I list in my head all the positives of this process. We can go on a day trip and I won’t have to pump in the car. We can travel without me having to hunt out a pumping space in an airport or discreetly hook myself up to pump in my seat on a plane. When people come to town for the babies’ first birthday party, I won’t have to miss hours of the fun to go pump by myself. When I cover the White House I won’t have to squeeze myself into a tiny radio booth in the press gallery, rushing to finish pumping before they call us out to the motorcade. I will never get another clogged duct or have to worry about mastitis. I can eat all the parsley I want! (OK, not actually a big plus.) I can take actual cold meds when I get sick! I can drink full-strength coffee! (Just kidding, I never drink full-strength coffee and the general public should thank me for this). These things are all true. But still, while pumping is largely a pain in the ass, it is also a special thing that I have been doing for my babies, and some part of me will miss that connection.

But the rest of me is looking forward to having more time for this.

Notes on how I was able to do this for so long: privilege, mostly. I work at a very progressive and laidback office with two dedicated lactation rooms. My boss doesn’t care how often I work from home. I rented two hospital-grade pumps to build and maintain my supply. Most crucially, I am married to the world’s most supportive man, who was fully on board with my breastfeeding goals. He never, ever got annoyed with my rigid pumping schedule (which affected his life almost as much as it affected mine) or with listening to me talk (and sometimes complain) about it. He frequently thanked me for doing it, while also making it clear that I could stop whenever I wanted to. Everything with children really does take a village, even this most private and personal of things.

A note on breastfeeding in general: it’s really hard and there is immense pressure to do it. But it’s not for everyone and that’s OK. However you choose to feed your baby is entirely your decision, and no one should judge you or make you feel bad about whatever you decide.

the unexpected poignancy of weaning