A testimony about the unlikely, unhurried, undeniable way God called me to lactation consulting — and the little country church where I finally stopped arguing about it.
There were mornings I made it all the way to the parking lot.
That sounds like progress until you understand that the parking lot was the destination I could not get past. I was a dance teacher, traveling between schools in Washington County each day, and there were mornings I pulled into the lot of the second school and simply — stopped. Couldn’t open the door. Couldn’t make my body do the thing I had come there to do. I just sat there in the car, crying or staring or both, while the minutes ticked by and the school day went on without me inside it.
I want to be careful how I tell this part, because it is tender. I loved my students. That is not what this is about. This is about a woman — me — who was taking four different psychiatric medications just to walk through the front door of a building each morning. Four. Not because I was weak, not because teaching is shameful, but because my nervous system was quietly, persistently trying to tell me something I wasn’t ready to hear.
You are not supposed to be here anymore.
I taught in Washington County public schools for ten years. When I became pregnant with my youngest daughter, the mental health challenges I was already managing took on a new shape. The antenatal depression was its own beast entirely. I didn’t always make it in. Some days the parking lot was as far as I got. And underneath all of it, constant as a hum you eventually stop noticing, was this low-grade conviction that I was supposed to be doing something else with my life. I just had no idea what.
I left teaching the day I went on maternity leave and never went back.
God bless my husband, who has never once made me feel guilty for that. I’d carried it long enough.
What followed was a season I can only describe as wandering with good intentions. I searched for work. I interviewed. I followed leads. I prayed for doors to open, and they didn’t, and at the time that felt like silence. Looking back, it feels like mercy. Every dead end I hit was a kindness I didn’t recognize as such.
And then — my baby girl had feeding difficulties.
We were struggling, and weight gain was slow, and I was scared in the particular way new mothers get scared when something seems wrong and nobody is giving you a straight answer. We connected with a lactation consultant — Dianne Cassidy, up in Rochester, New York — for a telehealth visit at 7:30 one particularly hard evening. My husband Joey held the phone. Dianne watched, and asked questions, and knew things, and by the end of that hour something had shifted. Not just in how we were feeding the baby.
Something had shifted in me.
I want to do that. The thought arrived with a quiet certainty that surprised me. That’s what I want to do. I want to be the person in that phone call. I want to be the one who knows the things and helps mamas feed their babies.
I ignored it for a while.
That’s the part I don’t tell often, but it’s the truest part of the story.
I knew. And I kept looking for something else anyway. Because becoming a lactation consultant required a lot of classes, clinical hours, and stuff I didn’t think I had time for. Because I had a newborn. Because this wasn’t the most practical path for a woman in rural Middle Georgia who had spent a decade in public school dance education. Because I was afraid, and fear has a way of making the thing God told you to do sound like a bad idea.
So I kept interviewing for other things. Kept exploring other options. Kept politely ignoring the thing I already knew.
Until I sat down in a pew at Black Springs Baptist Church.
Black Springs is a little country church in Baldwin County, just across the road from our family home and the farm land where I grew up. It is not a fancy church. It is the kind of church where you know everybody and everybody knows you, where generations of your people have sat in those same pews, where the preacher is not performing for an audience but talking to a room full of folks he genuinely loves.
The preacher was talking about something that had nothing to do with me or my career crisis. I couldn’t tell you today what the sermon was about. What I can tell you is that he looked up and, in that way some preachers do — where it feels less like eye contact and more like the Holy Ghost has decided to deliver something directly — he looked straight at me and said:
“Why are you looking around for something else? God’s already told you what to do.”
He meant it for someone else. Or maybe he meant it for everyone in that room simultaneously. That’s usually how those moments work.
But I heard it the way you hear something when it lands square in the middle of the thing you’ve been quietly wrestling with for months. It was not subtle. It was not gentle, exactly. It was like someone pulling back a curtain and flooding a dark room with light — oh. Oh. Okay. I see.
I stopped looking around after that.
I will not pretend that the path has been straightforward.
It hasn’t. Building a lactation practice in Middle Georgia, from scratch, while raising two children and navigating the particular challenges of a rural healthcare landscape — it has asked a lot of me. There have been hard seasons. There have been moments of doubt. There have been days that looked a lot like sitting in a parking lot, honestly.
But here is what I keep coming back to: I did not come up with this idea. I didn’t stumble into lactation consulting because I thought it sounded like a good business opportunity. I was pointed here. And if the One who pointed me here is faithful — and I believe that He is — then the work of making this practice succeed is not mine alone to carry.
He has been faithful. Over and over again.
I think about the families I’ve sat with — in their living rooms, in my offices in Sandersville and now in Macon, on the phone at odd hours when things got hard — and I think: this is what I was supposed to do. Not in spite of the hard years. Not after the hard years. Because of them. The parking lot mornings, the antenatal depression, the unanswered prayers that turned out to be redirections — all of it was preparing me to sit across from a mama who feels like she is failing, and tell her the truth:
You are not failing. You are not broken. You are a person whose body has been through something hard, and you deserve someone who will actually help you.
That’s why I do this.
And then He went and did it again.
A few weeks ago, I was having one of those weeks. You know the kind — running ragged, stretched thin, booking mamas who needed me now a week and a half out and feeling the weight of every single day between them and the help they needed. It is one of the harder parts of this work, honestly. You want to be there, and you can only be in so many places.
Then my phone rang.
A woman named Rebecca Foley had found my business card at a pediatrician’s office in Milledgeville. She didn’t know me. I didn’t know her. But she followed her heart and called anyway, and what she said on the other end of that call stopped me in my tracks. She was a registered nurse and an IBCLC — a mom of five, a Labor & Delivery nurse who had spent twenty years helping mamas breastfeed at the bedside before earning her IBCLC — and she was passionate about helping mamas feed their babies, and she wanted to connect.
I had a gut feeling about Rebecca from those first conversations. The kind of gut feeling that, after everything I’ve described above, I have learned to pay attention to.
I extended her an offer to join the Nurturing Lactation Care team. She said yes.
God provides. He really, genuinely does. Not always on my timeline, not always in the way I expected, but He provides.
Rebecca Foley, RN, IBCLC is now seeing families through Nurturing Lactation Care — Macon office visits, home visits, and virtual appointments. A mom of five herself, with twenty years of L&D nursing and lactation experience, she brings something to this practice that I could not have planned for or manufactured on my own. That matters to me more than I can say.
Come meet us.
We’re having an Open House at the Macon office — 2607 Vineville Avenue, Suite 107 — on Thursday, March 26th from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. Come have a cookie. See the space. Meet me and Rebecca both. We would genuinely love to see you.
And if you can’t make it to the open house but you’re a family in Middle Georgia who is struggling with breastfeeding — whether you’ve just welcomed a new baby or you’re still pregnant and already worried — we’d love to talk to you. Between the two of us, we have more availability than ever to get you the help you need when you need it. You can reach us by calling or texting (478) 288-8784 or visit nurturinglc.com to book.
I’m glad I stopped arguing and listened. I hope you’ll let us help.
Leia Giddens is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) and the owner of Nurturing Lactation Care, serving families in Macon, Sandersville, and throughout Middle Georgia. Rebecca Foley, RN, IBCLC — a mom of five and a Labor & Delivery nurse with twenty years of experience helping mamas breastfeed — has joined the Nurturing Lactation Care team and is available for Macon office visits, home visits, and virtual appointments. Together, they offer expanded lactation support across Middle Georgia.