That Night I Cried Over a Can of Formula

It was 2:47 AM. I know because I looked at the microwave clock three times, like maybe the numbers would change if I stared hard enough. They didn't. The kitchen was that particular kind of quiet where you can hear the refrigerator humming and your own thoughts and absolutely nothing else, which is honestly the worst kind of quiet when your thoughts are not being friendly.

Lily was finally asleep. FINALLY. After forty-five minutes of pacing the hallway between our bedroom and her nursery, doing that weird bounce-walk thing that the NICU nurses taught me, humming "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac because it's the only song I can remember all the words to at 2 AM. She'd conked out with her cheek smushed against my shoulder, that deep sleep where their mouth falls open a little and their breathing gets all slow and rhythmic and you feel like you've won a battle against an opponent who doesn't even know they're fighting.

I should have gone to bed. I should have shuffled back to my pillow and grabbed those precious maybe-two-hours before she woke up again. But I was hungry—the kind of hollow, shaky hungry that comes from forgetting to eat dinner because you spent three hours trying to get a baby to take a bottle and then just collapsed. So I went to the kitchen. And that's when I saw it.

The empty formula can.

It was sitting on the counter next to the coffee maker, the label peeled halfway off (Mark's nervous habit, he destroys every label in a three-foot radius), the little plastic scoop still inside, completely empty. Not almost empty. Not "there's probably one more bottle in there." EMPTY empty. The kind of empty where you scrape the bottom with the scoop and get nothing but a faint powder dust that's more wishful thinking than actual nutrition.

And I just. I don't know. Something in me broke.

I stood there in the dim light from the microwave, holding this empty can, and I started crying. Not the pretty crying either—not the single tear down the cheek that looks artistic in movies. This was the ugly cry. The kind where your nose runs and your shoulders shake and you're making sounds that might be words but are mostly just guttural expressions of pure exhaustion. The kind of crying where Mochi, my cat who normally couldn't care less about human emotions, came over and rubbed against my ankle like "hey, what's wrong with you."

Here's the thing. It wasn't about the empty can. Obviously it wasn't about the empty can. Cans get empty. You buy another one. That's how consumer goods work. But at 2:47 AM, standing barefoot on the cold kitchen tile, the empty can was about everything. It was about the fact that I'd been back to Fred Meyer three times that week for formula. It was about the fact that my daughter was a 36-week preemie who'd spent her first twelve days in the OHSU NICU with tubes and monitors and nurses who knew more about her feeding needs than I did. It was about the fact that my body hadn't made enough milk—that my breasts had failed at the one thing they were supposedly designed for, producing maybe four ounces a day total despite the hospital-grade pump I'd rented and the fenugreek supplements that made me smell like maple syrup and the power-pumping sessions that left me raw and exhausted and still empty. It was about sitting in the NICU lactation consultant's office while she said "you're doing great, any amount of breast milk is beneficial" and hearing "you're not doing enough, you're already failing at the most natural thing in the world."

The formula can was empty and I was empty and somehow those two things got tangled up in my brain until I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

I swear to you, I didn't expect formula feeding to feel like this. Before Lily was born, I was neutral about it. As a dietitian, I knew the research—breast milk has immunological benefits, formula is a perfectly adequate alternative, fed is best, end of story. I'd counseled hundreds of parents in the NICU about combination feeding and exclusive formula feeding. I'd said all the right things with the right tone of voice. "You're making an informed choice for your family." "Your baby is thriving." "There's no wrong way to feed a baby as long as they're fed." I believed those things. I still believe them. But knowing something intellectually and FEELING it at 2 AM are two completely different things.

The shame is so weirdly specific. It's not like anyone was SHAMING me. Mark never said a word about switching to formula—if anything he was relieved because it meant he could do feeds and I could sleep. My mom, despite her general tendency to have opinions about everything, actually kept her mouth shut about this one. The pediatrician was supportive. The NICU follow-up team was supportive. I was surrounded by support and I was STILL ashamed. I felt like every can of formula I bought was a public admission of failure. Like the checkout clerk at Fred Meyer was judging my cart. (She wasn't. She was a teenager who was definitely thinking about her break and not about my infant feeding choices. But still.)

I met Sarah at a WIC office on Southeast Powell Boulevard. This was about a month after the kitchen floor incident, and I'd dragged myself to the WIC nutrition education class partly because I needed the continuing education credits and partly because I was desperate to be around other formula-feeding moms who weren't Instagram influencers making aesthetically pleasing bottles with filtered water and expensive European formula. (I have THOUGHTS about the Instagram formula aesthetic. That's a different essay. But I have thoughts.)

Sarah was 28, from Portland originally but living in Southeast near the Trader Joe's, and she had six-week-old twins. SIX-WEEK-OLD TWINS. She was functioning on approximately forty-five minutes of sleep at a time, her hair was in two different stages of a bun situation, and she had formula powder on her shirt collar. I liked her immediately.

We got paired up for some group activity about reading nutrition labels—which, for a room full of exhausted parents, was maybe the most optimistic curriculum choice I've ever witnessed—and somehow we ended up talking about the actual experience of formula feeding instead. Sarah told me she'd planned to breastfeed. Had taken the class, bought the nursing pillow, watched the videos. And then her twins came at 34 weeks, and one of them couldn't latch, and the other one couldn't transfer milk, and she was trying to pump for two babies while recovering from a C-section and her husband went back to work after two weeks and one day she just sat on her bathroom floor and couldn't do it anymore.

"I thought I'd feel relieved when I quit," she said. "But I just felt... guilty. And then guilty about feeling guilty. Like, what kind of feminist am I if I'm crying over breast milk?"

What kind of feminist indeed. Sarah and I sat in the WIC waiting room after the class ended and talked for another hour. We talked about the cost—she was spending nearly $400 a month on formula for two babies, and WIC was helping but not covering everything. We talked about the logistics—how many bottles do you need for two infants, how do you keep track of who ate what and when, how do you leave the house ever. We talked about the comments from strangers—the woman at the grocery store who said "you know breast is best" as Sarah was literally just trying to buy formula and diapers and go home, the family member who kept sending her articles about increasing milk supply, the pediatrician who was supportive but clearly assumed she was still trying to breastfeed.

That conversation with Sarah changed something for me. Not all at once—nothing changes all at once—but it was the beginning of something. The beginning of realizing that I wasn't the only one crying over empty cans. The beginning of understanding that the shame I felt wasn't actually mine—it was a cultural shame I'd absorbed without even noticing, a message that had seeped in through countless small moments. The lactation consultant who said "don't worry, any amount helps" in a voice that suggested I should definitely be worried. The baby books that had one chapter on breastfeeding and a tiny paragraph on formula tucked in the back like an afterthought. The hospital discharge paperwork that included six pages on breastfeeding and a single sheet on formula that was mostly about how to sterilize bottles.

I went home that day and I threw away the empty can on the counter. Not just threw it away—I took it out to the recycling bin myself, which is usually Mark's job, and I placed it in there and I closed the lid. And then I went inside and I made Lily a bottle and I didn't cry. Progress.

The thing about shame is that it thrives in isolation. It grows in the dark, in the 2 AM kitchens, in the empty formula cans we hide at the bottom of the recycling bin so the neighbors won't see. It feeds on silence. And the only way to kill it—the ONLY way—is to talk about it. To tell someone. To say out loud, "I'm feeding my baby formula and I feel like I failed," and have someone look you in the eye and say, "Me too."

I'm not saying that moment fixed everything. I still have complicated feelings about formula feeding. Some days I'm totally at peace with it. Other days I see a mom breastfeeding in the park and I feel a little pang of something—not jealousy exactly, more like grief for the experience I didn't get to have. But I'm not crying in my kitchen anymore. And when the formula can gets empty now, I just add it to the grocery list.

Lily is two now. She eats actual food—mac and cheese, blueberries, the occasional fistful of dirt from the backyard. The formula days are behind us. But I still think about that 2:47 AM moment. I think about the woman I was then, standing barefoot in the dark, holding an empty can like it was evidence of some great personal failure. I want to go back and tell her things. I want to tell her that her daughter is going to be fine. That she's going to hit her growth curve and learn to walk and develop a very strong opinion about strawberries. That formula isn't failure, it's just food. That the shame she's feeling is borrowed, not earned.

But I can't go back. None of us can. So I'm writing this instead, in case someone else is in their kitchen right now at some ungodly hour, staring at an empty can or a bottle that didn't get finished or a baby who won't eat, feeling like they're the only one who's gotten it wrong. You're not. I swear to you, you're not.

The empty cans pile up. The babies grow. And somewhere in between, if we're lucky, we learn to forgive ourselves for things that were never our fault to begin with.

— Emily