I didn't want to go. I need to say that first, because the Emily who shows up at mom groups now—with her slightly stained Lululemon knockoffs and her emergency stash of formula samples and her whole "we're all in this together" energy—that Emily is not the one who sat in her car outside a coffee shop on Hawthorne for twenty minutes last February, arguing with herself about whether to walk through the door.
The car argument went something like this:
*Just go in. You need people.*
*But what if they're weird? What if they judge me for using formula? What if they're all those moms who make their own organic baby food and have color-coded sleep schedules and will look at me like I'm feeding my child poison?*
*You're a literal infant nutritionist. You KNOW it's not poison. Go inside.*
*What if nobody talks to me? What if I sit alone with a cold latte and feel worse than I did before? What if they ask about breastfeeding and I have to tell the whole story again—the NICU, the pump, the milk that never came in—and they give me that look? The pity look? The "oh, you poor thing" look? I hate that look.*
*So don't tell the story. Just go in. Drink coffee. Leave. You can do this.*
I didn't go in. Not that day. I sat in the car until the baby woke up from her car seat nap and started crying, and then I drove home and cried too, because apparently that's who I was now—a person who cried in cars outside coffee shops because she was too scared to meet other moms.
At 2 AM the night before, I'd been up with Lily for the fourth time—she was in this phase where she'd fall asleep fine but wake up forty-five minutes later screaming, and nobody could figure out why, and I was losing my mind in these tiny increments of lost sleep—and I'd found myself googling "formula feeding support group Portland" while she finally dozed off on my chest, her breath warm against my collarbone, my phone balanced precariously on the arm of the nursing chair. The search results were sparse. There were breastfeeding support groups everywhere—La Leche League meetings at least three times a week, lactation circles at every hospital, peer counselors available by text, by phone, by carrier pigeon probably. But formula-specific support? Almost nothing. One Reddit thread from 2019 titled "Formula feeding moms in PDX?" with three comments, none of them helpful. A vague mention of a group that met at a community center in Gresham, which might as well have been Mars when you're operating on two hours of sleep. And then, buried on the third page of Google results—the algorithmic graveyard where search terms go to die—a listing for "Portland Formula & Mixed Feeding Moms" that met every Tuesday at a café on Hawthorne. The description just said: "No judgment. Just coffee. And pastries."
I texted the number from the listing at 2:47 AM, not expecting a response. Someone named Jen replied at 6:12 AM: "Come. We have pastries. And zero lactivists."
Zero lactivists. I didn't know what that meant exactly, but I liked the sound of it.
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The next Tuesday, I went back. Same coffee shop, same parking spot, same argument in my head. But this time I got out of the car. I got Lily out of her car seat. I walked through the door with my daughter on my hip and my heart in my throat and I stood in the entrance of the café scanning the room for a group of women who looked like they might be formula-feeding moms, whatever that was supposed to look like.
What they looked like was: exhausted. Every single one of them. Glorious, beautiful, validated exhaustion. Dark circles and messy buns and yoga pants with formula stains on the thighs. One woman was mixing a bottle right at the table, shaking it with the practiced wrist motion of someone who'd done this ten thousand times. Another had twins in a double stroller and was somehow drinking coffee while bouncing both car seats with her feet. A third was just staring into space with the thousand-yard stare of someone who hadn't slept more than three consecutive hours since 2023.
Jen—the one who'd texted me—waved from a big table in the back. She was 37, a graphic designer at a firm in the Pearl District, mom to a 10-month-old named Theo who was exclusively formula-fed from birth. She'd started the group six months earlier after her own lonely googling session turned up nothing.
"I was so angry," she told me later, after I'd been coming for a few weeks and we'd started to become actual friends. "There's this whole infrastructure for breastfeeding support—which is great, breastfeeding moms need support—but formula moms are just supposed to figure it out alone? Buy the can, read the instructions, good luck? It's insane. It's completely insane."
It IS insane. That's the thing I keep coming back to. Formula feeding is the most common infant feeding method after the first few months—something like 75% of U.S. babies receive at least some formula by six months—and yet the support systems are practically nonexistent. Nobody teaches you how to mix a bottle in the hospital. Nobody warns you about the gas and the constipation and the way different formulas smell different and how to transition between them. Nobody tells you about the midnight emergency runs to Fred Meyer because you miscalculated how much formula you had left and the baby is screaming and you're standing in the aisle at 11 PM trying to remember which brand your pediatrician recommended.
The mom group filled that gap. Not with professional expertise—though several members were in healthcare, and we had a rotating cast of pediatric nurses and one very opinionated lactation consultant who had formula-fed her own twins and had THOUGHTS about the "breast is best" messaging—but with collective experience. The kind of knowledge that only comes from doing something at 3 AM seventeen times.
Let me tell you about some of the women in that group. Not their real names, obviously—some things stay sacred—but their stories.
There was Mara, whose son was born with a congenital heart defect that required surgery at three days old. She'd planned to breastfeed—had taken the classes, bought the pillows, watched the videos—but her son was on a feeding tube for the first month of his life and by the time he came home, her milk supply was gone. "I mourned it," she said one Tuesday, her voice steady but her eyes red. "I literally mourned breastfeeding like it was a death. And nobody understood. My husband was like, 'he's eating, isn't that what matters?' And it IS what matters, but also I needed to grieve. I needed someone to say it was okay to be sad about this."
We said it was okay. We said it a lot. We said it so many times that it started to feel true, not just for Mara but for all of us.
There was Sophie, a single mom by choice who'd used a sperm donor and never planned to breastfeed because the idea of it felt wrong for her body. "Try explaining that at the pediatrician's office," she said, laughing but not really laughing. "They keep giving me lactation handouts. I keep throwing them away. It's like a weird passive-aggressive paper war." Sophie was the one who taught us all about the formula pitcher method—mixing a full day's worth of formula in the morning and pouring bottles as needed. It saved my sanity. I don't know why nobody tells you about the pitcher method. It should be in the hospital discharge paperwork.
There was Priya, whose mother-in-law had strong opinions about formula and wasn't shy about sharing them. "She sends me articles," Priya said. "At 2 AM. From India. She's in a completely different time zone and she's STILL managing to judge my feeding choices in real time." Priya taught me that you can love your family and also want to throw your phone across the room when their names appear on the screen. Both things can be true.
And there was Rachel, who'd had a double mastectomy at 31 and never had the option to breastfeed. "People assume things," she said quietly. "They see the bottle and they make up a story. They don't think about cancer. They think I didn't try hard enough." Rachel was the one who finally made me understand that you can never, ever tell what's behind a bottle. Not ever. The judgment I'd carried into grocery stores—the judgment I'd written about before, the judgment I was still unlearning—died its final death in that coffee shop, listening to Rachel tell her story while her daughter gummed a teething ring and drooled on the table.
The group met every Tuesday. I started structuring my week around it. Tuesdays were Mom Group Day, and knowing I had that anchor point—that two-hour window where I could drink coffee and talk to adults and not have to explain or justify or defend anything—made the rest of the week survivable. Monday nights were still hard. Wednesday mornings were still hard. But Tuesdays were a soft place to land.
We talked about everything. Formula brands and mixing techniques, yes, but also sleep training and daycare waitlists and whether it was normal for babies to make that weird grunting sound (it is, apparently, very normal). We talked about our partners and our in-laws and our bodies and our careers and our fears. We talked about the stuff that felt too dark to say out loud anywhere else—the postpartum anxiety, the intrusive thoughts, the moments when we understood why sleep deprivation is used as torture. We talked about the guilt. Always the guilt. The guilt that seemed to attach itself to every parenting decision like a shadow you couldn't shake.
One Tuesday, about three months in, a new mom showed up. She was maybe 25, with a two-week-old and the particular shell-shocked look of someone who was still in the newborn trenches. She didn't say much for the first hour. Just sat at the edge of the group, bouncing her baby, listening. Then, during a lull in the conversation, she said quietly, "I switched to formula three days ago and I feel like I failed."
And the whole table—all eight of us—just sort of gathered around her. Not physically, but emotionally. We told our stories, one after another. The NICU, the low supply, the mastitis, the medication, the adoption, the choice. We showed her our babies—healthy, happy, thriving babies—and we said: you didn't fail. You made a choice. Your baby is fed. You're doing great.
She cried. A few of us cried too. The barista brought us extra pastries for free, which I'm pretty sure is the highest honor a mom group can receive.
I think about that moment a lot. I think about what would have happened to that mom—to me, to any of us—if we hadn't found each other. If we were all still alone in our kitchens at 2 AM, googling "formula feeding guilt" and finding nothing but lactation propaganda and judgment. The isolation of formula feeding is so unnecessary and so pervasive and so damaging. It doesn't have to be this way. It really doesn't.
The group is still meeting. Tuesdays, same coffee shop on Hawthorne, same table in the back. The membership rotates—some moms go back to work, some move away, some graduate to the toddler years and don't need the support anymore—but the core remains. Jen still runs it. I still go when I can, though Lily is two now and the formula days are behind us. Sometimes I bring pastries for the new moms. Sometimes I just sit and listen. The formula feeding years are so short in the grand scheme of things, but they're also so long when you're in them. They feel like forever. Having someone who's been through it—who's come out the other side with a healthy toddler and a sense of humor and no lingering guilt—that matters. That's the gift the group gave me, and it's the gift I try to give back now.
Here's the thing about mom groups. They're not really about the thing they claim to be about. The Portland Formula & Mixed Feeding Moms group claimed to be about formula, but it was actually about loneliness. It was about finding your people in a city that can feel isolating despite all the coffee shops and farmers markets and friendly-seeming neighbors. It was about sitting in a room where you didn't have to explain yourself, where the shorthand was already understood, where someone would hand you a napkin when you cried and then make a joke about baby poop so you could laugh instead.
Portland can be a weirdly lonely place for new moms. For all its progressive reputation—the bike lanes and the composting mandates and the keep-it-weird bumper stickers—it's still a city where people keep to themselves. We have the Portland freeze, that famous Northwest reserve, and it doesn't thaw just because you're pushing a stroller. If anything, the parenting culture here can feel even more isolating. Everyone's doing their own thing, their very specific carefully researched thing, and there's this unspoken pressure to have it all figured out. The mom group shattered that. It was messy and imperfect and sometimes we spent the whole two hours talking about nipple sizes and bottle brands, and it was exactly what I needed.
If you're reading this and you're in the thick of it—the formula feeding, the guilt, the 2 AM googling, the loneliness—find your people. Start a group if you have to. Text a number from a listing. Post on a neighborhood app. Be the one who says "formula feeding moms, meet me at this coffee shop on Tuesday, I'll bring pastries." Somebody out there needs you to be their Jen. Somebody is sitting in their car right now, arguing with themselves about whether to go in. Be the reason they open the door.
— From Portland with exhaustion
