When I mention slow mornings, you might picture soft sunlight filtering through linen curtains, journaling as the sun comes up with a steaming loose-leaf tea in an artisanal mug by your side. Gentle stretching, a green smoothie and fresh farmers market bread, before getting dressed in a beautifully curated, effortless outfit to head out the door. I write about it wistfully. I’ve never once lived it.
If you’re a parent, none of this needs explaining further. Not even the time you wake up is yours to choose, and most days the only stretch of quiet is whatever’s left over once everyone else’s needs have been met. My mornings start when a small person decides they have, somewhere around five, sometimes earlier. My partner’s often already gone by then, out the door around half four for an early shift, so it’s just me and the kids and whatever the morning turns into. And if you’re not a parent, you’ll have your own version of this: a flatmate’s alarm through the wall, a shift that starts before the sun’s properly up, a dog who doesn’t understand daylight savings time. Almost nobody actually gets that ideal hour of silence.
My version of a slow morning is a lot smaller. Here’s roughly what it looks like, on a fairly ordinary day:
Awake, because someone else is.
A glass of water before anything else. Mainly, before I touch my phone, before I know what kind of morning this is going to be.
A brief stretch of time to myself before the kiddos get restless.
Enough time to wash my face, cold water, the same three things on my skin in the same order. Just me at the sink for ten minutes doing the same small thing I do every day, no rushing involved.
It’s way too early for breakfast…
…so we lie in bed with books, stickers (and yes, the TV goes on eventually too).
Breakfast for everyone.
Always eaten at the table. There’s conversation, most of it about what we’re eating, what we’ll be eating later, and what our favourite colours are. I finish off by clearing the table, even just to stack the dishes in the sink and wipe the crumbs up with the palm of my hand.
The day takes over.
Which is fine. The slow part was never meant to last all morning.
A few things survive most days, even the bad ones:
- Water before phone. Coffee first thing has never felt like a good idea to me. I don’t think it does anyone many favours before there’s food or water in them. Just a glass of water is fine, before moving on to anything else.
- Breakfast at the table when it’s possible. Five minutes sitting down does something that the same five minutes standing up doesn’t, though both are better than skipping it.
- The skincare, a short routine, never rushed. Some mornings it’s the full three steps. Some mornings it’s just a splash of cold water before I move on. The key is to allow myself that simple ritual, which has nothing to do with the number of steps completed.
- Phone waits until face is washed. That’s the only rule about screens this whole routine has.
If you’re still waiting for the version of your morning with the journal and the green smoothie, it might come later, in a different stretch of life, or it might not come at all, and either way it was never really the thing doing the work. The version of a slow morning that actually makes a difference, is the one you can carve out of five minutes, with one ritual that is purely your own.
