The "morning as a mom" trend is one of my favorites to watch and I want to be clear upfront that I mean that sincerely, without any edge. Parents are doing a genuinely extraordinary amount of work that I find awe-inspiring from a safe distance, and the "morning as a mom" content is largely women saying: look at this labor, it is real and it is constant and I am doing it at 5:47 a.m. while everyone else is still asleep. That deserves documentation and credit and I respect it completely.
But every time it blows up on my FYP, I notice there's no childfree counterpart. The counterpart content that exists tends to be either "I sleep until noon and spend Saturdays brunching, childfree is amazing," which is fun but also a caricature, or defensive, which I don't want to be. I'm not defensive about being childfree. It's just my life. So I want to offer what a morning actually looks like when your household is one adult, two dying-but-rebounding plants, and occasionally a borrowed beagle named Biscuit. Because care is still happening. It just looks different.
The Actual Morning (No Kids, Still a Ritual)
My morning starts somewhere between 7:30 and 9, depending on what I was doing the night before. If I was in the studio until 1 or 2 a.m., the 9 end of that range. If I went to bed at a sensible hour like a reasonable person (this happens rarely but I appreciate those mornings), closer to 7:30. The first thing I do before I look at anything, phone, laptop, mirror, anything, is make coffee. The stovetop moka pot. The ritual of waiting for the hiss. I've written about this before and I'll probably write about it again because the first cup of coffee in silence is honestly sacred to me and I'm not embarrassed about it.
After the coffee: Lazarus. My pothos. He's named for the guy in John 11 who Jesus raised from the dead, which should tell you everything about how many times I've let this plant nearly die and brought it back from the brink. He's in the corner near the window and every morning I check him. Is he drooping? Does the soil need water? Has he made new growth overnight? (He has, recently. Little green shoots. I was embarrassingly delighted.) This is a five-second assessment. But it's mine. It grounds the morning in something physical and alive and not about music or metrics or what I have to do today.
On the mornings I'm dog-sitting Biscuit, my neighbor's beagle mix who I watch semi-regularly because I love him and the chaos he brings to my life, the morning is a different animal entirely. Biscuit has needs. Biscuit has a schedule. Biscuit will sit next to the bed and stare at me with the intensity of a being who knows that his breakfast is happening whether or not I'm awake enough to participate in it. I get up faster on Biscuit mornings than on any other morning. I am showered, dressed, and have walked around the block by 8 a.m. on Biscuit mornings. He is a personal trainer who also has the body of a sausage and the energy of a child who just drank espresso. I love him unreasonably.
What "Care" Looks Like Without Kids
Here's the thing about childfree mornings that the "morning as a mom" content accidentally highlights, just by contrast: the care is still happening but it's mostly invisible. When you have kids, the care is visible and constant and externally legible, the lunches being made, the schedules being managed, the tiny human needs being met before 7 a.m. That's real, documented, recognizable labor. When you don't have kids, the care you perform in the morning is mostly care for yourself and care for the things you've committed to and it tends to happen quietly, with no audience.
For me that means: watering Lazarus and the little succulent on the studio shelf (she doesn't have a name yet, she hasn't earned it, she keeps almost dying). Checking in on the song I was working on the night before, not diving into it, just looking at the voice memo I made at midnight, listening back to thirty seconds of a melody I was chasing. Making note of the thought I had while half-asleep about the bridge that's been giving me trouble. Responding to the message my aunt Deb left (she leaves voicemails the length of short documentaries, I love them and I save them). Taking my vitamins, which I always forget until I've already had coffee and then feel briefly guilty about. These are not dramatic. They're not content. They're just the texture of a morning that belongs to someone who's in a specific kind of life.
The thing I've come to appreciate about my mornings is the quiet. I know that's a cliche and I know moms and dads would trade for it sometimes and I have absolutely zero judgment about that. But I didn't always know how to be quiet with myself. I grew up in a house that was always full, in a church community that was always active, in a faith tradition that filled every silence with prayer or worship or Bible study. The concept of just being alone in the morning, with a cup of coffee and a plant and your own thoughts, felt decadent and a little guilty for a long time. Like I was supposed to be doing something with the time. It took me years to understand that the time is not wasted. It's the container the rest of the day gets poured into.
Voice Memos as Morning Prayer
I want to talk about the voice memo thing specifically because it's become the most consistent part of my morning practice and I think it's underrated as a creative tool. I keep my phone by the bed and my voice memo app is set to record with one tap. Anytime I have a half-formed thought in the night, a lyric, a melody, a phrase that might be something, a structural idea for a song, I grab the phone and record it without turning the light on. The recordings are chaotic. I've listened back to them: I'm clearly half-asleep, my diction is terrible, I sometimes start a melody and trail off mid-phrase. Most of them don't amount to anything. But the ones that do are the most surprising things I've made because they came from somewhere below the analytical brain.
In the morning, listening back to the previous night's voice memos is the first creative act of the day. It takes maybe five to ten minutes. Sometimes I listen to nothing because I didn't record anything. Sometimes I listen to something that's genuinely good and those mornings have a different quality, like finding money in the pocket of a jacket I haven't worn in a while. The record I'm making right now has at least two songs that started as voice memos I didn't consciously remember making. I went back and listened and thought: huh. Apparently I know something I wasn't aware of knowing. That's the kind of thing that makes me believe in the subconscious as a real working creative partner, even if I have to work in my sleep to access it.
the other things that are actually care
Morning care for me also includes: not checking Instagram before the coffee is done. This is a rule I break sometimes and always regret. The mood contamination from going straight from sleep to the social media ambient hum is real and I've gotten better at protecting the first thirty minutes from it. Also: opening the curtains and standing in the actual daylight for thirty seconds, which sounds extremely basic but I am a nocturnal creature who works in a closet-sized studio and if I don't do this deliberately I will go entire days without technically being exposed to outdoor light. I think that's technically how vampires work.
I have a small notebook I write three things in every morning, not three things I'm grateful for in the Instagram-caption way, but three things I'm thinking about that day. One is usually music-related. One is usually something I'm processing personally. One is usually something I read and haven't finished chewing on. Nobody sees this but me. It doesn't become content. It just happens and it helps and I've been doing it long enough that I feel wrong on days I skip it, which is what tells you it's an actual practice rather than a performance of self-improvement.
This is my morning as a childfree adult who lives alone and makes music and talks to her plants. It's quieter than a morning as a mom. It's more selfish in the literal sense, most of the care goes toward me and my creative work and the small living things I've agreed to keep alive. That's not a hierarchy judgment. It's just a different life. Both deserve documentation. Both are full of actual care and actual ritual. And honestly? I think we'd all benefit from seeing more of the full spectrum of how people start their days, the chaotic and the quiet, the parent and the childfree, the city apartment and the house with a yard. We're all just trying to get from sleep to function without losing ourselves in the process.
I hope your December morning, whatever it looks like, has at least one moment that belongs entirely to you. You've earned it.