The Quiet Mile

Some mornings, once everyone else is sorted, I manage to pull on my trainers and get out for a run. Not early, not glamorous, just whenever the gap appears, if it appears at all. This is my quiet mile, the bit of the day I try to keep for myself (and the dog), and honestly it's become one of the few things that keeps me sane. I'll be straight with you though, this took me years. For a long time after becoming a mother, like so many women, I put myself so far down the list I fell off it completely. The idea of carving out time for a run would have felt selfish, or frankly impossible. Finding any kind of rhythm, and letting myself matter enough to protect it, has been slow, and I still get it wrong plenty. Some weeks the run happens most days, and some weeks it barely happens at all, because life is mad, isn't it.

Before I get out the door

My mornings, I imagine just like yours, start with everyone else. There's breakfast to sort, a toddler to dress, the great hunt for both shoes, and me asking her to put her socks on for what feels like the fifthteenth time. Some mornings that runs smoothly, but most mornings it's closer to controlled chaos, but either way, like so many of us, I've given a fair bit of myself away before the day has really got going.

The run that brings me back

By the time I actually get out for myself, my head is a mess of open tabs, half-finished thoughts, little worries, the endless mental to-do list every parent walks around with. The run is where all of that starts to quiet down. There's something about the rhythm of my feet and the fresh air that resets me, closing those tabs one by one until my head feels like my own again.

I breathe, I let my shoulders drop, and mile by mile (though there aren't many of them) I come back to myself. The noise settles, my head clears, and I feel more like me. By the time I'm heading back towards my own front door, I've usually made sense of half of what was nagging at me, and I feel steadier just from moving through the quiet.

The version of me that comes home

I come home a steadier version of myself, calmer, more patient, actually present rather than half-here. I'm far from perfect, and a run doesn't magically turn me into some serene, unflappable mother, though it does give me back enough of myself to show up well, for my family and for the families who trust me with their feeding worries later that day. I've learned the hard way that I need to get myself steady first, before I can help anyone else feel steady.

This is a big part of what I see in those families, too. When feeding has become all-consuming, when every hour bends around the next bottle or the next refusal, I watch a mother's desperation tip, little by little, into complete dysregulation, with barely any time or space to claw it back. She is running on empty, pouring from a cup that ran dry long ago. In those moments, I often feel that the place we need to begin is with her, with you, rather than the bottle, because a frightened, depleted mother and a baby who is struggling to feed are asking for the same thing first, a bit of calm restored in you before anything can soften between you.

I'd wish that for you the same way I reach for it myself. Even ten quiet minutes that belong to you and nobody else, where you can breathe out, unclench a little, and come back feeling more like yourself. You deserve that as much as anyone you care for, and more often than we realise, that steadier you is exactly where feeding begins to soften too.