Most parents find themselves surrounded by chaos on a daily basis – even Marie Kondo, the queen of tidying, recently admitted she’s “kind of given up” on keeping her house in order after having her third child.
Yet admissions like this are still quite rare. Wherever you go on social media, there are influencers sharing reels of their perfect homes, where not one single sofa cushion is out of place.
Everything comes in varying shades of beige or grey (or greige). There are no dents in the walls, no toys strewn across floors, and certainly no stains where some form of bodily fluid has splashed.
It’s perhaps this very reason why parents are flocking to follow Emily Feret, a 30-year-old mum with two kids, who shares incredibly real – and often hilarious – Tiktok videos of her chaotic home in Chicago.
Feret is all about sharing her “normal” filter free life online – celebrating the messy, chaotic and average. She started her TikTok account “as a joke”, but now 1.2 million people follow her videos, so it’s clearly struck a chord with parents.
Perhaps some of her best videos are the tours she does of her house, which often looks like a bomb’s hit it (like most homes do when kids are involved).
But Feret takes joy in it. You can see she embraces it. It’s all just part of life.
One of her videos, titled “Come clean my non aesthetic playroom with me”, follows her as she attempts to tidy a room that is literally drowning in toys.
At one point she comes across a toy that’s had its head chewed clean off and pulls a face before carrying on, dancing around and stashing toys in baskets and on shelves – anywhere she can find room – before a caption appears saying “can’t wait for this room to be a disaster again in a few hours”.
In another video, the mum-of-two walks around her house “to make you feel better about yours”. She picks up a coffee cup with day-old coffee in it that she didn’t get chance to drink, laughs maniacally at the state of her car and reveals she’s internally screaming over the placement of some paper snowflakes her toddler stuck on the window.
Showing her “normal home” has made tons of other parents feel less bad about their homes too. If people aren’t laughing at the relatability of her clips, they’re nodding in agreement at the truths she shares.
“Obsessed with you and the comfort you give me in my motherhood,” commented Samantha Shawe in response to her video on tidying her children’s playroom.
“I love how authentic you are!” said another parent. “This mama appreciates you!” Another added: “I love when your TikToks come up, you make me feel normal and you make me smile!”
Her aim has always been to help parents feel less alone. “Parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done and it’s been wonderful and heartbreaking and amazing and challenging,” Feret tells HuffPost UK.