I’ll never forget the time my friend came over to make me brunch after I had my first baby. At the time, I was mostly living on granola bars (and other bland, one-handed foods). I was very tired, still healing from a c-section, and starting to feel sort of bummed as I saw all my friends still living their best 20-something lives while I stayed home breastfeeding and changing diapers. So when my friend came over with a bag of fresh produce from the farmer’s market to make me a Spanish tortilla, hang out, and clean my kitchen, that act of kindness kept me going for weeks.
Recently, British influencer Grace Beverley shared her own “save the day” moment when she and three friends stepped up for their postpartum friend on TikTok.
Beverley’s friend Steph Elswood is a new mom, and expressed feeling overwhelmed on social media, particularly by the fact that her house was a mess. If you’ve been there, you know: even though nobody expects new parents to keep a pristine home, it can still feel overstimulating to be stuck in it without any real recourse. And so a plan was hatched: Beverly and two friends asked Elswood if they could come over one Sunday to which the new mom replied yes but, “Just to let you know, the house is a mess and so am I.”
So when Beverley and Co. rolled up in full-on housekeeping gear, lugging mops, brooms, and dusters (along with flowers and pretty pink cupcakes with “MILF” decoratively written on the top) Elswood was overcome with happiness.
The trio not only scrubbed, vacuumed and dusted, but beautified the space with fresh flowers and even assembled some flat pack furniture that was sitting around waiting to be built.
Elswood, being an influencer herself, of course posted the end results on her own account.
“When I say the house was immaculate,” she wrote over a picture of her living room, “I genuinely feel like I can finally breathe. That overwhelming to-do list doesn’t feel so heavy anymore and the clutter that was overstimulating me is just… gone. I’ve never felt more lucky and grateful. Female friendships are just the best thing in the world.”
The moment went truly viral, the first video about Operation Cleaning Crew has been viewed more than 20.5 million times as of press time and has garnered nearly five million likes.
“This 👏 is 👏 girlhood 👏,” cheered the official Barbie TikTok account.
“The village is villaging,” mused another.
“This is the definition of love and friendship and it’s also the best gift you could give to her and the baby – a little piece of mind,” said a third.
It’s no small thing to take hours out of a weekend to give a friend’s house the thorough attention a lot of us probably don’t give our own on a regular basis. But having been in Elswood’s position, I can promise you that whatever effort her friends put in was her appreciation, relief, and gratitude was even more powerful.