Single Mom Has ‘No Words’ After Seeing What 6-Year-Old Did for Her Birthday

A single mom was left lost for words after her six-year-old daughter sprang the most heartfelt of birthday surprises on her.

Though some may say otherwise, a significant proportion of us love nothing more than being surprised on our birthday. In 2021, a survey of 2,000 U.S. adults conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Evite found that 36 percent of respondents had explicitly told a partner not to do anything for their birthday while secretly expecting them to do the opposite.

Single mom Emily White from Surrey in the U.K. wasn’t expecting all that much from her birthday. However, she had a suspicion that her six-year-old daughter, Millie, was up to something.

“She’d been building it up for months with my dad, thinking she was being subtle by asking to ‘borrow my phone to call grandad’ and then hiding under the table,” White told Newsweek. “She thought if she was under the table I wouldn’t hear the conversation despite still being in the room.”

There were other “subtle” signs as White’s big day approached, like the fact Millie insisted on opening everything that came in the mail. “Even letters that were obviously bills,” White said.

Even after her mysterious package arrived, there were more hints. “The night before she asked me for a gift bag and spent about 40 minutes in her room taping together the gift bag making excited little squeals to herself,” White said. “Then she ‘hid’ it in her room— it was actually still in plain sight.”

None of that mattered come the morning of White’s birthday, though, when Millie unveiled the gift, complete with an adorable handwritten card, which she gave to her mom while singing “Happy Birthday” with all her heart.

It was a wonderful moment for both mother and daughter, and one White was able to capture on camera, with the resulting footage posted to her TikTok @emilywhitey alongside a caption that simply read: “No words.”

“It just melted my heart,” White said. “It honestly could’ve been a bag of mouldy bananas but seeing the joy it brought her to give me a gift was so magical and precious.”

Millie bought her mom a cosy dressing gown, which White said was “perfect” and something she will cherish forever. “I wear it all the time and every time I have it on it takes me right back,” she said. “It absolutely was the best part of the day!”

White regularly posts on TikTok and wanted to share this experience to highlight the “reality” of life as a single parent who doesn’t have a partner to surprise them on their birthday. Millie made sure that didn’t happen, though, and her mom could not be prouder.

“I shared it to show how amazing my little girl is that she’d thought about it months in advance and gone to so much effort with it,” she said. “But it’s also a reminder to anyone with friends or family who are single parents that it’s important for their children to feel like they’re making their parents’ days special too, even if it’s a small handmade card! It’s something people don’t think about.”