A mother learned the hard way to always keep an eye on her toddler after she discovered him eating her father’s ashes.
Natasha Emeny, under the username @palominolil, posted a video on TikTok on Tuesday showing her son walking around her living room covered in a grey powder.
She showed a storage unit with an urn sitting on top of it, the lid open, and the container completely empty. The mother continued two film, showing the powder scattered on the floor and across her couch.
Emeny then pans over to her son, who has the powder around his mouth and is crying. “Oh my god,” she said. “When your son eats your dad’s ashes.”
“My son has eaten my dad’s ashes!” she repeated as the clip ended.
As of Thursday afternoon, the TikTok received over 14 million views, with many people turning to the comments section to alert another TikToker known for her long list of reasons why she refuses to have children.
“Where is the girl with the list,” many people wrote in the comments.
Other commenters joked about the incident. “He’ll never lose 2 truths and a lie,” one person wrote.
“Let us know if he starts acting like ur dad,” another commenter joked.
Some commenters were concerned about how her son was left alone long enough to get into the ashes at all.
“Your child is too young to be left unattended. This is your fault, not your child’s,” one person commented, while another commenter agreed, writing, “This is 100% on mom for leaving the urn within the child’s reach.”
Emeny posted two follow-up videos on Thursday, answering some questions she had seen regarding the video. She clarified that her father’s ashes were split amongst her family members and that the urn was previously up on a higher shelf, but she was in the process of moving things around and hadn’t gotten around to putting it back.
She also addressed the comments regarding her not paying attention to her son. “How are people doing jobs — like housework, work, cooking, cleaning, going to the toilet — with a toddler as a single parent without leaving them alone for a few minutes?” she asked.
“Do I just wear him as a backpack from now on?”
This isn’t the first time a mother has ended up in Emeny’s situation. Earlier this year, Monica Long posted a video on TikTok about her two toddlers also eating her father’s ashes.
“The boys got Paw Paw,” she said, referring to her two toddlers. “They got him and they dumped him out all over my carpet. And I didn’t realize it was Paw Paw. And I vacuumed him up.”
Long then held up an empty, cross-shaped container in the video with the label Paw Paw on it.
“They may have eaten some of him too,” she continued in her video. “Because [my son] had the cap [of the container] in his mouth.”
