On one of Avery Smith's weekly trips to her mom's house in Yukon, Oklahoma, she started digging through big plastic buckets of items her mother, Billie Sue Smith, saved from her childhood.
"I was feeling nostalgic," Avery tells TODAY.com. She didn't know that she would find the single composition notebook that played a pivotal role in her life.
"I had totally forgotten about the journal, but when I found it, I realized I have literally not picked this up since 2012," Avery says. "As I'm reading these notes, I'm out in our garage, bawling my eyes out because I don't even remember writing this stuff."
Avery, now almost 22, was so touched by her fifth grade journal entries that she decided to post them on social media. "I posted them because I was very proud of the way that she communicated with me and the way that I communicated back," Avery says.
To date, the TikTok video has over 6 million views.
In the video, Avery put together a slideshow of some of the touching things she and her mom wrote to each other during that tough period. She captioned the first image: "Finding the journal my mom and I used to communicate when I started to struggle with getting my feelings out verbally, and realizing just how incredible she did as a single parent."
Within the pages of the journal, Avery vents about her younger sister, Dani, reminisces about the time before her mother got divorced and attempts to interpret fifth grade boy behavior.
Billie Sue gives outstanding advice and reassurance to her daughter while showing a bit of vulnerability. On one page, she asks: "Will you tell me 3 things I can do better as a mom?"
Her husband was "in and out of the picture" because "he was struggling with addiction" at the time, Billie Sue says. A therapist suggested that Billie Sue be honest with her daughters, always keeping the line of communication open.
"But Avery was a little bit anxious at that age and it was a struggle more to communicate verbally than her sister," Billie Sue says.
“At that age, I didn’t like confrontation,” Avery explains. She told her mother that she was uncomfortable having direct conversations about her father. She had already started writing her feelings out through poetry or her personal diary, and she desperately wanted to talk to her mother, "but anytime I tried to talk about it, I would just break down crying and I couldn't even get the words out."
"And so I had this idea to maybe write in a journal to her and then just put it in her room so that she can write things down that are bothering her versus coming to me and having this uncomfortable conversation. So that's how it started," Billie Sue says.
She wrote Avery a note and placed the note and the notebook under Avery's pillow. When Avery was ready to respond, she would smuggle the notebook to her mother's room and place it under her mom's pillow.
Avery was thrilled to see the journal. "I was thinking, 'Perfect!' I don't have to talk about it. I don't have to cry about it. Everything that we wrote in that journal stayed in that journal and we never addressed it in person."
Exchanging letters in the journal was "a very brief thing," according to Avery. "Once we started doing it and I started getting comfortable with it, I quickly became more comfortable to verbalize things. So it didn't last a very long time."
But those pivotal written exchanges cemented their close relationship. Billie Sue earned her daughter's trust, and Avery gained confidence in expressing emotions.
Billie Sue also exchanged notes and letters with her younger daughter, Dani, now 18. "My sister played such a huge role in getting me through everything, getting my mom through everything," Avery says. "The three of us ... one cannot exist without the other."
Because Billie Sue only uses social media as a way to keep up with her daughters and her friends, she didn't realize that Avery had posted images of the journal ... or that the post was going viral.
When the pair were heading to a concert one evening, Avery realized how many views the video was getting. She hopped in her mom's car and said, "Mom! We're famous!"
"What? Okay. Whatever," was Billie Sue's unruffled response, Avery says.
Though she's a public speaker by trade, Billie Sue doesn't like to be the center of attention in her personal life, so the response to the video has been "overwhelming."
"I have been flooded with messages from all over the world," Billie Sue says. "I did not realize how many people had issues with their mother, which I relate to so much because I have the same situation with my mom, which is why I wanted to do better."
She also wants viewers to know that being a single mother is tough.
"I was working three jobs sometimes — and it was really important to me to be there for everything that [my daughters] did. So I was working a lot of odd hours and just trying to be there for them as much as possible while also keeping our family afloat financially ... I don't think that they remember a lot of the really hard times, but I definitely was losing my sh-- sometimes. It was really, really hard."
Avery, on the other hand, has had a different reaction to their new social media fame.
"I have loved it," she admits honestly. "It's not that I love being the center of attention, but I love that I am the center of attention for something that feels so deep and meaningful to me."
Stopping a moment to compose herself and steady her voice, Avery continues, "We've just we have helped each other through so much. And the relationship I have with her is something that I just wouldn't trade for anything. She really is just equally my mom and my best friend."
