The founder of Hot Mess Express talks about building a community that cleans for those in need.
Having a family can be chaotic — to say the least — and we all know who usually gets stuck cleaning up the disarray. Moms are so often overwhelmed with mounting housework, endless culinary duties, and everything else childcare requires. So it’s no surprise that they’re also often weighed down by stress and fatigue. Plus, mothers with conditions like postpartum depression usually don’t get time off to prioritize their mental health over a cluttered kitchen.
But what happens when moms are drowning under the mounting pressures of daily life, and can’t catch up? In 2021, Jen Hamilton met one such mom who desperately needed help — she was struggling with depression and couldn’t organize and clean her home, but was almost too ashamed to ask for assistance. Noticing many moms who were in the same boat, Hamilton decided she would build a community to help. Now a nonprofit, her organization Hot Mess Express is a web of volunteers who provide free cleaning services for moms in need.
We caught up with Hamilton to talk about Hot Mess Express’s growing national reach, what it’s like to be a full-time nurse managing a growing community, and how a Facebook group started it all.
Katie Couric Media: Have you always been community-oriented?
Jen Hamilton: I’m a nurse, so I think that comes naturally to me. My mom’s a nurse also, and a lot of my [interest in] community service comes from my dad. My dad started an organization in 2008 called Wake the World, which started as an organization that benefited kids in foster care or in children’s homes — kids who had been let down by the adults in their lives. He started taking them to the lake and teaching them to wakeboard or water ski. Now there are chapters all over the United States and Canada. So I got to see firsthand what it looks and feels like to help people.
What inspired you to start Hot Mess Express?
One day, I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw a post on a local moms’ group [in the triad area of North Carolina]. A young mom posted anonymously saying, “Can someone please give me some recommendations on house cleaning companies? I have postpartum depression and I can’t keep up — I don’t have the energy to clean my house and I feel like I’m a bad mom. Also, I don’t really have the money.”
I reached out to the group admin and said, “I know this is against the rules, but could you please find out who posted that? Ask her if it’s OK if I know her identity and see if I can get a group of people together to come and rescue her.” When she said it was fine, I made a post in that same group saying, “Would anyone be willing to go with me to save this girl from what she’s going through?” That Saturday, I and eight or nine other women met up at a McDonald’s parking lot. and carpooled to her house.
We walked in and it was a cluttered house — just like what many of us live in, but don’t want anybody to see. We’d raised some money and we sent the family out for a fun day while we were cleaning. I could tell just from looking at [the mother’s] face how scared she was to [show strangers] this. As women, we’re taught to hide our mess. I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “We’re here because we wish that there was someone there for us when we were going through the exact same thing.”
We folded all the laundry, swept, mopped, vacuumed, and organized. A couple of us went to Walmart and got organizational tools, and also things to make crockpot meals and frozen food. When the family came back, not only did they have a clean house, but they also had a refrigerator full of food, and food in a crockpot for that night.
After we left that rescue mission, we knew we were on the brink of something huge. That’s how Hot Mess Express was started. Since then, we’ve been able to help so many women across the United States, and many women have started chapters of their own.
What’s next for Hot Mess Express?
We have a list of all our current chapters on our website. If you don’t see one for your area, you can start one.
I have 3.1 million followers on TikTok, and I’m a full-time bedside labor and delivery nurse. So I’ve passed the baton to Brittinie Tran for the day-to-day running of HME. Brittinie was a part of the very first Hot Mess Express mission and has since taken HME to places that I never could have dreamed of. We also just got our non-profit status. Now, when people donate to us, it’s tax-deductible.
Our goal is just to be able to help as many people as possible, so I’d love to see chapters in every single state. I want to see a community of people who understand what it feels like to feel alone, to feel like a failure, to feel like you’re not a good mom because of the state of your home. And I want to let them know that they’re not alone — we all feel that way. Being overwhelmed doesn’t mean that you’re a bad mom, it doesn’t mean that you’re a failure. We’re supposed to live in a community, and we all need help.
