Mom Sits on the Edge of a Drained Pool and Lies Back So Her Daughter Can Push Up Off Her Feet After Over 30 Minutes of Failed Plans to Get Out Without Ripping the Loose Liner

A daughter in a teal top stands at the bottom of a drained backyard pool with both hands on the edge, a green garden hose trailing down the wall beside her. Her mom stands on the concrete deck above, looking down at her. The white pool steps are in plain view at the far end, and neither of them can work out how to get her out.

The video went up on TikTok from the account @shielaesco on June 20, 2026, and the mom starts it with a narration: “Please allow me to explain these current events.” Her daughter, she says, had to get in the pool to help with the liner, “but now she needs to come back out.”

The liner is the whole problem. “She cannot put her weight on the side of the liner or she’ll rip it out of the top seam,” the mom says. The steps are no help either: “Even though it looks like she could just walk over there to the steps and walk right out, not the case. The liner is actually pulling away from the side of the pool all the way around. So where she is standing is as close as she can get.”

Her caption fills in how they got there. “The pool had to be drained for repairs,” she writes, and with the liner “hanging loose all the way around the walls, my daughter suddenly had one major problem: there was no easy way out.”

“So mom to the rescue. Right?” she says in the narration, before admitting she may or may not have been able to help.

Over 30 Minutes, Three Questions and One Pair of Worn Out Hands

By the caption’s count the two of them spent “over 30 minutes” on “brainstorming, failed plans, new plans, creative engineering.” The mom describes herself “trying to figure out how to lift her over the side with hands that had already given up on me.”

She lists what they tested as three questions: “Could she jump high enough? Could I pull her up? Could we somehow defy the laws of physics?” Her verdict: “The answer wasn’t as obvious as you’d think.”

Once the narration ends, most of what can be heard is laughing, broken up by instructions called out to the pair from off camera. The first that comes through cleanly is for the mom: “Sit down and put your legs over. Let her step on your feet.” It is followed a little later by the snag: “But she can’t step up on her feet.”

The next plan asks more of the mom. She is told to lie back and let her daughter up, the call goes out to “put your other foot on her foot,” and then it is “Push up, push up.” The video ends shortly after that, and the caption promises that watching to the end shows “how our great escape finally happened.”

“By the end, we were exhausted, laughing hysterically, and questioning why getting OUT of a pool was harder than getting IN,” the mom writes. She calls it possibly “the funniest video I’ve ever recorded.”

Two Questions to Settle Before Anyone Climbs Into a Drained Liner Pool

The mom answers both in her first 20 seconds, but only after her daughter was already standing in the bottom. Asking them from the deck is the fix.

Can the edge take a person’s weight? Hers could not. By her account, leaning on the side of the liner would have ripped it out of the top seam, which ruled out the obvious move of hauling herself over the side.

Can the helper still walk to the steps? Hers could not do that either, because the liner was pulling away from the wall all the way around and the spot where her daughter stood was as close as she could get.

If both answers are no, agree on the way out before the helper goes in. The last plan heard in the video needed someone seated on the edge with her legs hanging into the pool as footholds, then lying back on the deck while the climber pushed up. That is easier to set up at minute one than at minute 30.

Keep more than one person up top. The mom says her hands had given up before the lifting was done, and the step by step directions that got things moving came from a third voice.