Recently, Ophelia Nichols – better known as Mama Tot to her legions of fans called “tater tots” – asked her audience to post their best impressions of her. One woman nailed Mama Tot’s “Taster Tuesday” segment, in which she samples various types of alcohol “so you don’t have to.” With her cleavage front and center, she spoke in an exaggerated Southern accent and made faces as she drank a shot. Another impersonator was a man with a T-shirt tied around his head in imitation of Mama Tot’s long blonde hair. “Let me grab some snacks,” he said, his arms overflowing with bags. Over and over, her followers mocked some of her characteristic lines, as she looks at the camera with concern and asks gently, “Have you eaten anything today? Have you had your water? Have you taken your vitamins?”

It takes someone with a truly good sense of humor and a lot of self-confidence not only to ask to be roasted but to then laugh at the results. Over the past three years, as Ophelia has shot to social media fame, she has never taken herself too seriously – even as she experienced the most devastating moments of her life right in front of her own camera, buoyed by the love and support of her fans from all over the world.

Since she made her first post on TikTok in August 2020, from the break room of the furniture store where she used to work, Ophelia has amassed an incredible 12 million followers on that platform. She has another 3 million followers on Facebook and some 690,000 on Instagram.

A Mobile native who lives in a bucolic country setting in Wilmer, in the westernmost part of Mobile County, Ophelia works just as hard today as she did in retail – but now she sets her own hours and works from home, where she’s surrounded by animals, like her dogs Stella and Jax, her tiny pup Pixie, her cat, Gigi, her personality-filled cockatiel Tuti, who often perches on her shoulder or in her hair, and Binx, the lost parakeet she took in a few months ago. She’s been married to Derick Nichols, a truck driver and drag racing enthusiast also known as Papa Tot, for the past 13 years.

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Sitting at a table on their shady front porch on a hot summer morning, Mama Tot is in real life just like she is in her videos: sweet, empathetic and approachable. “I don’t play a character or nothing,” she says. Just the day before, her first grandchild was born. “I probably took 15 pictures at the hospital yesterday with nurses and other people in the waiting area and stuff, but that’s a compliment to me. The biggest compliment somebody can ever say to me is, ‘Mama Tot, you’re down to earth.’”

It’s so quiet out here in the country that the only sounds are the loud hum of cicadas and the gentle peal of 19 windchimes in the occasional slight breeze. She’s told her own story many times, and she still seems to be somewhat surprised by the turns her life has taken to lead her to this moment.

You name it, and Ophelia has been through it – abuse, infidelity, an eating disorder, estrangement from her mother and the very public murder of her youngest son. She has become a champion for the underdog, the bullied, the unseen. She is a fierce advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, an inspirational figure, a role model, a mother and a dear friend to millions.

‘I feel safe’

Her success is “a complete accident,” she insists. During the pandemic, she created a TikTok account “as a watcher, like everybody else,” she says. Her username, “shoelover 99,” reflected her passion for footwear. Knowing how much she loves to laugh, her four children would send her funny TikTok videos. She had never made one, herself, until one day she happened to see a video of a teenage girl who was wearing a new dress and bemoaning the fact that her mother had shamed her for it, saying she was too big for it and that she needed to return it.

Ophelia called her daughter and told her she needed a quick FaceTime lesson on how to “stitch” a response to the girl. A few minutes later, she addressed her in the way that would quickly become famous: “Hey, my little tater tot!” she said. “I had one of those mamas, too, that used to tell me I was fat and ugly from the time I can remember. And then as I got older, I quit listening to that heifer, OK? I don’t know who told you you’re not beautiful, but I think you are!”

She went back to work, and about 30 minutes later “realized what going viral looked like,” she says. “But it wasn’t the views – I could care less. When I opened up the comments section, that’s what caught my eye. It was, ‘I feel safe over here.’ It was, ‘I wish my mom would have talked to me like that. I might not be so self-conscious about the things I am today.’”

Ophelia realized she was on to something. “I thought, ‘That’s it! That’s what I’ll do. I’ll use this account to help people feel better about things.’ And I did, and it just grew, and it just wouldn’t quit growing. Daily.”

The critical mother struck a chord with Ophelia, who grew up on Dog River in Mobile’s Cypress Shores neighborhood with a mom who Ophelia says suffered from bipolar disorder and was mentally and physically abusive to her daughter. It was her mother’s second marriage – she had three children, none of whom lived with her, when she met Ophelia’s father – and it was her dad’s third marriage. He had one child with each of his previous wives. Ophelia describes her parents as “polar opposites.” Her dad was “very funny, very friendly, never met a stranger, accepted all people,” she says. Her mom was “just one of those moms who didn’t bond with her children.” Even so, she had many good qualities, Ophelia says. “She was a beautiful home decorator, she was an excellent writer.” She credits her mother with her own love of fashion and makeup.

Her beloved father, a workaholic who owned a used car lot, had always been her protector. But when Ophelia was just 13 years old, he died of a heart attack, leaving her alone with her mother, who spent most of her time locked away in her bedroom. Fortunately, she had a few mother figures in her life, including a favorite aunt and her childhood friend’s mother, Miss Jenny, who took her in and helped her when they could.

Ever since she could remember, Ophelia had wanted to become a forensic anthropologist. “I wanted the challenge of it,” she says. “I wanted the mystery of it. I wanted to be that person that successfully figured out what people needed to know, to be the voice for somebody that couldn’t speak.” She even planned to attend the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

But her life went in another direction when she became pregnant at 15. Her mother made her drop out of high school, and then kicked her out of her home when the baby was only a few weeks old. Walking down the road with nothing but a baby carrier, she found a phone and called her son’s biological grandmother, who came to pick her up and took her home to Gulfport, Mississippi.

“And I never lived with my mother again,” Ophelia says. “Ever.”

Eventually, she completely cut off all contact with her mom.

Ophelia was terrified that she wouldn’t bond with her son, and that she would repeat her mother’s patterns. “All of my fears ended up being just that, fear,” she says.

She remains friends with her oldest son’s father, even though “he cheated on me and broke my heart,” she says. “I’ve since forgiven him for his ways. We broke up during the pregnancy, but his family never was astray from that baby. So he’s been very much a part of my life.”

At 18, she married her first husband, and they had three children. After they divorced, she met Papa Tot, who has been a father figure to her four children since they started dating 17 years ago.

‘He’s my son!’

In the summer of 2022, Ophelia was happily vacationing at the beach with a group of girlfriends when suddenly, she found herself experiencing a parent’s worst nightmare. Her youngest son, Randon, was shot to death while selling marijuana in Prichard, Alabama, on the day before his 19th birthday. That day, she filmed herself at her most vulnerable, with no makeup, no fake eyelashes, no wig, just herself crying, begging her then-7 million followers to help find her son’s killer. It was painful to watch the normally cheerful Mama Tot, a mother figure to so many, pleading for help, holding up a photo of herself and Randon. “Look at him! He’s my son, and I’ll never see him again,” she said between sobs.

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Randon’s killer eventually was caught. Despite her anguish, she has empathy for the young man who hastily decided to take her son’s life. “It’s not just my family that’s hurting,” she says. “Because I know the person who is being charged with this, his mama and daddy didn’t raise him like that. When I seen them in the courtroom, they looked like good people. You could see the hurt on their face. They still have their son, but the disappointment in their face was just – I don’t know, my heart went out to them and still does.”

She credits her tater tots with helping her to survive such a heartbreaking and devastating loss. “They think that I do something for them,” she says. “They have no idea what they do for me. If I’m having one of those really, really tough grief days, I go in there in my media room and I open up the boxes of all the letters and the cards and the notes and everything that has been sent to me from complete strangers, not just in this country but around the world, and I remind myself that there’s somebody out there that was thinking of me at that moment to send that, and it just really gets me through the day.”

Those 19 wind chimes hanging from her porch were all sent in Randon’s memory. In fact, she received nearly 300 of them from her tater tots. After he died, she received so many packages that she had to pick them up with Derick’s truck and open them on her front porch.

Now, she’s working on creating a foundation to honor her son and help his death have meaning. “He was very independent,” she says, “which is why I’m building his foundation under the name Randon’s Way, because he did things Randon’s way.”

Ophelia believes Randon was depressed and lost after his own father died in 2019. “He was a totally different person when (his) daddy died,” she says. She hopes to be able to focus on providing mentors for youth as well as helping families in need. “I cannot wait until we’re able to cut the first check for somebody that maybe they need a mobility ramp built in their home,” she says.

She also hopes she’ll be able to help the LGBTQ+ community “because I’m a huge ally for them,” she says. The first gay man she ever knew worked at a convenience store in her neighborhood when Ophelia was about 9 years old. She remembers how kind he was to the children who rode their bikes up to the gas station, how he gave them free ice cream – and yet her mother told her not to breathe the same air because she could get AIDS and not to talk to him because he was going to hell.

Later, one of her cousins came out to her when he was unable to tell anyone else in his family. “Our family, on my mama’s side, was real religious and would use it as a weapon,” she says. “You could tell how bad he was struggling with being a gay man but loving the Lord, because he loved God. But he did not understand why he was a gay man. He didn’t understand that he could be both, and that God loved him no matter what.” Five years ago, he parked his truck at Dauphin Island, walked into the Gulf waters and was never seen again. “He’s no longer here because he didn’t have that support,” she says.

Her mother “didn’t do anything but push me into being a raging ally with that noise,” says Ophelia, who immediately decided to use her social media platform to be her cousin’s voice – so maybe she’s a bit of a forensic anthropologist after all. “And now I’m traveling out to other towns and states and stuff with it, which is very nice, but it’s all because of him. Every bit of it is because of him.”

‘Somebody’s listening somewhere’

Her personal experiences make Ophelia understand what her followers are going through every day. “I know what it feels like to have a mom like that,” she says. “I know what it feels like to have a husband with multiple affairs. I know what all of this feels like. I know what it feels like to be bullied in school. I just want to protect everybody. I know that’s impossible to say and do, but I just want to protect them all and I don’t want them to go through a lot of hurt. I understand that’s life, but if I can help them by just talking about what I went through at this age, or what I went through at that age, somebody’s listening somewhere.”

She’ll never forget being on FaceTime once with a follower who was in a closet, contemplating suicide. The follower’s friend sent one of Ophelia’s inspirational videos. “They watched the video, and it was exactly what they needed to hear in that moment,” she says. “They then called their friend over to their house to pick up their gun from them. That is… that’s something. It’s a huge toll on my heart, but it’s – my gosh, what exactly is the Lord using me for? Is it much deeper than I could ever know, possibly? Yeah, I think so.”

In addition to the inspirational videos her impersonators lovingly mocked, where she asks her little tater tots if they’d like to eat lunch with her, Ophelia offers a wide variety of content. Sometimes she shares snippets of conversation overheard in Dollar General. Sometimes it’s her skincare routine. Sometimes she shows off her collection of earrings or swimsuits. She’s picky about the brands she represents and limits the number of sponsored posts she does. “You’ll get a little bit of everything on my account,” she says. “You’ll get some family vlogging, you’ll get the taster Tuesdays, you’ll get the product reviews, comedy.”

Every morning, she wakes up around 6 a.m., does her hair and makeup, makes her bed and starts “looking for who needs me the most,” she says. She likes to return messages and talk to people in the comments section “because I want them to be heard and be seen, and I don’t want them to think that they’re just a number, like just another follower. No, you’re in this community for a reason, and I’m glad you’re here.”

As her social media career unfolds, she says she is just going with the flow. “If I get a phone call tomorrow, they want a talk show, they want a talk show,” she says. “If I don’t ever get that, I don’t. I will go with whatever the good Lord and universe sends me, you know? So I’m not seeking out anything.”

Ophelia feels lucky and is quite content to be a positive force for good in the world. “There are thousands of people relating to every story I share,” she says. “I just feel like you don’t really see a lot of that on social media. You see a lot of bad stuff on social media. Well, I don’t want to be part of the bad side. I want to be part of the good side. So I’m not changing for anything.”

Even Papa Tot, who for the first two years shied away from the spotlight, now has how own TikTok account with more than 400,000 followers.

And even though she says they have a “pretty good marriage” – despite her tendency to overshare and point out his quirks – she insists that it’s not perfect, and she wants everyone to know that. “I want to make sure I’m very open with stuff with my followers, even people just passing by and seeing my videos. Please don’t ever look and think that everything is perfect over here. No, we’re real people, and we go through real things just like everybody else. I want it to stay real and stay authentic.”

She says she has told her best friends to let her know if she ever starts to change. “And they were like, ‘Opie, you ain’t changed a damn bit.’” She giggles, knowing it’s the truth.

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