My daughter's dance with death and my remembrance of life.

Part I: The descent into darkness.

“She’ll be fine” the hardened nurse said tersely as he wheeled my sedated four year old daughter across the thick red line painted at the entrance to the operating room wing.

She’ll be fine.

They’ll be fine.

You’ll be fine.

It’s fine.

Scenes from the thousands of times in my life I’ve been fed that dismissive platitude flashed through my mind’s eye. My heart pounded faster. Anger rose and I saw red. A red with the same intensity as the thick boundary line my daughter was just wheeled across on a rickety hospital bed.

But nothing was fine.

The back of my daughter’s blonde head disappeared behind another set of steel doors as her eyes rolled back in her head. As the sedation crept in.

I flippantly barked something just loud enough for everyone to hear but not loud enough to cause real disruption. It was something relatively unintelligible. Something along the lines of “it’s so f*cking robotic in here I want to vomit”. Something that came from my animal body faster than my civilized mind could filter.

I lost connection with my higher order thinking. Like a toddler without impulse control. Like a mother grizzly bear defending her young.

And like a scene straight out of Grey’s Anatomy, my much-more-level-headed-husband held my shoulders, locked eyes with me, and beckoned me to get my prefrontal cortex back online, “not here, babe, let’s go”.

We walked together to the cold steel grey door with the “waiting room” sign hanging above it, and I found myself entirely undone.

Pacing. Box breathing, belly breathing, shaking out my hands, jumping up and down, abruptly opening my notes app to write vigorously and then shutting it in almost the same instant.

She’ll be fine.

The bright red line.

Images were flashing through my mind faster than strobe lights at an Odesza concert. My daughter. My first baby. The girl who made me a mother. The girl I made with my body. The girl with daisies as hair and the ocean as eyes.

Unbeknownst to March 2nd me, it wouldn’t be the last time I’d be in this strange, stark “waiting room” contemplating my only daughter’s demise.

It wouldn’t be the last time I’d be told “she’s fine” as she was rolled away to a place parents lose their agency in exchange for the goal of sterility and survival.

It was March 2nd. Day two of what would end up being an eleven day hospital stay. Day two of the what would become the most crystal clear conversation with the divine I’ve ever experienced.

Day two of a total and complete family transformation.

Day two of her dance with death.

Day two of a journey I won’t allow myself to forget the teachings from.

And that’s why I write.

Because life moves fast. Especially life post-traumatic event. Especially life with kids, as we crawl our way back to some sense of “normalcy”.

I write to remember. And maybe — just maybe — to help you remember, too.

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The last time I sat at my computer, I wrote about my daughter. It was the night before I brought her to urgent care after she told me she was having trouble walking.

It was the night before I’d have my entire worldview ripped to shreds and patched back together, piece by piece.

It was the night that will forever be known as “the time before the surgeries” and “the time after”. A delineation in our family’s story.

Life is strange. Ironic. Serendipitous. Synchronistic.

In my early twenties — before I was connected to something bigger than myself and the material, mechanistic worldview we’re all steeped in — I probably would’ve stopped at “ironic”.

But despite my upbringing in a firmly non-spiritual house, I found my way back to what I consider Truth. A brilliant-beyond-our-brains’-comprehension type of intelligence. The type of intelligence that one might call God. Goddess. Or the universe. Or spirit.

The type of intelligence my now-dead-father spent the last few years of his terminal illness urging me to awaken to much to my chagrin.

The type of intelligence that is always trying to communicate, urging us to open our heart and awareness toward a path of deeper joy, love, and peace.

The type of intelligence that would, for example, continue to show you your path even when you deliberately do not listen. The type of intelligence that sends you signs and synchronicities so obvious that even the most hardened skeptics eventually wonder if there’s something more than our physical reality.

A benevolent force for good, call it what you may.

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The night before we landed in the ER, I published a post publicly declaring my devotion to my daughter. It was about the profundity of her gifts and the way she has — since the second she inhabited the space in my womb — overtly and covertly brought me back into integrity. Brought me back to myself.

My daughter is the leader of our family, I closed with. An ode to my and my husband’s doubling down on shifting the small and the big things in our life to remain in service to her — my orchid child — even (and especially when) it’s inconvenient for us.

A proclamation of my intentions. A nod to the universe. An “I see you. I hear you.”

I usually write after I’ve integrated a lesson, because I feel a (many planets in Capricorn-esque) responsibility to share the fullness of my experience, not just a reactive snapshot from whatever emotional wave I’m riding in a moon cycle.

But this time I didn’t.

I was still integrating. Still grappling. Still rubbing up against resistance and the realization that life would have to look tangibly different for the message I kept receiving to be translated from concept into reality.

I’ve been writing about motherhood as alchemy for almost five years. I’ve got a Scorpio sun (to run the risk of referencing astrology twice in four paragraphs) and I don’t shy away from transformation and transmutation.

I’ve alchemized piles of baby poo into gold time and time again. I’ve let motherhood change me from the inside out. I’ve softened my hard edges. I’ve let so much go — big and small — that folks from my past would probably find the way I move through the world unrecognizable.

I’ve heeded the call.

And yet.

And yet.

And yet.

Something wasn’t quite right. There was a density. A snag in the thread. Gum on the bottom of my shoe.

My husband and I spent months deep in contemplative conversation after the kids fell asleep assessing and analyzing to try and untangle the knot in our rope.

But it wouldn’t loosen. Something was stuck. Something that I had just begun to see with stunning clarity the week before my daughter went in the hospital.

And so I wrote. I wrote to you and I wrote to me. I wrote in real-time reflection of what had revealed itself to me.

I understood. I got the message.

“Message received, loud and clear” I remember saying out loud to my husband the night I published my last post — the night before life would suddenly become unrecognizable.

“We’ve really got to change some things”, I said sternly. He softened, like he always does with ease, and agreed. “Whatever it takes” he said.

Whatever it takes.

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I imagine if you would’ve told me what was to come, I would’ve begged for mercy. I would’ve negotiated any alternative to witnessing my daughter dance with death.

But life takes you where you need to go. Even if it doesn’t make any f*cking sense at all. Even when you’re tumbling underwater in the rip current wondering if you’ll make it out from the foamy water alive.

I didn’t need to go to the most painful edges of the human experience to understand what I’m about to share. I’ve been there before.

I’ve been there when, for four painful years I watched my father’s body decay and suffer under circuitous rounds of chemo and radiation.

I’ve been there when I watched my mother lose her high school sweetheart and the father of her children.

I’ve been there when I watched my eleven year old brother walk his father’s casket up a set of stone steps.

I’ve been there when I held my dad’s hand as he left his physical body.

I’ve been there before.

I didn’t want to go back.

But back I went.

Except this time I went deeper. Like a scuba diver thinking they had gone as far as their tank could take them without suffocating only to realize they actually had another 20 meters to go.

I went to the darkest depths. The place where spirit dwells.

The place where pain is so agonizing that out of it comes an almost cathartic, paradoxical peace. The type of peace that begs you to risk it all and write. To remind other people what we’re all actually doing here, even if it means ripping your heart back open again.

So let me tell you. Let me remind you. Let me remind us.

Because it’s too easy to forget. It’s too easy to waste our days away fixated on all the wrong things, caught in a cycle of wanting more and connecting less. Caught in disconnection. It’s too easy to look away from the lessons tugging at your pant legs (or to just take your pants off so no tugging can commence).

It’s too easy to float on the surface where the sun shines and oxygen flows freely. It’s too easy to avoid plunging down into what lies beneath.

We’re here for love. And ascension. Individual and collective expansion in the direction of love and compassion.

We aren’t here to accumulate.

We aren’t here to separate.

We aren’t here to control.

We’re just here to embody love.

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On the fourth day after my daughter’s initial emergency surgery, something was very obviously amiss. She was extremely unwell, sliding into a strange regression that no one seemed to be able to explain.

Her care team cracked open her door every hour or so to ask if we’ve done our daily walking, to which my daughter would instantly sob and explain that it was too painful to walk. If we got her upright she’d cower in pain like a wounded animal.

“She’s fine. She can walk. You’re just babying her” the tired old surgeon scoffed that afternoon.

I reminded the surgeon that although he might be an expert in surgery, I’m an expert on my daughter, and something isn’t right.

I pushed harder.

My intuition nagged for more investigation. I continuously advocated for her well-being, asking for more testing only to be met with more mansplaining.

Silly girl, medical decisions are for doctors.

“She’s fine.”

There it was again. Two words that have dismissed and silenced, gaslit and minimized women’s medical and psychological realities since the rise of the patriarchy. A metaphor for modernity.

The trope of our times.

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As the sun set on day four, a nurse came in to check my daughter’s vitals. Her oxygen was slipping beneath 90.

I watched the numbers decrease on the monitor as I warded off a panic attack.

90

89

88

87

86

The numbers turned from blue to yellow to red as the team suddenly picked up their pace and grabbed an oxygen mask from the nearby cabinet.

Now she was on oxygen. My daughter — the girl who shines brighter than midday summer sunlight reflecting on water — was dulled by excruciating pain and the fog of an oxygen mask.

My husband and I locked eyes, the way we often do, and shared a knowing look.

Something wasn’t right.

It was 9pm now and my 15 month old son was home with his grandma waiting for me, needing my body and my presence after four days of erratic and unusual separation.

I kissed my daughter on the head and told her I’d be back as soon as I got him to sleep.

I don’t remember leaving the hospital, because in order to leave her side, I had to leave my body. I had to disassociate from the pain I felt or my feet wouldn’t have moved to the door.

I got home and greeted my son, holding him against my body as I nursed him to sleep in our boucle green rocking chair.

I cried. No — I sobbed.

And suddenly, quicker and clearer than I’ve ever known anything in my life, I knew my daughter wasn’t okay.

She was in too much pain. She was thinking about leaving her body, too. But with finality.

I was in my California cottage under the big oak tree like I am every night, but I was also right there with her.

I was breathing for her. With her.

We were together even though our physical bodies were separate.

It was like she was back in my womb — back in the body that created her body.

I was in my rocking chair and in my living room and in the hospital bed all at once.

I closed my eyes to make the merging clearer and said softly, “Stay, baby girl. Stay in your body. Stay on Earth with us. This is hard and painful and scary, but it is temporary. You are safe to be here with us.”

I felt a lightening in her energy. A nod. An “okay, mama.”, An “I’m trying, mama”.

I sobbed harder.

I didn’t descend into sleep for a single second that night. I stayed awake, connected to her, breathing with her.

As soon as the sun crept over the horizon, I raced in my car back to her bedside. Before I could make it down the hallway to room number four, the familiar face with the small round glasses and the dampened aura met me halfway.

“Britt?” the stoic surgeon said. “Can you talk to me for a moment before you go in her room?”

I exhaled. I knew. I already knew. Like mothers do.

I must’ve nodded because he started talking, but with great uncertainty and trepidation in his voice.

“I need to bring her back to the OR. Something is wrong. Something must’ve happened in surgery. Or maybe it’s an abscess. I don’t know, but we need to open her up immediately.”

Open her up.

The language of violence seared my tender, tired heart. Even in an environment designed to help — an environment dedicated to healing — the language surrounding us was sloppy at best and outright violent at worst. Not just today, but every day during our hospital stay.

This was my daughter. My baby. My four-year-old girl who sat 20 feet away desperately trying to recover from the last time she was cut open just five days prior.

I thought about lying flat on the Earth, surrendering to the weight of it all once and for all, but there was no visible Earth nearby and under the aggressive fluorescent lighting adrenaline kept me standing.

I asked a hundred thousand questions and watched as the stoic surgeon turned into a just-another-man-in-scrubs soaked with shame.

The man who just two days earlier told me I was “babying” my daughter when I decided not to urge her to walk despite repeated instructions from her care team to “get her up and walking”.

She couldn’t walk. She was nearly dying, it turned out.

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I climbed back on the gurney like I had done five days prior. My daughter — desiring to be wheeled down to the OR only on her mother — climbed on top of me.

Down two floors we went, together as one. One, like we were the first 18 months of her life. My koala baby. The girl who would only sleep on my chest.

As a patient care tech wheeled us through wings and down elevators, we passed the birth unit, where my daughter first emerged Earthside four short years ago.

I held her tighter. I kissed her head as my mind journeyed to the moment of her emergence. Her green eyes looking up at me asking to affirm safety, like the way her eyes still do.

My orchid child. The girl who notices.

“Thank you for coming to Earth to be with us, baby girl”. I whispered.

Her oxygen mask was covering her mouth and nose. She said nothing at all.

I cried quietly out of her sightline as I thought about the words I had written just a week prior.

My daughter is the leader of our family.

I thought about the serendipitous sequence of events that led her and I to the hospital four Octobers ago instead of being born at home like her brother.

I thought about the present-day-me reaching out to four-year-ago-me — sneaking into her hospital room for one brief second — just to hold her. Just to hug her. Just to celebrate her in the moment she moved from maiden to mother.

I thought about all the things that lie ahead in life that we can’t possibly know without the gift of precognition. That’s the thing about life. We can’t really know what’s around the corner. All we can control is how we show up moment to moment — how we play with the present moment.

I thought of all the mothers and the babies transitioning through the birth portal just down the hall and how hard they might weep with wistfulness if they could see how fleeting it all is and could feel the breadth and depth of the love that is to come.

I thought about hopping out, running through the doors, and yelling, “THESE WILL BE THE BEST YEARS OF YOUR LIFE. STAY IN IT. STAY WITH IT. STAY IN YOUR INTUITION. DON’T HARDEN YOUR HEART”.

But that would be insane, and I was glued to the gurney by the weight of my daughter’s ailing body.

And so I stayed. In it. With it. With her.

As we pulled up to the OR once again, I was riddled with the sharpest irony. An irony so piercing that it almost felt…funny. You know this feeling, right? The kind of dark humor that would make for a good (twisted) Shonda Rhimes plot line but the kind of humor you absolutely do not want to experience in your own life?

Yeah. That kind.

I was overcome with the juxtaposition of the work that I do, the way I move through the world as a mother, and where I found myself here, now, in this moment: approaching the bright red line for a second time in a week.

It wasn’t about my daughter needing emergency medical intervention. It wasn’t about adversity.

It was about separation.

Our culture’s obsession with separation. Our discomfort with emotion. Our systems and structures — our institutions — that have become so industrialized they’ve forgotten we’re human animals with nervous systems that are adapted to a very different nature. Systems so disconnected from developing brains that they extort and exploit without even realizing what’s happening. Systems where childism isn’t a cute catchphrase for activists but is the only real descriptor for what unfolds within.

Oppression. Dehumanization.

So no, it wasn’t about the surgeries.

It was about being thrown around in the washing machine of the medical industrial complex, a system borne out of industrialization and corporate capitalism; an environment intended for helping and healing but poisoned by the same patriarchal overculture that has polluted nearly every other part of modern society.

The same prevailing paradigm that screams at parents to care less and detach more. The same corroding culture that hides behind rally cries like “they’ll be fine” and “they won’t remember this” even though we are objectively, clearly not fine as a human species right now.

The same paradigm that attempts to exert power and control over mothers and their babies from the second they emerge, together, in their new form as the mother-baby dyad.

The same paradigm that blinded my daughter’s care team into thinking her resistance to walk after her last surgery was “disobedience”. A paradigm blinded by behaviorism.

A culture in crisis.

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We wheeled adjacent to the bright red line as we entered a temporary room.

As another nurse checked vitals, I was reminded of the terse nurse at my very own bedside four years ago, whose repeated aggressive attempts at trying to get me scare me to sleep separate from my daughter awakened my intuition.

“She’ll be fine.”

“Just put her down.”

“Don’t you want a break?” (A break from my mere 24 hours of motherhood…?)

The nurse who awakened my intuition and led me here: to my sacred work. To motherhood as a medicine journey. To motherhood as a reclamation of all that was deliberately stripped away from women in my and your lineage. To motherhood as art. To ancestral knowledge that existed long before patriarchal platitudes.

The nurse who led me to your inbox.

The nurse who led me back to my power.

And here I was again. In the hospital again. The belly of the beast. Like a researcher thrown into the wild to record and observe.

Except I’m not a scientist. I’m a mother. A seeker. A person who tries so hard to see clearly through the smoke and mirrors.

Here I was again.

Except this time I would really see. My eyes would open to things I will never unsee.

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