​Kanani's feature feels so special to me, and not just because she brought her adorable baby boy, Bodhi along with her! As a fellow NICU mom, her story hit me in the deepest places of my mama heart. Her willingness to share so openly of her feelings of worry, guilt and fear hit my soul and reminded me of my early days with my oldest daughter. But even more so, Kanani's love for her family, her adventurous spirit, and her positivity were a reminder that when the going gets tough - it's cool to cry about it, but it's also good to gather your circle of people together and allow yourself to feel loved. I hope you enjoy her feature as much as I enjoyed her company!

"5 (or 6) things I want the Simply Sisterhood community to know about me:

1. My goal is to return to subsistence living, reduce our footprint and impact as much as possible.

2. I absolutely ADORE David Bowie and Freddie Mercury.

3. I have nonamophobia. Even in broad daylight I freeze like a fainting goat when the power goes out.

4. I’ve swam in open ocean with sharks, jumped off 25-50 foot cliffs, mountain biked down a volcano, climbed the highest peak in NM, surfed the North Shore of Oahu, and joined the circus on a dare.

5. In Hawaii, I surfed alongside icons like Laird Hamilton, Gerry Lopez, Brock Little, Kai Lenny, John John Florence, and others. I had no idea these guys were famous. They were just friends in the lineup.

6. My husband, in addition to being super sexy and always hilarious, helps with lists sometimes! (Ryan may have helped a little here, too).​

"I was brought up with a really huge family in Hawaii, like sixteen cousins just on my mom’s side alone - so there was a really tight knit sense of community amongst us all. The majority of my cousins were female. I was sort of raised an only child; I have a brother and sister, but they grew up living with my dad while I lived with my mom. So we never really had that closeness that most people associate with siblings. Any time my cousins came over, that felt more like siblings to me. When I moved away from Hawaii, I ended up in California. It was a huge culture shock, because they don’t really seem to place the same value on family out there. It’s sort of every man for himself out in California, so I was really out of my element. I moved away for school at the age of twenty, basically by myself. I played soccer for Pasadena City College, and then ended up moving to Albuquerque never having been here before. Literally the only thing I knew about Albuquerque was that Bugs Bunny said he should have taken a left turn here! I went to UNM to finish up my Bachelor’s Degree with every intention of leaving as soon as school was over. But then I took up hiking and exploring and really fell in love with New Mexico and decided I was here to stay. I threw down roots here and years later, I am still here with a family of my own!

As far as my job goes, I’m sort of like Chandler from friends. No one really knows what I do! I have a bachelor’s degree in dance, but I actually work as a data analyst for a phone company. It’s not something I ever thought I would enjoy, but it is a really fulfilling job and something that I’m really good at! It’s something that I can work really hard at, and then when I leave, I can put my mom and wife and adventurer hat back on. . . and that makes me really happy!"​

"My daughter Maya is one of the most empathetic people I’ve ever met. She really is in tune with how other people are feeling, and watching her makes me think, “Hey, I must’ve done something right!” Even though it probably had nothing to do with me! I was a single mom from the time Maya was a year old until I met my husband, Ryan, when she was six. I worked really hard to teach Maya that it wasn’t just her and I against the world, and that even though we didn’t have other family around, we could still build a community. She came to all my dance performances and found a family among the people there. I just had that village mentality, and I did everything in my power to create a village for her. I wanted her to know that she wasn’t here to compete with others, but to exist peacefully with others.

I’m almost forty years old, and I’m still trying to figure out how to be a woman! I think the most challenging part is finding balance between the thousands of obligations we have. A lot of women feel like they have to wear a lot of hats and excel at every single thing we do. We constantly compare ourselves to others, and we just end up judging everyone - including ourselves. Satisfying all of my obligations and really trying to use the word “no,” is what I am really working on. I am constantly asking myself, “how much work is too much work?” Yes, it’s great for my children to see me succeed, but I also don’t want to be away from them for extended periods of time. I want to lead by example, and prioritize family first.

I always like to remind myself (and my daughter) that we are all human beings first. And yes, I am a woman and maybe that means I have to carry a little bit more responsibility in some ways. Maybe I have to adapt to environments quicker, or push back a little bit harder to be myself. But I can either decide to feel the need to prove myself constantly, or decide that I am good enough, I know myself, and I am satisfied with who I am. I think we spend so much time as a child, just swallowing what you’ve been fed; by your parents, by your extended family, your church, whoever. And you reach this point where maybe it doesn’t really jive anymore with what you believe. So that makes you really start to question what you are feeding your own kids and what you want to instill in them as they grow up."

​"With my son, Bodhi, I had a super easy, 100% complication free pregnancy. Well, other than the fact that according to American standards, I basically have a geriatric uterus! My midwife told me, “you’re not just a little bit at an advanced maternal age, you’re thirty nine years old.” So, they kept a close eye on the baby and myself throughout my whole pregnancy. Everything went extremely smooth throughout the pregnancy and my labor. He came on his own, one day before my due date. I worked the entire day while I was in labor, dropped my daughter off with her dad, headed to the hospital, and everything was going according to plan. When Bodhi was born, he was not pink, he was floppy, he was silent, and the room sort of exploded with activity. The nurse took him away to the table and told me there would be a lot of people coming in, and not to panic. So naturally, I begin to panic. I kept asking, “why isn’t he crying?” over and over again. They brought him over a few minutes later with an oxygen mask on. He was pink and making some squeaking noises, and Ryan and I both assumed that everything was good from that point.

He ended up in the NICU shortly thereafter. In the NICU, they have something called rounds every morning, where you can show up and get an update on your baby from the actual doctors that are working with them. They go through and lay out the medical plan for you. Now, Bodhi was born on a Saturday. We went to rounds every morning - Sunday through Wednesday. And it wasn’t until Thursday morning that I finally worked up the courage to ask, “So, what exactly happened in the delivery room? Why are we here? What is going on?” And that was when I found out that my baby had been born code pink; meaning he was born not breathing and without a heartbeat, and that he had no tone, even after they got him breathing again. I read through his file and realized that he had gone over two minutes without a heartbeat or breath in him when he was born. Even after he was breathing, he was very unresponsive. He barely registered on the Apgar when he was born. And after a few hours of being alive, he started to catch up, but there are still concerns when it comes to being without oxygen for that long - things like brain damage, kidney function, etc. that kept us in intensive care. They kept him in a cooling bed, completely undressed to lower his core temperature and give all of his organs a chance to rest and sort of let his brain catch up. They did that for four days, and then finally when that was over, Ryan and I got to hold our son for the first time. And that was the moment where we could believe that we were going to get to take him home, and just felt so thankful that he had survived this. Little by little, we whittled away all of the worries about his brain, his oxygen, his kidneys, his heart, etc. until finally the neurologist came down to our room to give us his MRI results. Usually they will just send the results down to your nurse, but the neurologist wanted to come down personally to tell us that Bodhi’s results were in, and his brain looked 100% normal. Finally, a morning came where I was able to breastfeed my son for the first time. The nurse asked if I wanted to go to rounds, and I decided to send Ryan so I could stay with Bodhi. Ryan was psyched up to ask the doctors all these hard questions and figure out what hoops we needed to jump through to get ourselves discharged. Not ten minutes passed, and Ryan comes walking back in with the nurse, with a giant smile on his face, and asked me, “how would you feel about taking our boy home tomorrow?” I lost it. The relief and joy that overwhelmed me was indescribable. After eleven days of uncertainty, we walked out of the hospital together."

​"During all of this, I kept feeling like maybe I had caused this. I told myself that it had to have been something that I did because my body was responsible for taking care of him. And that is such a burden to bear as a mother. When I started sharing the news that Bodhi had complications when he was born, I started to realize how many moms have had similar experiences and have spent time in the NICU. That realization helped me to see that, sometimes things like this just happen, and it is really out of our control as mothers. We have support groups and classes to prepare us for labor, but we really don’t prepare mothers for the idea that something could go wrong. There is a team of wonderful, heroic people at the ready to care for your baby if there are complications, but then where do you find the support system for yourself when things go south? Nobody prepares you for when you don’t get to hold your baby, for the uncertainty that surrounds birth complications, for how you will feel about it. No matter how many people you have close to you, no one understands the loneliness that you feel in these situations, and the fear that you have as a mom. There is no explanation for what happened to Bodhi. Doctors have run all of these tests and tried their hardest to find something wrong with him, but there is really just no satisfying reason for why he was born without a heartbeat. Women are often just guilt ridden, as humans. Whether it be for sexual assault, divorce, whatever it is. We feel guilty for just about everything. And I think we even feel guilty for being upset by difficult circumstances, because it could always be worse. I got to take my baby home from the hospital, and the fact that there are many women who do not get that luxury is not lost on me. But I remind myself that pain is relative to everyone’s experience and we are allowed to feel pain in our own experiences. ​As a society, we don’t address the emotional trauma that mothers sometimes experience. We prescribe pills and put band aids on bullet wounds, but we never remove the bullet. We need to do a better job of honoring mothers’ experiences and pain and supporting them through these things. Now that I’m back at work, and Ryan is staying home with the baby, I struggle with being away from them. Of course it’s wonderful to have Bodhi stay with his dad, and to know that he is being well taken care of while I’m at work, but being away from my family is when I start to struggle with anxiety and reliving the hard moments. But as each day passes and Bodhi continues to do another thing that is classified as ‘normal’, I am reminded that we are surviving this! The little moments, like Bodhi discovering his hands, feel so special when you weren’t sure if you were going to get them. And that is the beauty of motherhood."