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By Movieguide® Staff
Nine years after she watched first responders pull her daughter from a Louisiana pond, Jamie Lynn Spears still can’t fully account for what happened next.
“We were given a miracle, and I don’t take it for granted,” the SWEET MAGNOLIAS actress told PEOPLE this week in her first-ever joint interview with her daughter, Maddie Watson, 18, published Wednesday.
The conversation comes as Maddie prepares to leave for the University of Southern Mississippi in August to study health sciences and play softball — a future that once looked like it wouldn’t arrive at all. In February 2017, Maddie was 8 years old when the Polaris RZR 170 ATV she was driving flipped into a pond on the family’s property in Fluker, Louisiana, trapping her underwater. Jamie Lynn, her husband Jamie Watson, and Watson’s father all jumped in to pull her out — but Maddie was pinned under the ATV’s safety netting and couldn’t be freed.
First responders arrived and got a pulse. Maddie was airlifted to Children’s Hospital New Orleans, where she slipped into a coma for two days. Things looked bad enough that a priest was called in to administer last rites.
“He comes in, and she physically sits up in all her restraints and tubes,” Spears recalled. “I’m screaming for the doctors, like ‘Come in here now!’ Even the priest was like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening.’”
Maddie walked out of the hospital with no neurological damage. The experience was transformative enough that Spears converted to Catholicism in its wake. Movieguide® has covered this family’s faith journey over the years — from the early “miracle anniversary” posts to a 2025 update when Maddie leaned on God after a shoulder injury threatened her senior softball season.
Related: Jamie Lynn Spears Celebrates Her Daughter’s ‘Miracle Anniversary’
Now it’s Maddie’s turn to speak for herself, and she keeps it plain. She doesn’t remember the accident but says the ripple effects have never really stopped.
“I feel like our faith got a lot stronger,” Maddie said. “In the end, I think such a negative experience affected us positively.”
She added: “Seeing everybody rally around me, it made me realize how blessed I am. It really made me so grateful for every day.”
One detail Spears shared tells you something about the whole family. Maddie had been lobbying for a baby sibling before the accident and apparently didn’t drop the subject even coming out of a coma.
“When she came out of her coma, she’s like, ‘You going to give me that baby?’” Spears recalled. A year later, Spears and Watson welcomed daughter Ivey.
“We always say she just went up to heaven to go pick out her little sister,” Spears said.
For a mother who spent the worst afternoon of her life bargaining with God in a hospital waiting room, watching Maddie put on a cap and gown this spring was its own kind of answer.
“I just was so happy to have her, but how in the world did God give her back?” Spears said. “And then He gave her back in a way that she’s succeeding, she’s beautiful, she’s kind, she’s smart…I feel like I don’t get to ask for anything else in life because I got the biggest blessing.”
Maddie heads to Mississippi in August. She’ll study health sciences and play college softball — still going hard for what she wants, the way you do when you’ve already been given a reason to.
Read Next: Jamie Lynn Spears Chose Life After Her Parents Encouraged an Abortion
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