Mara still gets triggered by the sounds of ambulances at night. As she’s lying in bed, the mom of six tells PEOPLE, she’ll hear the alarms speeding by her house and she’s brought back to the moment she almost lost her 2-year-old daughter.

July 29 was a classic summer day in South Texas, where Mara, who shares her family life on TikTok under the handle TheAmazingMara, lives with her family: hot and humid. She, five of her kids and their father went over to their friend’s house to take a dip in their backyard pool and escape from the heat for the afternoon.

As they were sitting out by the water, Mara briefly went inside to change her 3-month-old’s diaper, while 5-, 8- and 12-year-olds were playing in the water, and her 2-year-old was out of the pool.

“I said, ‘Hey, can you just keep an eye on the kids in the water,’ ” she tells PEOPLE she told the kids’ father. “I’m gone for 10 minutes, and I come back outside because everyone’s screaming.”

The only word Mara has to describe the scene that ensued is “surreal.”

Her 2-year-old daughter, Sunny — who did not know how to swim and was not wearing a life jacket — was lying on the pavement, her body entirely blue. She had drowned in the pool and was pulled from the pool by Mara’s oldest daughter.

“I just started screaming and crying, and I called 911,” recalls Mara. “I just remember being in shock and just saying, ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand how this happened. I don’t know what’s happening. Like, intellectually I can — I knew what happened — but I could not process that.”

When the paramedics arrived at the scene, Mara and the five other adults at the pool cleared a pathway to her daughter, who was immediately transferred to an ambulance and received CPR. When Sunny arrived at the local children’s hospital, there was a trauma team waiting for her —  “the doctor’s, nurses, everybody comes running to like start work on her,” says Mara.

“Sunny fell into a backyard pool & was found floating face down,” posted Mara on TikTok the next day. “Thankfully they got her breathing again. She is admitted to hospital & has been doing very well.”

As their daughter was stabilizing at the hospital, Mara and her children’s father were approached by a social worker, who asked them to each share their story about what had happened at the pool. At the end of the conversation, Mara says, the social worker informed them that she had to report the father to Child Protective Services for neglectful supervision, as non-fatal drowning is considered a preventable accident.

The father, who requested his name be omitted from this article, declined to comment.

“I was fine with it. I was angry at her dad for not watching her, so I wanted him arrested,” says Mara about learning that CPS would be opening a case. “But then, having time to reflect, it was a little bit scary to hear that CPS is going to be in your lives because you don’t know what that means.”

Continued Mara: “Most people think they come in and just snatch your children away, and that then became a worry to me. They’re going to be poking around in our lives and — not that we have anything to hide — but you hear the stories.”

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees CPS, did not respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

Later that evening, Sunny was released from the hospital, and shortly after getting home, two members of CPS came to their house.

“I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, they’re just coming to just take all of our kids,’ ” remembers Mara. “I didn’t really know what to expect.

The initial visit was fairly quick: The CPS members wanted to see all of Mara’s kids and told the parents that they needed to bring Sunny to the pediatrician the following day.

CPS returned to their home the day after, this time interviewing their four older children, taking pictures of their bedrooms as well as the family’s fridge and pantry. They remained at the family’s house for about six hours, says Mara.

The day after, CPS came again, now with a safety plan that the parents had to have in place for the following month: strict rules that the kids could not be left alone with their father and that he was not permitted to drive them places.

“I had six kids to get to school or to wherever they needed to be all by myself,” describes Mara. “That was really challenging.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

While the safety plan was in place, Mara and the father of her kids also enrolled in mandated classes about parenting and water safety. Mara and her 12-year-old child started counseling. And the family regularly received home visits from their caseworker without any advanced notice.

“It caused so much anxiety for everybody, thinking we were being watched or that the kids were being watched,” admits Mara. “The kids were also really scared. They felt anytime a car would come or somebody they didn’t know, they felt that they could be taken away.”

“My 12-year-old probably knew,” continues Mara, describing the stakes she felt regarding the CPS case. “She did want to lie because she was worried that if she said that her dad was the one that was supposed to be watching Sunny, something bad could happen. And I told her, ‘They already know, just tell the truth, there’s no reason to lie.’ ”

Amid the stress of the CPS case, Mara says her relationship with the father of her children — with whom she is not married but has lived with since welcoming their first kid 12 years ago — became “more strained.”

“I still feel angry at him,” she says, adding that she blames him for the “trauma responses” she has when ambulance sirens ring in the night. “He has taken accountability for that, and that’s helped staying together as a family to work on things.”

A little over five weeks after her daughter’s drowning incident, Mara and their family received a letter from CPS that the case had been closed after the agency failed to prove neglectful supervision. Though she was certainly “happy” to have CPS out of their lives, says Mara, she was “torn” over their findings.

“My daughter almost died,” she continues. “The punishment for that to me was what — take some parenting classes, learn CPR? It didn’t feel like the punishment fit the crime.”

“I don’t know what I wanted to happen. I don’t know what should have happened or what I would’ve been satisfied with, but it just felt like it was nothing,” says Mara. “It kind of felt to me like, well, maybe her life is nothing if she could die and you’re just saying, ‘OK, well take parenting classes to do better.’ That doesn’t seem like enough to me.”

While Sunny’s drowning and the subsequent CPS case have left her family shaken, Mara says she’s felt the need to share the experience on social media — even if it means opening herself up to negative responses online — to be a “resource” for other parents.

“Maybe people aren’t comfortable talking about it or it’s just a hard subject,” she says. “But I want to share so it doesn’t happen more.”

“I’ve kind of learned to accept criticism and be OK with it,” Mara continues of the internet’s response to posts about the CPS case on TikTok. “I’m wanting to change the narrative with this and focus more on yes, this tragic thing happened and she did live, which we’re thankful for, so what can we all learn from this?”