The past two months have been a whirlwind of fall novelty and stimulation for my preschooler. It was Sesame Place, then the third birthday, then the first day of school. Just as things started to settle down, we launched into a cascade of Halloween activities. And then, quickly on its heels, came the elections.

As anyone in this town knows, election time is its own kind of festival Here. Volunteers and committees and organizers converge until there is beat on the door three times a day and every telephone pole is plastered with colorful placards. One afternoon we came home to find a yard sign had popped up on our lawn, popping up like a mushroom after a rain.

It was a lived education opportunity, I felt. I talked to my preschooler about this in regards to the free school lunch: one the candidate wanted all children they have themone crazy he didn’t. She explored our block with us merrily, flipping tricks with the campaign on. When election day came, she helped us push the buttons on the voting machine and gave out leftover Halloween candy to the poll workers.

It was another holiday – until it wasn’t. Before her birth in 2020, we joined our neighbors in the street, dance in relief at the news about Donald Trumphis defeat. But this year there will be no party.

Instead, we tried to manage our emotions in front of her as we absorbed the news that Team Trump’s torrent misinformation and hate once again resonated with voters. The fascist presidential candidate had won, this time with the popular vote.

On social media, someone asked me how I explain this result to my child. I struggled with the enormity of this question and still do. How do you explain this horror to a child when you’re still not sure how to explain it to yourself?

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There is no good answer, really. We just present ourselves as best we can.

So that’s what I tell my kid.

I asked her, “Do it Remember how we talked about the election? About how we all come together to elect someone to make choices for us? Together, people elected someone who is very rude.”

“Many adults in your life will be sad and scared right now,” I say. “I’m sad and scared.”

I tell her that it is very important to remember that we are not sad or scared because of what she did.

Then I promise her that no matter how sad and scared we are, we will keep her safe.

That’s a tough promise to make right now: what if J6 defendants who threatened our family are they pardoned? What if Trump’s ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets his way mission undermine vaccines? There’s a whole ocean of “what ifs” that make my stomach drop and my skin crawl if I entertain them too much.

We need to keep children safe.

And yet, this is a promise I know with an iron certainty that I will find a way to keep.

This is the most terrifying gift children give us: the gift of being able to find your way to know hope because you have to. Because wild, impossible hope is your calling and your sacred responsibility as a parent.

It’s incredibly hard for me to summon that hope right now. I can’t imagine the agony of trying to find it if you are a parent who had reason for fear of deportation or worse for your family.

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However, it is our duty and obligation as adults – all adults, not just parents – to find a way to help each other find that hope, to work to fight this world to be a place where we can all make and deliver on the promise to keep our children safe, somehow.

I still don’t know how we do it, honestly. All week, that sense of terrible, almost impossible responsibility has returned to me, manifesting itself physically as it runs down my throat and out of the corner of my eyes.

But the obligation remains.

We need to keep children safe.

“Hope is not optimism. It’s a discipline” write basic organizer Mariame Kaba, with wisdom, and it is a discipline we need now more than ever. It is okay, even necessary, to sit with our pain and anger in this bleak moment. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to be scared.

Yet, as the sun rises the next day, we must rise to our duty. To our children, children of undocumented parents, trans and gender non-conforming children. To all children. They need us to accept their gift of hope and they need us to use it to fight for them.

We owe it to them.

Gwen Snyder is a professional organizer and longtime activist from Philadelphia.