How do we explain this election to our children?

The past two months have been a whirlwind of autumnal novelty and stimulation for my preschooler. There was Sesame Place, then her 3rd birthday, then her first day of school. Just as things began to settle, we launched into a cascade of Halloween activities. And then, fast on their heels came the election.

As anyone in this city knows, election time is its own kind of festival here. Volunteers and committeepeople and organizers converge until there are knocks on the door three times a day, and every telephone pole is papered in colorful placards. One afternoon, we came home to find that a yard sign had popped up on our lawn, appearing suddenly like a mushroom after rain.

It was an opportunity for lived education, I felt. I talked to my preschooler about it in terms of free school lunches: one candidate wanted all kids to have them, one, unkindly, did not. She canvassed our block with us cheerfully, reverse trick-or-treating with campaign lit. When Election Day came, she helped us press voting machine buttons and gave her leftover Halloween candy out to poll workers.

It was another celebration — until it wasn’t. Before her birth, in 2020, we had joined our neighbors in the streets, dancing in relief at the news of Donald Trump’s defeat. But there would be no party this year.

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

On social media, someone asked me how I was explaining this outcome to my child. I struggled with the enormity of that question, and still do. How do you explain this horror to a child when you are still not quite sure how to explain it to yourself?

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There is no good answer, really. There is only us showing up as best we can.

So this is what I say to my child.

I asked her: “Do you remember how we talked about the election? About how we all get together to pick someone to make choices for us? Together, people picked someone who is very unkind.”

“A lot of adults in your life are going to be sad and scared right now,” I say. “I am sad and scared.”

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

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

That is a difficult promise to make right now: What if J6 defendants who threatened our family are pardoned? What if Trump’s ally, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., succeeds in his mission to undermine vaccines? There is a whole ocean of “what ifs” that make my stomach flip-flop and my skin crawl if I entertain them too long.

We have to keep the kids safe.

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

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

It is incredibly difficult for me to summon that hope right now. I can’t imagine the agony of trying to locate it if you’re a parent who has reason to fear deportation or worse for your family.

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Still, it is our job and obligation as adults — all adults, not just parents — to find a path to help each other find that hope, to work at wrestling this world into being a place where we can all make and fulfill that promise to keep our kids safe, somehow.

I don’t yet know how we do it, honestly. All week, that sense of terrible, nearly impossible responsibility has rested with me, physically manifesting as it lumps in my throat and wells up in the corners of my eyes.

But the obligation stands.

We have to keep the kids safe.

“Hope is not optimism. It is a discipline,” writes grassroots organizer Mariame Kaba, wisely, and it is a discipline we need now more than ever. It is OK, even necessary, to sit with our grief and anger in this grim moment. It is OK to be sad. It is OK to be scared.

Just as the sun rises the next day, however, we must rise to our obligation. To our children, to children of undocumented parents, to trans and gender-nonconforming 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 them that.

Gwen Snyder is a professional organizer and longtime Philadelphia activist.