Parenting while scared

I’m stuck on a question I can’t quite answer: how do you keep your kids feeling safe when you don’t really feel safe yourself?

After the shooting at Annunciation, my wife and I made a hard decision. We decided we couldn’t send our kids back into a place that no longer felt safe, or into a community still living inside that trauma. We pulled them out and started fresh somewhere else.

At the time, that decision mattered because it answered the question that kept circling: what’s next?

Leaving Annunciation was painful, but it gave us a next step. We closed that chapter. We chose a new school where we believed the boys would be safe, and we tried to move forward.

Right now, even that sense of security is gone.

An ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good nine blocks from our house.

It happened near the dinosaur car we pass on the way home from the downtown library. At our local Target, where I shop a couple of times a week, an American teenager was beaten, shoved into a car, and dropped a few blocks later after it was determined that he was a citizen. Thousands of people gathered peacefully in a park where I once met other kindergarten parents for a playdate.

None of this is happening “somewhere else.” It’s all inside the geography of our normal routines. That proximity makes it harder to process and harder to see a way forward.

The “what comes next” question feels unanswered in a new way.

Day to day, we’re trying to act normal. Reading before bed. Talking about birthday parties. Planning summer camps. At the same time, we’re constantly checking our phones, looking to see if schools will be open and tracking where federal agents are showing up nearby.

On the outside, it might look like we’re doing fine.

The reality is, we’re not.

The boys still don’t understand what happened at Annunciation, and they don’t really understand what’s happening now. We’ve tried to keep it that way. But that effort gets harder when federal enforcement activity starts affecting everyday life.

This weekend, after three days inside worrying, we drove to a McDonald’s with a PlayPlace to shake things up. The doors were locked. A sign read: Lobby closed. Like a lot of places that weekend, it was to keep ICE agents out and employees safe.

When places kids expect to exist suddenly close, they feel it. Even if all they can articulate is that they’re mad they didn’t get a Happy Meal or go down the slide.

I knew eventually they’d hear something, even if it didn’t come from us.

At school on Monday, Eliot heard about ICE and what they’re doing to the community. What he understood was that ICE is taking away people who aren’t from here. He was worried because he was born abroad. His mother is a naturalized citizen, and I’m from Wisconsin. None of us, other than Roman, are “from here,” as far as he can tell.

Kids are taught early that help shows up when something goes wrong. That’s the logic of almost everything they watch. There’s a problem, and then someone comes to fix it.

Paw Patrol handles the emergency.
The Octonauts show up when animals are in trouble.
Spidey and his friends take care of the bad guys.

So what happens when that logic breaks? When the ones doing the harm are the ones meant to protect?

We aren’t afraid of our immigrant neighbors. We aren’t afraid of friends who protest or speak out. What scares us are masked men with weapons who don’t answer to anyone we can identify and who seem free to do whatever they want.

That’s the part that’s hardest to explain to kids. That’s what we’re quietly navigating in a hundred small moments. We don’t know who is supposed to help. We don’t know what comes next. We don’t know how to make this better.

It may sound illogical. My wife is a U.S. citizen. My child is an American. And yet, the fact that I even have to think about those things feels like part of the point. Safety has stopped being a given and started feeling conditional. Subject to interpretation by people I do not trust.

If someone showed me a list and our names weren’t on it, if I knew our house wasn’t circled or my wife’s license plate wasn’t flagged, maybe I could breathe a little easier. Even knowing what that list would mean for the people whose names were on it.

But there is no list anyone can see. No rules anyone can explain. Just a growing sense that the order Americans were taught to trust no longer applies.

A federal agent shot a woman in the face three times. The footage was immediate. The lies were immediate, too.

That fear is not an accident. It’s the point.

The Annunciation shooting was one person. A bad actor. The response was inadequate. Gun laws didn’t change. The deaths didn’t matter to the GOP. But at least the story made sense. We could close a chapter. We could pretend that changing schools was a way forward, even if safety itself was always an illusion.

This feels different.

What’s happening now isn’t about a single act of violence. It’s about a system producing fear on purpose. It’s about realizing that whatever sense of normalcy we’d been maintaining was fragile, and mostly held together by pretending.

The President just posted that Minneapolis should prepare for a day of reckoning and retribution. That isn’t abstract rhetoric when it’s your city.

So how do you keep your kids feeling safe when you don’t feel safe yourself?

This isn’t covered in any parenting book. It didn’t come up during Leen’s immigration process.

What we’re doing feels less like parenting by design and more like improvisation.

We don’t know what to do. Safety feels far away right now, and I don’t know how we it get back.