I was relieved when my young-adult children, several of their friends and my college-freshman niece made the decision to walk with my sister and me in the Women's March on Washington.
Once a mother, always a mother, I saw the march as a way to restore their hope after the demise of millennial favorite presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and the subsequent rise to power of a man whose values they don't respect or trust.
I saw the march as a source of encouragement and solidarity in a world focused one day on the issues important to them like climate-change policy and human rights, and dramatically shifted on its axis the next.
I could even be part of the antidote, marching beside them, showing them, teaching them what it means to take it to the streets as an activist, a feminist and a U.S. citizen with First Amendment rights.
What I didn't expect was they might end up teaching me.
"After Bernie, we realized we were not on top of the world," said my 19-year-old youngest, who had voted in a presidential election for the first time. "I see now, rather than trying to comfort ourselves, defend ourselves and complain, we have to work against the harsh reality we're in."
"We have to look at ourselves. We have to go inward," said one of my daughter's friends, a Vietnamese immigrant who lives in Washington. "Who you are and how you live your life is important. What you are doing is an example to the world."
I watched my children crumble the night Donald Trump was elected. These were young people who heard our president-elect talk about grabbing a woman by the crotch, who watched him make fun of a handicapped journalist, promote violence at campaign rallies and talk about climate change like it was a game. His behavior affected and offended many of us, none more dramatically than a generation of young people, idealistic by age and nature, who had been taught that character rules the day, who saw Trump as a man who embodied everything they were exhorted not to be.
I have worried most acutely about this since the night of the election, when my 19-year-old couldn't sleep.
And yet, as it turns out, along with being idealistic, the people of this generation, at least the ones I know, are also reflective, resilient and smart.
I saw this when they left work and college classes in three states to get to this march, accompanied by a Bernie action figure in his own pink knit hat, their late grandmother's St. Christopher medal and signs that said "Earth doesn't have four years." I saw this spirit reflected in others of their generation, who constituted the majority at the D.C. march, who carried smart signs that didn't denigrate the man in the White House, but took the movement beyond the man, into forward movement on the issues.
I heard it in conversations throughout the weekend, the day after the march, after a sermon by African-American activist Melissa Harris-Perry at All Souls Unitarian-Universalist Church in the city, during which she said we can't always live in a golden age.
"We've got to get off our Democratic high horses," said one of my daughter's friends. "We're not going to go anywhere until we understand what happened, how we lost this election."
I heard it in their compassion and depth of understanding.
"I never think about some of these issues," my daughter said. "Being here at this march, I feel a culmination of so many injustices. And I realize there are no limits to who should have access. No one is above the other."
I was inspired and awed, privileged to witness, as my children's hopelessness transformed to hope, as inaction turned to thoughts of action, with or without their mother.
As they were packing up to return to their respective cities, they vowed to start their own resistance group, Rise Up, which will rely on the "10 Actions in 100 Days" template from the Women's March to keep them on task. Already they have their first meeting.
And there is this: For two hours during the pre-march rally, my children and I were lost from each other.
For two hours, I stood on a rock near the National Museum of the American India, east of the Washington Monument, scanning the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd looking for them.
In the end, despite my efforts, it wasn't I who found them. My two sons had made their way through the thick of the crowd somehow and were calling out my name.
It was they who found me.
