Scroll. New red light mask that’s supposed to make my neck less crepey.

Scroll. Pregnant mom being knelt on by multiple ICE agents.

Scroll. Here’s a sheet pan dinner to make for your family tonight.

Scroll. Masked men shoving a teenager in the back of an unmarked car. 

The dissonance is enough to make you question reality. I’m supposed to care about how my neck is aging or meal prep while watching videos of families being ripped apart? I’m supposed to keep scrolling past armed agents raiding grocery stores like it’s just another Tuesday?

A video from Adriana Goblirsch, a Minnesota mom to two young boys, paints a clear picture of what mothering through tyranny actually looks like–and quite frankly, it’s the only kind of GRWM video I care to see right now.

She’s getting ready for her day, doing what we all do. Still have bottles to feed, snacks to give, lunches to make. And while she’s doing this, her state is being targeted.

“What I’m sharing is not rumors,” she says. “These are first-hand accounts from things I’ve experienced personally and people I’ve heard of. Mothers, families, educators, healthcare workers, and people in the Minnesota community.”

What is happening in Minnesota right now?

“ICE is showing up in everyday places, Target, grocery stores, restaurants, laundromats. Parents are afraid to take their kids out in public because they’re fearful of their children witnessing what is happening in our communities. Schools are being surveyed. Checkpoints around pickup and drop off. Police are escorting students and Minneapolis Public School has offered remote learning because children and staff are not safe. Daycares are being watched, businesses are shutting down, restaurants are closing or only offering takeout because people are afraid to show up to work. People are canceling medical appointments, surgeries because they’re afraid to go to the hospital. US citizens are being arrested.”

Someone Adriana personally knows, shoved to the ground. Activists and legal observers, many of them mothers, beaten and threatened.

Protesters are remaining peaceful, yet members of Congress have been denied access to ICE detention facilities.

And through all of this, mothers wake up. We make breakfast. We feed the kids. We do what we have to do to get by.

“It feels incredibly strange to move through the day as normal while all of this is happening,” Adriana says.

That’s the part that keeps hitting me. The going-on-as-normal when nothing is normal. Packing lunches while your neighbor disappears. Dropping kids at school past checkpoints. Pretending everything is fine when masked men are marching through Target where you buy your kids’ clothes.

The impact of the political climate on kids 

This isn’t just something parents have to process. Their kids are living through this. Empty desks at school where their friends used to sit. Closed businesses. Missed appointments. Armed agents in places that used to feel safe.

There’s no parenting book for this. No What to Expect chapter on how to explain checkpoints to your first grader. No gentle parenting script for why their friend’s mom didn’t come home last night.

Children are watching their parents try to act normal when nothing is normal. They’re learning what we do when things fall apart. They’re seeing whether we speak up or stay silent.

Adriana says she’s not someone who can witness this and do nothing. “I believe awareness is how things change and being silent has not made anybody safer. I want to be a part of things getting better for my kids and for my community.”

So here’s what we can do

Get loud. Share Adriana’s video. Talk about what’s happening in Minnesota. The algorithms aren’t amplifying this. Mainstream media isn’t covering it adequately. If we don’t pay attention and share these stories, they disappear into the scroll between neck cream ads and dinner recipes.

Pay attention. This is happening in America right now. Not in some far-off place you’ll never visit. In Minnesota. In grocery stores. At schools. In communities just like yours. Just because you’re not seeing it on the evening news doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

Help where you can. Donate to immigration legal defense funds. Support mutual aid networks helping families in Minnesota. Call your representatives. Show up to community meetings when you can. Even small actions matter when thousands of us are doing them.

The cognitive dissonance of scrolling past this horror to get to the dinner recipes is its own kind of violence. It trains us to see atrocities as just more content. It makes the unacceptable feel normal.

Adriana refuses to let that happen. She’s making bottles and packing lunches and also refusing to pretend this is fine.

We can do the same. We can mother our children and also fight for a world where they don’t have to live like this. We can scroll past the neck cream ads and stop at the videos that show us what’s really happening. We can refuse to normalize tyranny just because it’s mixed in with meal prep content.

Our kids are watching. Let them see us pay attention. Let them see us refuse to stay silent. Let them see us fight for better.