The day the president signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. was eventful for my Muslim family.

For starters, it was the day my 3-year-old nephew got his “meeting.”

My sister and her husband, both attorneys, frequently mention meetings to their two preschoolers, and the word took on a certain mystique. The 3-year-old began begging for a “meeting” like it was a rare Hatchimal on sale at Target. They agreed to set up a meeting for him -- a brief conversation with a local judge -- and it was scheduled for that fateful Friday in January. Both the 2-year-old and 3-year-old got dressed in suits early that morning, the older one excitedly dancing a jig.

At the courthouse, the judge asked my nephew what he wanted for his birthday, and he said a lawn edger. (The child is obsessed with lawn care.) The courtroom laughed. Post-meeting, the boys headed to their Montessori school with an exciting tale for Show and Tell.

Meanwhile, my father was substitute teaching in an urban school district with a fair number of struggling students, as he has nearly every day since his retirement. He’s in his early 70s, and drives nearly an hour each day to sub wherever he’s needed. He came to America from Pakistan in the late ‘60s on a stroke of luck -- the winner of a visa lottery. He had aspirations to become a teacher here, but spent more than 20 years as a car salesman before buying a convenience store.

My mother helped him run that store for nearly a decade. They woke up before dawn, drove 60 miles to the store and returned home late, sometimes near midnight. She worked as a sales clerk at Macy’s after that business folded, and retired less than a year ago. Not one to sit still, she became a full-time volunteer for refugees resettling in the Houston area.

That Friday, she had already made some calls and raised grocery money for a Syrian family. She was planning her shopping for the next day, hunting for the best sales at different stores to stretch the dollars, when she got another call: A Somali family needed some help with rent this month. She’s gotten to know several refugee families -- offering to take in children when their mom was hospitalized, driving a pregnant woman to her checkups, earning the nickname “Grandma” from young kids.

They know her, and they trust her.

But her thoughts on that Friday were occupied with my youngest brother. She was waiting to hear the results of his board exams, the last hurdle before finishing medical school. She had been praying for him relentlessly, this youngest child of six, all born and raised in America. All of us are college-educated and most beyond, but none had fulfilled her dream of having a doctor in the family.

In the sixth-grade English class where my father was subbing, the students were being unruly. He talked to them the way he would lecture his own children.

“Listen, the people who really love you in this world are your parents,” he said. “They want you to learn; they think you are here in school learning, but that’s not what you’re doing right now. If you don’t keep your eyes focused on what you are supposed to be doing, you’re not going to be successful.”

They immediately changed their attitudes, settled down and got to work. It’s speeches like this that earned him the nickname “abuelo” from children he sees regularly.

He and my mom have mastered parental guilt. Children of immigrants internalize the sacrifices their parents made to give them better opportunities. It’s partly why second-generation immigrants tend to outperform their peers academically. The unspoken standard is one of trying to pay back the debt you owe to parents who left their families, their culture, their lives because they believed in something better.

Back at home, my mother offered her Friday prayers and stayed longer on the prayer mat, wondering why she hadn’t heard from my brother yet. She knew the board results were coming.

Less than an hour later, my siblings and I received a WhatsApp message from my brother, who was working at the hospital: “I passed both boards. Can someone tell mom and dad? I am in surgery.”

When I called my mom to say, “Congratulations, your son is a doctor now,” she cried.

After our call, she went back to figuring out how to divvy up the donations she had gathered among the refugee families.

The day Muslims were blocked from entering America, my family remained busy -- giving back to the country that is our home and to the people who are its greatest strength.

Sharon Ketchum went with her daughter to the nation’s capitol to spread the word of God, as she believes it, and to call for an end to abortion in the country.

While such a protest has clear political implications for the law and how it affects others, she described it as more of an emotional journey for her. It was a chance for her to bond with her 16-year-old daughter, Katelyn, who was attending the March for Life for the second time.

“This was a pilgrimage for my daughter and I,” Ketchum said. “Hearing the speakers, witnessing how many people feel the same way we do, it was a needed boost to our faith.”

The March for Life is an annual rally opposing women’s legal right to abortion as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973. This year, the speakers included Vice President Mike Pence. The event came the weekend after nearly 500,000 women marched in Washington in protest of President Donald Trump and in support of women’s rights -- including access to abortion.

Ketchum and her daughter, who live in Wentzville, Missouri, left on Wednesday in a caravan of chartered buses taking thousands of St. Louis-area students to the march. The night they arrived in D.C., the group attended a program in which an energetic priest put on a show in the style of late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon. He even did a lip-sync competition with a nun.

“The kids just loved it,” Ketchum said. It got more serious when they heard from Melissa Ohden, a well-known speaker among anti-abortion activists. She speaks about her experiences as a survivor of her birth mother’s attempted abortion.

The next day, they marched from the Washington Monument to the steps of the Supreme Court building. Ketchum’s group found other students from Missouri, and they chanted: “We love babies, yes we do, we love babies, how about you?”

Thousands of teenagers and college students attend the march each year, but the discussion about abortion starts much younger for some. Ketchum said her children probably learned about it in fifth or sixth grade, when their parochial school begins teaching about puberty. Children learn about the various ways a fetus can be aborted and the church’s stance against it.

Ketchum said the ultimate goal is to end all abortions, including in the case of rape or incest, because she believes life begins at conception. This raises difficult questions, such as what to do with all the embryos created and stored for IVF treatments, but Ketchum says the larger issue is about the consequences of individual decisions.

“I don’t think it’s man’s decision that we can scientifically manufacture a baby,” she said. “It’s God’s will.”

The abortion rate in the U.S. has dipped to its lowest level since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision that legalized the procedure nationwide, according to a study released by the Guttmacher Institute. In 2014, 19 percent of pregnancies in the U.S., excluding miscarriages, ended in abortion.

About 926,200 abortions were performed nationwide in 2014, the report found, compared with 1.06 million abortions in 2011.

Better birth control access and use is a key to the declining number of abortions, said Megan Donovan, a senior policy manager at the Institute, in news reports about the study.

Ketchum said that with her own children, she wants to focus on the importance of chastity, making moral decisions and responsibility.

“Don’t ask me what I believe on contraception,” she said. “That’s not what I want to talk about. I didn’t go on this trip for the politics. I went on it because I knew it would be an awesome experience with my daughter.”

Her daughter agreed, saying that having her mother attend with her was the most meaningful part of the march. Katelyn also said seeing the large crowd of people standing up for the same issue as her was a favorite moment.

The day after the march, their group gathered in front of the White House to pray for the country and its leaders. Ketchum felt an overwhelming feeling of warmth. She said she voted for Trump because she feels it is what God wanted her to do based on Trump’s stated anti-abortion position.

“I’m trusting Trump and his administration will do what they say,” she said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Ten-year-old Lucia del Pilar interrupted the audiobook she and her mother listened to as they cruised across the country in a hybrid Highlander. The car speakers played Gail Collins’ book, “America’s Women: 400 years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines,” which tells the stories of the women who have shaped our nation.

Lucia spoke up when she heard Anne Hutchinson’s name. She had learned about Hutchinson in her fifth-grade classroom.

“When we were talking about the colonies, she was in the workbook,” Lucia said. “She was one of the only women on the list.” Hutchinson was an outspoken leader and midwife who challenged the established New England Puritan patriarchy. She was tried, convicted and banished from the colony for her religious dissent.

It was fitting car talk for a mother and daughter participating in their first march, a female-led protest against the new president of the United States. Jessica del Pilar, 38, of Clayton, Missouri, took her daughter out of school for two days to travel to the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington. Crowd counts estimate 500,000 people marched in D.C. -- more than triple the estimated attendance of the inauguration itself. Nationally, it is said to have been the largest protest in American history, with political scientists estimating between 3.3 to 4.8 million people participating in towns throughout the country.

But del Pilar had no idea how it would turn out when she decided to drive 800 miles to D.C. with her daughter. During the election cycle, she said, every issue felt polarized to such an extreme. After Donald Trump won and del Pilar saw the reports of violence by some of his supporters, she wanted to do something. His cabinet appointments only affirmed her resolve.

“I think it’s very important for people to understand (that) his supporters don’t represent the whole country,” she said. “I don’t want to be complacent in this moment. I don’t want to pull back or hide or just be hopeful that everything will be OK.”

Having grown up in Denver and lived in D.C., she also felt a little isolated, away from family -- a transplant from blue cities to a red Midwestern state. They made plans to meet up for the march with del Pilar’s sister and aunt, along with a friend traveling from California, who was also bringing her young daughter.

Del Pilar wanted to impart a simple message to her daughter: “It’s time when we need to show that we are going to stand up for what we believe in.”

Lucia made her own signs. One said, “I refuse to be silent.”

On the day of the march, they headed to the Metro station at 8 a.m. It was full of people, and their train only became more packed at each stop. They were letting people out in waves. The attendant had a bullhorn and was chanting, as well.

“It was so positive,” del Pilar said. She and her daughter met the rest of their group and found a space near the stage. The crowd around them swelled. Neither had ever been in a crowd so large before. She watched her daughter listen to speakers like Madonna, Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem talk about women’s rights and equality. There were times the entire crowd was dancing, and times they were pushed together by the crush of people.

A little before 3 p.m., they started marching toward the White House. When some marchers chanted, “What does America look like?” others responded, “This is what America looks like!”

Lucia was taking it all in.

Del Pilar’s husband texted her while they marched, “I’m so glad you are there.”

She said that if she’d been looking for a larger community that shared her values of liberty and justice for all, she rediscovered it that day. That evening, they huddled around the table, amazed at the aerial images of marches from around the country.

On the drive home to Missouri, she and Lucia listened to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” a personal and political history of race in this country written as a series of letters to his teenaged son.

They are still processing the events of the weekend.

The march was the beginning of the story for them -- a renewed start of political engagement; a source of inspiration that will continue to push them forward.

Participating in it was like reading the introduction to an epic anthology, del Pilar said. Until you read the entire book, you don’t truly understand it.

“This thing has yet to be written,” she said.