Today, a good friend of ours and her daughter (also a transracial adoptive family) were walking down the street in their neighborhood, and a random stranger made a racist comment towards their three year old daughter. When I heard about it, my heart sunk, my eyes filled with tears and my guts roiled. It was such a visceral reaction because I saw my own future...and that of my own small child.

There will come a time when my little girl hears something ugly directed at her. There will come a day when I have to sit with her and explain racism. There will come a day when my sweet girl loses that innocence and learns that there are people in the world who hate her for something beyond her control. And I will want to rip and tear at that person until they're a puddle of glop on the floor. I'll want to hurl nasty words at their heads and I'll want to hurt them to their very core.

But I won't do these things. I'll hold my baby by her hand and I'll walk away. I'll keep my mouth shut and I'll keep my rage inside. And when we get home, I'll tell her that you simply can't reason with ugliness and stupidity. I'll tell her that you can't waste your time with people like that, because nothing you do or say will convince them that they're wrong...and how wrong they truly are. You can't force someone to like you. You can't ask someone so rotted inside to look at you and see who you truly are. Someone like that will never know the absolute beauty of my child, inside and out. They will dismiss her, and they'll miss her humor, her sweetness, her intelligence, her sunny nature.

And she'll be better off for missing out on them.