As we walked toward her, I looked at my two children.

Leo, asleep again against my chest in his grandmother’s blue carrier, having missed the entire thing.

And Maya, walking beside me with her head held high, her purple backpack catching the sun so the little stars on it seemed to glow, looking a small but unmistakable degree older than she had that morning at O’Hare — carrying, along with the prayer card, a lesson she was going to hold for the rest of her life.

I thought, walking across that curb into the sunshine, about all the times a mother is quietly expected to step aside, to shrink, to swallow it, simply so that she will not be an inconvenience to someone who has decided she is one.

I thought about all the little girls who are told, in a hundred spoken and unspoken ways, to stay quiet, to not make a fuss, to be nice even when someone is stepping on them, just when they are trying to stand up for something right.

And I understood, watching my daughter walk into the Florida sun with her chin up and her stars glowing, that justice does not always arrive the way we are taught to expect it.