At age 7, my daughter has a joy in her Brown skin that I still have to work for

By Raakhee Mirchandani for The Today Show

My 7-year-old daughter Satya takes up a lot of space in the world. Literally. Her stuff is everywhere.

Every surface of the apartment is covered in the things that fill her life: notebooks, my vintage copies of "The Baby-Sitters Club,"squishies, scrunchies and paradindis. Bindis share space with slime and graphic novels, side by side, all of them equal parts of what this little girl is made of.

Growing up, my closets were separated. I had one for Indian clothes, another for “regular” clothes, as I called them. As if the shimmering lehengas and embroidered kurtas somehow deemed the wearer irregular. I had two sets of friends, school friends and Sindhi friends, and the two never met. I didn’t mean for it to be that way, but I had feet planted in two worlds, albeit on awkward, uneven footing.