It was Saturday morning, and my toddler woke me up early, obviously. She was restless, my girl who always wanted to go out, out, out, into the world. I didn’t have much energy for going, but staying would have taken even more. We put on our coats and headed toward the playground in the plaza. Outside the air was chilly. We were the only ones on the street. In our impoverished Argentine neighborhood, the weekends were for late night parties. More people went to bed at seven a.m. than woke up for the day.

At the playground, I let go of her hand and let her run free, watching carefully anytime she bent down to pick something up. Broken glass and cigarette butts were as plentiful as the sad tufts of grass, so some vigilance was required. She climbed the wooden slide and swung on the squeaky swing. I tried to focus on my radiant child and not on the dreary surroundings. But it was Saturday morning, and I was tired and sad. It hadn’t been an easy few months.

Then my girl came running toward me with something small held in her pudgy hand. She held it up, this tiny living thing she had found. It was a scraggly flower, a weed really, but the small white blossom lifted my heart. “Even here,” I thought to myself, “Even here there is beauty.”

Then I lifted up my eyes, looked over my daughter’s head, and saw a man peeing into the bushes.

It took him a long time to finish. It wasn’t easy to make sure my baby kept looking at me and only me. When he was finally done and staggered away, home to sleep off the night’s revels, I took my little girl by the hand, and we left in the other direction.

“Mommy,” she wanted to know. “Why are you laughing?”

And I couldn’t explain, but I also couldn’t stop. There’s nothing funny about your child being exposed to public urination. But that doesn’t mean you won’t giggle the whole way home.

Because sometimes you can find beauty in the middle of ashes. And sometimes you just find absurdity and you have to make do.