When you do overseas mission work, there a million jobs you have to learn how to do. Handyman, teacher, taxi driver, party planner, tour guide, nutritionist, counselor, translator, accountant. I’ll let you guess which of those I enjoyed and which I bungled constantly. By far, though, my favorite job was public speaker. It wasn’t a regular thing, but from time to time, Nate and I would be asked to teach at a youth camp or preach at a nearby church, and even when it was in Spanish, I loved it. Maybe it’s the teacher in my soul or maybe I just loved attention, but I never felt more energized than when I could stand in front of people and communicate something that was important to me.

Then I had a baby. I continued on with most aspects of my job, but from time to time I would have to bow out of things that just weren’t feasible when you were nursing an infant. Like the week when a friend asked Nate to be the visiting speaker at his church one Sunday evening. None of our local churches had nurseries where you could leave a baby (it would have been culturally weird). We didn’t have grandparents nearby, and all our usual babysitters were…well, they were at church. So even though we normally worked together on speaking engagements, and even though we had written the content of his message together, we agreed that Nate would have to take this one solo.

Theoretically, this should have been fine. Nate is an amazing speaker. He does not need my help. And I had an infant who still didn’t sleep through the night. I was exhausted and didn’t need one more thing on my plate.

But that theory doesn’t take into account my personal hang ups.

I could have just stayed home that night. It was getting close to winter and the sun set early. The service would be late enough that I had every excuse to keep the baby inside and put her to bed at her normal time. It’s probably what a sane person would have done, or, say, a person without the world’s most advanced FOMO. All I could think was that I was already missing out on speaking up front. I shouldn’t have to also miss out on seeing all the people.

So I went. And it was a little late for the baby. And hanging out with a bunch of people I didn’t really know very well proved to be more awkward than fun. And the minute the music ended and Nate stood up to preach, the baby started to cry.

She didn’t want to nurse and she was never going to sleep in a room full of interesting new things. She also didn’t want me to sit still or be inconspicuous in any way. I know I said that I like attention, but it turns out I am somewhat picky about what kinds of attention I appreciate.

Desperate not to make any more of a scene that I already was, I quietly slipped out the back door into the courtyard outside. It was a bit chilly, brisk enough that I was glad of my coat, but not cold enough to keep me from sweating inside that coat as I walked back and forth and bounced my baby up and down. I paced and I sweated and I grumbled in my mind about the unfairness of my being out here soothing this baby while my husband was inside doing something I loved.

I didn’t blame Nate for where I was–he wasn’t in any way responsible–but I have found that it’s just as easy to be mad at life as it is to be mad at a person. So I indulged my self-pitying anger for all it was worth. I went ahead and let the moment grow in my mind, so that my situation represented the plight of women everywhere, overlooked and oppressed, all because we are biologically equipped to carry and nurse children.

After a while, I discovered that as long as I kept up a sort of swaying bounce, my daughter would settle down and stay quiet, so I had a new opportunity to exacerbate my resentment and build on the narrative of martyrdom I was spinning. Of course, I seized the chance. I crept up close to the door to try to listen to Nate as he spoke. The window was open a crack, allowing me to hear, and slowly I eased closer and closer until my nose was nearly up against the glass.

I know. The symbolism of the moment was a little heavy-handed. I was literally outside, looking in at where I wanted to be, prevented from being there by the baby in my arms. If you saw this moment in a movie, you’d be like, “Geesh, no need to hit me over the head with it.”

At that moment, though, I wasn’t seeing the humor in the situation. Discontent had squeezed all perspective from my soul, and I wanted the metaphor to be so obvious that even the strangers in the room would have to see it.

They did not, of course. That’s the thing about discontent. No one else ever takes it as seriously as I do.

I’d like to tell you that I had a revelation that night. That I looked down at my sweet daughter’s face and realized that she was infinitely more wonderful than anything I loved doing, that I would have more impact on the world by raising her than by any amount of public teaching. I mean, those things are true, and on some level I knew them. They are the reason I chose to have kids in the first place. But I did not reach a new state of enlightenment that particular night. That night, I stood there and tortured myself with what I couldn’t have and then went home in a dark, unfriendly mood.

Hilarious, right?

Sometimes, I’m really not funny. Sometimes I’m too self-absorbed to laugh.

That’s why I revisit those moments from time to time. To look back at that frumpy new mother glaring through the window at people who didn’t see her situation as a problem and give her the laughter she couldn’t give herself.

It’s not a mocking laugh. That new mom was in the middle of a huge identity shift, and the middle is a place for compassion not derision. This laugh is an empathetic laugh. An oh-crap-I-still-do-that-to-myself-sometimes laugh and a man-I’m-thankful-I-didn’t-live-in-that-resentment-forever laugh. It’s the laugh of someone who sees how easily she could have chosen to linger in self-made misery and is relieved that the story took a different turn.

It’s the laugh of someone who knows that the those moments really are a big deal. And also that they really aren’t.

It’s the laugh of someone who appreciates that kind of paradox. In retrospect, at least.