Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time

by Angela Brown

But that’s the thing I’ve only recently come to understand about birthdays. They’re not about presents or streamers. They’re not about parties or pictures or petite pastel candles on your cake. They’re about having a brief sense of hope. For that one day, we’re able to close the door on our mistakes and cling to the false idea that we’ll approach the next year wiser. We make wishes. We blow out candles. We tell ourselves this will be our year.

Once we got through the week, the month, the school year, the holidays, the nonsense, the stress, we’d find time to do the things we longed to do. But then we never did. Life, it turned out, could wait.

You see, there’s a great secret to motherhood: no matter who you are or who you used to be or who you’d once dreamed you’d become, you were supposed to pretend that your children were enough, that you weren’t multifaceted, and that your dreams weren’t three-dimensional. You weren’t supposed to admit that you had any dreams reserved exclusively for yourself at all.

In big cities, you could be invisible if you wanted to be. People had the common courtesy to leave you alone.

just know I don’t ever want to settle. I want my life to always feel as full of possibility as it feels right now.”

I guess that’s what happens sometimes. You put off a dream too long, and it stops being a dream. It just becomes a memory.

“I don’t want to be remembered as some tired, overbooked, boring suburban woman who never took the damn time to become the best version of herself.”

For too many years, I’d taken for granted so many aspects of my life while on a quest to check off the few boxes I’d yet to complete. It was like that scattering of blank squares had left a blankness in me. It wasn’t until I began to chase them down that I realized that I could still have a full life, even if they remained empty. That I could be content, yet still have dreams.

Andrew wasn’t like me. He was straightforward, less emotional, more to the point. If we were pieces of punctuation, I’d be a question mark, always second-guessing my life. Andrew would be a period. Simple. Certain. It wasn’t like him to get hung up in the past. Nostalgia was a department I typically managed for us both.

Up until the very end of that year, I think I still felt like death didn’t apply to me or anyone I loved. Maybe I thought I could opt out of it, like unsubscribing from an obnoxious email thread. Of course, I was wrong.

“They’re Mom’s favorite. She’s always said spring is the best time for cooking. For living, really.” She exhaled heavily. “The only problem is that all the good stuff is so fleeting. You peek out in the fields one minute and they’re bursting with this stuff.” She clapped her hands together, sending particles of dirt into the air. “But when you look out again”—she snapped her mud-caked fingers—“just like that, it’s all gone.” She shrugged. “That’s the only problem with spring. It’s such a short season.”

we aren’t born with one life, but with two. The life we live before we understand loss, and the one we finally live once we realize that, despite our many efforts, our life will ultimately end.

Sometimes, you just have to sit quietly with your grief and give it room to breathe. You have to acknowledge that it is a part of you, and that it probably always will be.

There is no such thing as a perfect life. There are only perfect moments.