The Month of Brady

January is here and I am now fully engulfed in what I am unofficially calling “the month of Brady”.  Brady was born and died last January, so there are a lot of contrasting emotions wrapped up into this one month.  January 2017 was both the happiest and saddest month of my life.  I went into the new year last year oblivious to what was about to happen.  The only thing significant about January was supposed to be our move to our new house.  You all know how that went (and if you don’t, check this and this out).

At the moment, I’m focused on Brady’s birthday.  He would have turned one in just about a week.  I ordered him a cake today.  I didn’t even intend to, but that’s how things are going with planning how we’ll celebrate his birthday.  I have received a lot of questions about what I am going to do for his first birthday, but I refuse to put unnecessary stress on myself to plan something elaborate.  I’m proud of myself for recognizing that, and putting a stop to the undue stress before I let it take over.  As someone who has frequently been paralyzed into inaction over the past year, that’s huge.

I’ll share more about what we end up doing for Brady’s birthday, and his cake, sometime after his birthday.  Considering the cake was an impulse purchase, I’m pretty proud of what I came up with.  Or, at least I think I will be.  It’ll either be awesome, or a disaster.  Either way, I am just fine with it.

So far, I have been burying my head in the sand about what happens just two weeks after Brady’s birthday.  For now, I’m allowing myself that too.  At this point in the month of Brady, I want to celebrate his birthday.  Though his entrance into the world was scary and unexpected, it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Over the months of having my therapist, we’ve talked a lot about windows of tolerance.  I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned windows of tolerance here yet, but basically, your window of tolerance is the zone where you function optimally.  Bullshit rolls off you like water rolls off a duck’s back, or something like that.  When you experience trauma or stress, your window of tolerance narrows, so little things throw you off a lot more than they normally would.  Since Brady died, I definitely have smaller window of tolerance in general, but I can already feel that already narrow window of tolerance narrowing even further this month.  I know it’ll be tough (it already is), and I know this sounds cheesy, but all I can do it my best.  Brady will be proud of me for just getting through it.