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I was reprimanded once, while working at a Bible Camp, for leading a prayer with "Dear God." A visiting pastor worried that without saying "Lord God" I could have been praying to anyone. It struck me as silly at the time, but that pastor and I really did believe in different gods. His was male, judging, controlling. Mine wasn't, and I'm very grateful for that now. I've been struggling with my faith since losing Teddy, and if I had believed in the god of that pastor, I think I would have turned away altogether.

I think I felt holy before he was born, when I was going through test after test and then through the induction and labor that, in spite of the days and effort we all put into it, ended up with me strapped to the cross of the operating table. I would have been the happiest of martyrs if he'd lived, and even though he didn't, I still look back at that time - that terrible and terrifying anticipation and fear - and I'm grateful for it. That I had those days with him. That I did everything I could.

I sit in the sanctuary. It is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year on the Jewish calendar. The year when even the least observant Jew can be seen in a synagogue.

I am not the least observant Jew… Not really possible with a husband who is studying to become a rabbi. Not really possible with the amount of Jewish tradition I was raised with. Not really possible with Polish grandparents who survived the Holocaust. Not really possible with the number of Jewish food calories I have consumed in 38 years.

I think, for me, the last year was about connectedness, which is ironic because I felt so alienated from so many of the people in my life. But I felt a deep deep sense of connectedness with suffering and grief in people around me. It was a beautiful, sad, overwhelming feeling of having a very human experience of loss shared by many in so many different ways. At some point, for the immediate weeks after Lucia died, I would see people as their suffering. I think it helped open my eyes to how vulnerable we all are.

I felt holy after she died.

What I mean to say is that I felt disemboweled, ripped open and gutted, my innards in a heap before me.  I, Prometheus, chained to a rock, punished for stealing a daughter for nine months. Grief swept down as I was chained to the cliff, feasting on my liver, or perhaps more like my sanity and sense of justice, as I watched desperate. But still, in that torture, not because of it, I felt holy. Holier than before her death.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, Ben and Liam's birth was not so much a belief-shattering experience as it was a belief-creating experience. I entered into it in a complete void of faith. What *was* shattered, for me, was my obliviousness. I hadn't realized how deeply rooted that obliviousness had been, and god, how naked and exposed I felt when it was gone.