A very long year.

366: Days since our first BFP
30 weeks 1 day: Amount of time I was considered pregnant by the medical community last year. Had they all been smashed together into a single pregnancy, that child would have a 99% chance of survival.
3%: The number of couples deemed to be dealing with "recurrent pregnancy loss". Or, rather, the number of women considered "habitual aborters".

I wish I could add a 'priceless' to this, make it some screwed up American Express commercial, but I cannot.

I've learned a few things along the way. I've learned that people say and do stupid things when they discover you've had a loss. And when they say and do stupid things, it's often out of love. I've learned that all people should be armed with the sheet of things not to say: It was for the best, Your time will come, Relax and it'll happen, God had other plans, There was probably something wrong with *it* anyway. And the list goes on and on and on.

This brings me to another thing I've learned: People SUCK at grieving. Or, rather, they SUCK at watching you grieve. I mean, in a way I should've known that when David died. People asked me how I was doing for approximately 30-60 days and then, after some unspoken timeline passed, quit asking, began cutting off conversations about it, and became uncomfortable with my continued discussions of David. Miscarriage seems to be worse because people don't generally treat it like the loss that it is. For many, to watch a person actively grieve, then, for a year, is to believe that they are incapable of living the life before them. And yet I think of my mother -- in the wake of losing David, she grieved. She still does. Our family still weeps together sometimes. And through all of this grieving she's lived - from working to church to actively engaging with our family -- to even taking a cruise in Norway. She's living and grieving at once and nobody knows what to do with that. I don't know how long she'll need to grieve - but I do know it's not mine to put an end date on. Similarly, the grief Tim and I carry this year is ours. We continue to live - to work, to play, to love our children fiercely, but we grieve. It doesn't detract from who we are, it is simply a piece of a much larger person.

Finally, I have learned that it is not only possible, but most likely necessary, to engage with deep crises of faith here and there through our journey. I have never heard anything more gut-wrenchingly offensive than God has other plans when David died and when we went through our miscarriages. Why would an all-powerful deity -- to whom we pray and offer ourselves daily -- take an amazing minister or allow me to become pregnant and then miscarry. If God was trying to teach us lessons somehow through riddling my stepfather with cancer or giving and taking back babies, this is a God I want no part of. I do not believe for a moment that God actively engaged with our lives to make these things happen for a plan that is so elusive we will only come to know it in the afterlife.

My buddy gave me a card a few days ago that said "When bad things happen I want to call God and say hey WTF." I've come to believe that if we could find the phone to the big man in the sky, we'd hear a long pause followed by a "No shit. WTF indeed."

Which then leads to the crisis Rabbi Kushner talks about in When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Do we have an all-powerful or an all-loving God? It seems, especially faced with situations like this, that we have to choose. I choose all-loving. If it's the other, then the all-powerful God can unfold his plans to me in the afterlife and I reserve the right to unload on that God for it.

But for now, for now I prefer to see it like this: We're kids, eight or so, full of life and love and happiness. Maybe we even have freckles. And we're on a bike. Maybe it's too big for us. Most likely so. It's the universe - big, mechanical, unsettled, dangerous. Put together lovingly by our father, the Father. Made to bring us joy. And there, at the top of the hill, waving to us, is our Dad. Loving. Delighted. If we crash? Scared right along with us. Tearful right along with us. Sad right along with us.

Is that something? Sure. Maybe it's something the grief-ridden cling to. Who knows. Maybe it's closer to Truth than we know.