The Space Between

The Space Between
What's wrong and right
Is where you'll find me hiding, waiting for you
The Space Between
Your heart and mine
Is the space we'll fill with time
The Space Between...                        Dave Matthews Band 

Parenting fills the space between.  The love we feel.  The time between when we first know they exist, to holding them and ultimately releasing them to the universe.  Often the times are equally besotted with joy and angst.  Every day life fills voids that sustain us.

2011 unwrinkles time.

January uncovered Frazer's ASD heart issue and pericariditis.   Lying in the periphery was Houlder perpetually tired, chronically riddled by a headache, and disoriented by blurred vision affronting our assumptions of youth prevailing and enduring because it mostly does.

Barely able to make state swim champs for Collegiate, he had to decline participation in A/BB Champs and Senior Champs that he earned through months of training; a year's worth of goals faded away under the crushing headache which had persisted since January 4th.  Before February's end, Houlder was no longer able to go to school, study, manage anything other than sleeping or eating.  

Concurrently, the endocrinologist suggested that Frazer may have a tumor on his pituitary gland.  In the space of the briefest month of the year, kids floated without medical diagnosis and pending heart catheteterization.  Waiting 6 weeks for an MRI with proclaimed excellent health care we wonder if a sweet child has a tumor that needs removal which if he does, could be complicated.  

Suffering no outward signs, Frazer remains the same.  If there is tumor, we already see the evidence -- he is short.  He is 11 years old and weighs 50lbs and is only 48 inches.  His 6 year old brother slightly outweighs him and matches his height.  There is no space between them besides the nearly 5 years separating them.

By March and spring break, Houlder  managed 2.5 good days where the pain was only a 4 and he got to see Picasso's exhibit at the VMFA.  Delighted as he was by the magnitude of Picasso's work, he was exhausted by the end of the hour and a half.  It was his last pleasurable time out of the house.

Test results are unclear.  The internet is not a friend in these darker late night moments of questing to understand something that may or may not be detectable.  Where we go next and what we uncover remain unknown.  Skills as a chronicler have never been so critical, but fear creeps in.  The minutiae of details like blood pressure, temperature, what they eat almost defy documentation.  Miss a detail -- of course.  Forget something?  Inevitably.   The space exists between what has happened and what needs to happen.

Where does the time go?  Can I hold it in my heart and make it safe and still?

What happens in those spaces that we hold for our children whom we love and want to protect?

We manage a semblance of life that resembles our previous unknowing.  William and I wait and wonder and worry and love.  That is all there is.  The time to hold and to love, and the space that it occupies in our minds and our souls are neither trivial or magnificent.  The everyday-ness of it all allows us to suspend the time between appointments or answers.  


When we held our boys in our arms for the first time and adored them, we marked a time in which there was schism in our lives -- the time before parenting and the time as a parent.  The space between then and now extends our ability to support them and remain curious about what it could be and what we have yet to learn.  It is the love we share for them and in that is the space for hope.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H67uEgRZs2Y