Clicks. Clacks. Riding the backs of giraffes for laughs is alright for a while.

"I spent my whole fucking weekend trying to get that goddamn gun to work. I told him to leave it off until he goes trick or treating but he never listens to a word I say."

--Craig's initial response to my email late the other night with the subject heading of "EMERGENCY!"

Yeowch!

He would cantankerously complain in his email about our son's tinkering with the homemade gun that goes along with his Halo Halloween costume, wired with lights which required laborious soldering, connecting and other "Only-Handy-Daddies-Can-Do" stuff, that Luke literally simply picked up to turn on (as he was putting one of his other rifles away for the night) and found that the aforementioned connections had failed. The battery pack had gotten extremely hot, which didn't sit well with me given the paint on the gun was flammable, so we took the batteries out. That was the extent of mother-assisted assistance.

It was 11:15 at night. I was beyond exhausted and wanted to go to sleep, pleading to my sobbing son (the perpetual night owl) to let it go and that I would contact his father ASAP and see if Craig could come and fix it Wednesday night during the memorial service, which I honestly preferred Luke not attend. Luke was inconsolable. Irate. Disappointed. Overtired. After my ex-husband's complain-a-thon reply to my email, Craig closed with the following:

"Sorry I swore, You have no idea how much time and agony we put into this project over this past weekend and I am still packed with stress."

That much I understood and I did sympathize with both Craig and Luke, but my email back to Craig was mindful and I pleaded with him that this is one of those instances where you have to put your own personal shit aside and your own social obligations and your girlfriend time on the back burner and just buck up and help your kid. To me, anyway, this wasn't the A-HA! moment to teach our boy life lessons about loss and disappointment. I wanted Daddy to swoop in and save the day, the way I envision Daddies always should. (What I remember of time with *my* Daddy, anyway. What I unfairly expect of my Tatus, who had the nerve to call me "demanding!" yesterday!)

Craig finally emailed me that he'd be over at around 6:30 to help Luke with the gun. As he's always been wont to ask me, "What are the chances of you shutting up until you get exactly what you want?" to which I answer frequently, "Slim to none." But this wasn't for my benefit. It was for Team Bechtel.

There was a little refreshment gathering in the gym after Jayden's memorial service last night, which I really would've liked to have stayed longer for, but I didn't know if Luke was home alone or if Craig was still there working with him on fixing the gun. I made the decision to split for home, while my ma stayed to hobnob and enjoy the fellowship and food.

What I walked into at home, after unlocking the door to the house, after experiencing this intensely heavy, deeply emotional, horribly sad yet celebratory service for this baby, was kismet.

My family was home.

Seeing Craig and Luke working together on the living room floor of the house made me strangely high in my heart.

Fractured and disbanded though we may legally be, Craig and Luke will always be my little family. The three of us have this undeniable, unbreakable bond far beyond sharing a child that transcends the infrequent yet snarky email exchanges between my ex-husband and myself, our mutual quirky annoyances and opposite personalities notwithstanding. I could rattle of a dozen reasons why it's for the best that we're no longer married to one another, but I could also give you a number of reasons why I, at least, wish we still were. Maybe Craig and I weren't meant to be, but Craig, Luke and I most definitely were.

Craig and I really were very much in love once we got together, though I distinctly remembering him tell me once early on in our relationship, "Don't hate me if things don't work out between us." Spookily prophetic. *I* asked him out on a date in 1992. He said yes. We went to see "JFK," which I picked out, so that I could spend as much time with him as possible, the film being over 3 hours long. I paid for the movie and he paid for dinner at the local Galesburg Chinese restaurant.

We had so much fun our first Knox trimester together that I neglected my studies to the point where I was kicked out of college on academic suspension for a term. Two D's and an F. During my term off of school, I worked in Chicago and visited Craig periodically at Knox, attending writing workshops and sitting in on a few classes.

The summer after our junior year, when Tim and Kate left as our resident assistants and moved to NY, Craig and I sublet their apartment in Williston Hall for the summer. Our first time living together. And it was sheer bliss. I worked in the Dean's Office and Craig worked overnights at a local hotel. I think between the two of us, we earned about $50 a week on which to live, which simply meant that we needed gas in the car and food in our bellies. For some reason, insomnia had the best of me that summer, and I found myself staying up all night because Craig wasn't home, taking him hot dogs to eat at the hotel in the middle of the night. We had the master key to every room in Williston, and were the best friends of all the kids who stayed in the hall on campus that summer who'd locked themselves out, or who wanted to veg out in our air conditioning, or who needed a ride into town or to the doctor. The summer of love, 1993.

By senior year, we were one of those couples who were, literally, CraigandAndrea. Inseparable. Solid. Committed. We took a brief break to date around in the spring of '94 before deciding we wanted to spend our lives together and got engaged at our favorite Chinese restaurant in Galesburg the night before my 22nd birthday. Craig may correct me if I'm wrong, but he had enough credits to graduate after Fall term of '94, but stayed on the whole year to stay with me, only taking one class per term to keep himself busy. He moved up to Chicago from Kansas after we graduated and found a job. We were married on August 3, 1996 and had Luke 4 years later.

The years in between our vows and Luke's birth were complicated. I was undiagnosed and unmedicated crazy-bipolar-manic-crazy, behaving very badly (which Craig was acutely aware of but never confronted me about), and survived narcotics addiction and recovery and a miscarriage. He witnessed insane behavior like me shoveling the entirety of our driveway property at our apartment building at 2am during a massive snowstorm (mania!) and didn't think twice. He came home from work to find me so doped out I was literally unresponsive, with lit cigarettes in the living room, or constantly tearing him away from work to take me to the ER so I could be shot up with more narcotics if I needed a fix and didn't do a damn thing about it to do what a spouse should've done, which would've been to throw my ass in rehab or a psych ward and ask questions later.

Once I got clean and the baby came, things were headed in a very positive direction at Camp Craig and Andrea for a good, long stretch, though in hindsight, like a lot of young couples with young children, we put our own relationship on the back burner in favor of raising our son. Then crazy-bipolar-manic-crazy, financial disaster, me behaving very badly again and alcoholism entered the picture. In my own defense, I was insane and drunk most of the time, and my husband did little to intervene other than to sporadically leave brochures on the counter like, "Do You Have a Problem with Alcohol?" I told Craig I was unhappy and wanted out of the marriage in a manic, abrupt fashion late in 2006 and by March of 2007, I had moved out of the house with Luke in tow. At that point in time, emotions were so raging that, despite sharing a child, we really didn't want to have much to do with one another, though we attempted to reconcile a couple of times, and God bless the guy, like I've mentioned before, he sat with me in the ER for 8 hours until I sobered up enough to check myself into alcohol rehab. Because though we were living separate lives, he was still technically my husband.

As he worked and swore under his breath with the gun, I offered Craig something to eat, as he hadn't had dinner yet and came straight to our house from work, but he declined. Instead, he continued to labor, asking me for tools that I gathered out of the toolbox in the basement. Luke vied for our attention by honking his stuffed walrus, and I proceeded to check in my emails and Facebook on the computer, firing up the iTunes. It was no different than in the halcyon days of our marriage and family time when Luke was little. The good years. I wanted it to last all night.

Craig and I had a particularly, uncharacteristically as of late, nasty set of email exchanges over the course of the last week, regarding where-to-go-trick-or-treating decisions, therapist-finding tension, using our son as an intermediary for messages best kept betwixt grown-ups and financial bickering. All of that, however, was put aside for the greater good, which was helping our son. Craig and I are very good at putting our personal disagreements aside when it comes to what's best for Luke, which I guess is unusual for a lot of divorced couples who harbor bitterness and malice towards one another.

The common person doesn't comprehend how we still manage to share holidays with one another together, now including his girlfriend of (I think it's around) 2+ years, and still putting up with one another's mothers, sitting together in church (while we see other divorced couples on opposite ends of the sanctuary). The common person expects us to argue constantly and use our son as a negotiating prop. Craig was vocally concerned about me during my relationship with "The Dough Boy" as he called him, and honestly couldn't bear to hear the full details of what his former wife went through, though he never liked "The Dough Boy" and always sensed something was terribly awry in that relationship. Once Craig found out that I had documented, diagnosed PTSD, he offered not only his sympathies but also a listening ear should I ever want to talk. I have yet to take him up on that. He's always said that he wishes me the best and wants me to be happy, and he means that, and vice-versa.

As the iTunes shuffled, Craig, in his infinite musical knowledge, one of the things that drew us together in the first place, pointed out songs I was playing...most poignantly for that evening, "The Porpoise Song" by the Monkees. It's a song about saying goodbye to someone, befittingly.

We keep meaning to get together so I can 12-step with him and properly, according to AA statutes, make amends towards him. That hasn't happened yet. I asked Craig some time ago in an email why he never got me help when I was drunk and mentally ill, and why he just let me walk away and didn't fight to hold onto me and get me the help I needed. He never answered that email. All this time, I've taken all the blame and all the responsibility for the disintegration of our relationship when it honestly is also partly his fault.

(What is it about me and asking guys difficult emotional questions via email that they never answer? Cowards!)

As a quarterly financial contributor to his radio show on chirpradio.org (where Craig spins tunes from 6-9pm CST every Saturday night), my reward for the donation was a handmade CD from Craig to me. (I also got a very nice metal bottle opener, which is ironic given I don't have a lot of beer bottles just lying around anymore.)

Some of the songs were humorous, some biting, weighty and angry, some favorites from our college days, one that he played on our college radio station the night we had our first big fight as boyfriend/girlfriend...a punk version of the Beatles' "Help!," Craig knowing my penchant for disliking ANY and ALL Beatles cover songs. The CD came in a CHIRP envelope, with no track listing, no artist accolades. It was something that had to be listened to intently to "get." A treasure with no map. I don't buy for a second that he "forgot" to put a track listing in. He *wanted* me to listen to those songs.

He has always been better at expressing himself musically than verbally, though we were both writing majors, and one song on that CD just choked me up, made me smile, said everything he couldn't muster the courage to say and showed me how my husband honestly felt about me. I think it answered the question I was asking about why he didn't jump in and force me to get help for my addictions or my bipolar. My Stephen Minister therapist from church asked me honestly what I thought Craig would say, if confronted with that question in person. I said he'd either say he didn't know WHAT to do or he was just THAT scared. In either case, I can empathize with his inner conflict. I'm not angry anymore. I don't think Craig is, at heart, terribly angry with me anymore either. Forgiveness is a beautiful thing and the cliche that time heals even the deepest of wounds is quite true.

Craig hugged and kissed Luke goodbye when he finally left Wednesday night, the gun in working order again. I stood behind Luke, holding out my arms, waiting for my hug, which he seemed to reluctantly reciprocate. It didn't matter. He held me tightly as I said a heart-felt "thank you."

The song that transfixed me on the CHIRP CD was called "Thank You," by the Redwallls (no, I've never heard of them). I'm no stranger to men sending me love songs with either/both covert and overt expressions of feelings, frankly. "Thank You," though, spoke more volumes about how much he ultimately loved me than anything he would ever be capable of telling me to my face. It took me a while to determine his intent in including that song. Was it a slap in the face, secretly dedicated to his current girlfriend? A mockery? Bitter irony? No. None of those things.

For better or worse....Craig had the first place in my heart when I was 19 years old. He'll always have a big part of it, dedicated to him forever. Unconditional love, appearing again.

These days it seems as though
I've lived a lonely lifetime
All because I never had a girl like you
To hold me tight

And since you came around
And showed your way to me
I'm beginning to think that I'll
Never be blue anymore

Now that you're in my life
You are my brightest day
When you came, you chased my blues away

And you know you're all that I been waitin' on
And all the stars I wish upon
And so I say "Thank you for bein' there
'Cause you and me are gonna be alright
Thank you for lovin' me
'Cause you and me are gonna be alright"

Well, any time of day

You wreck my bed
Since I heard you spoke go 'round my head
And you know that you're all

That I've been waiting for
You're the queen of all my dreams

And so I say "Thank you for bein' there
'Cause you and me are gonna be alright"
On my knees, it's days like these
When all I see is you and me

These days it seems as though
I've lived a lonely lifetime
All because I never had a girl like you
To hold me tight

And since you came around
And showed your world to me
I'm beginning to think that I'll
Never be blue anymore

Now that you're in my life
You are my brightest day
When you came, you chased my blues away

And you know you're all that I been waitin' on
And all the stars I wish upon
And so I say "Thank you for bein' there
'Cause you and me are gonna be alright
So thank you for lovin' me (like you did before)
'Cause you and me are gonna be alright"