My seven year old’s softball team finished up its fall season today and the toothless wonders celebrated with pizza, soda, and chips. The focus was on softball and the coaches recounted how each teammate had improved over the season. The girls talked about today’s game and about other games as well. They also talked about what they were learning in school. “Mrs. Jones is teaching us about Indians who lived in apartment houses—the Pa-wee-ba-loes,” the shortstop said. I learned that the catcher’s teacher emphasized the fifty United States. “We have to learn all fifty of them!” she bemoaned. An outfielder’s teacher dabbled in tadpoles and frogs.

One girl talked about her math lessons. “We’re learning our divisibles,” she said. This snippet of conversation piqued my interest and I thought to myself, “our divisibles.” The right fielder added, “yeah, I can do divisibles by threes.” Another could do divisibles by four, and another apparently could do divisibles by thirteens! The girls all nodded and agreed how important learning divisibles was, “because you had to be able to break things up.” And I thought to myself that after we learn in second and third grades how to break things up, we spend the rest of our lives trying to put things back together.

We search for that lid to our pot, that spark for our flame, that “certainty that comes once in a lifetime,” as Clint Eastwood tells Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County. As adults we want to feel a part of, not apart from. We want to feel taken care of. We want to take care of another and to supplement our birth family with the family we birth. We want to feel added to; multiplied, not divided. We can be alone, but we don’t want to feel alone, and we certainly don’t want to practice the divisibles. Love is the state of being that provides the sense of wholeness we crave.

My mom and dad taught me this. Mom and dad exuded Love. Neither ever tired of telling the world how well they were cared for. They lived for one another. When dad came home from work, we’d all go screaming to be the first to meet him—mom made sure of that—but the first kiss, the first hug, the first I Love you was mom’s. We children knew that.

Mom took care of dad and we saw it. Dad took care of mom and we saw it. Mom and dad, two amazingly strong people, yet they each needed to be taken care of. They each relished their roles of taking care of the other, and they each told the world again and again how well their Love took care of them. And around our family gatherings, you would hear that familiar love duet repeated as uncles and aunts held hands, danced, and laughed as only lovers can laugh.

Perhaps, I thought to myself, we have to learn our divisibles in order to learn how to put things back together, to become a part of, not apart from.That reminds me, I have to get back to the picnic.

“Girls, does anyone else want a slice of Pizza?”