The five-minute good object

I have come up with the “five-minute good object” rule. It occurred to me as I was falling asleep last night. Our miniature schnauzer was lying between my wife and me, and for some unknown reason started licking my hand, wrist, forearm. It didn’t stop. For Simon, this was an exceedingly rare behavior: He had imprinted, seven years ago at the pet store, on my wife, and I believe his occasional shows of affection to me, since then, have been instigated by guilt. But now, the gentle slurps kept coming. What happened was this: After some minutes – I’ll say five – I was visited by these stirring and unexpected feelings, incredulous feelings: “What? I deserve this much affection? I deserve this much attention?” I realized at that moment that I was a person whose entire life must have been constructed with – and probably on the base of – the absence of love, and that love needed to have been shown in an extended packet, over several minutes, for it to reach meaning, for it to have become the gift that brought a child to life. I remembered an occurrence one evening, around age six or seven. For the first time in my aware life, my mother, talking with my Aunt Molly, had picked me up and placed me on her lap. I remember that I had been normal and fine all that day. As I sat there, the strange and wonderful place, internal feeling overwhelmed me and I threw up. Maybe one minute had gone by. Not five. Not ten. She deposited me on the floor and went to clean herself up. She never picked me up again. I know – as we can feel a truth beneath our airy thoughts – that after that I continued on more of a phantom of a child, a person. There had been that potential moment, and it had been undone rather than sustained. It hadn’t been enough.

Proviso is that I don’t know enough of healthy families, so I can only state a theory that probably countless parents (though not those of my clients) already practice: Attentive affection to a child has to, in an early stage, be timeless. It cannot feel to the child like a passing moment that is just an equal part of the day, but a place of time stopped, of full heart-felt, eye-seen focus. The attention has to be an oasis in the world, but where the oasis is bigger than the world. Somehow, “time” is the factor that becomes the person’s timeless not contingent feeling of self-value, of self-esteem. Real self-esteem comes from love which is implanted in the child. Like a photon of light, it is outside of time and does not grow old.*

Five minutes straight, a whole world in a drop – but you are not counting.

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* “Since photons are moving at such excessive speeds, time dilation comes into play and must be accounted for. Once this is taken into consideration, according to the photon’s frame of reference, Heeck found that its lifetime would be a rather short three years; however, from our frame of reference, light would live about one billion billion (10¹⁸) years.” https://futurism.com/science-explained-long-can-photons-live-will-ever-die.