The Fifty-minute hour
By: Patty Somlo
The big hand presses the twelve while the little hand settles down over the four. Beyond the window, the world waits, silent and dark. My mother’s fingers encircle my bony right shoulder, easing it back and forth.
“Patty.”
Her whisper resembles a dry cough.
“Time to get up.”
My mother doesn’t need to remind us that there’s no time to dawdle. We’re accustomed to the drill. After all, we are military kids, used to moving nearly every year, sneaking away before the sun comes up, as if we’re skipping out on the rent.
Not surprisingly, I grew into adulthood a bit obsessed with time. There’s no diagnostic term or medication for this. I will call it Time Obsession Disorder or TOD. I suffer from TOD to such a degree that my life--in strange and serious ways--revolves around time.
So, it’s not by chance that the first thing I noticed about therapy had to do with time. The hour is what I’m referring to.
While I paid for sixty minutes of therapy, after a couple of sessions, I realized that the actual time I spent with my therapist was shorter. It took a few more sessions before I understood that in therapy, an hour is only fifty minutes long.
At about the same point, I recognized that a more profound difference existed between therapy’s fifty-minute hour and the sixty-minute hours that clicked by in the rest of my life. Quite simply, that once-a-week sliver of time was saving my life. The fifty-minute hour opened its arms and embraced me, assuring me that everything was going to be all right. Sitting in that chair across from my therapist with my feet planted firmly on the floor, I learned that I had done an excellent job stuffing my feelings down throughout my life. I didn’t have a clue how to feel anything now. I couldn’t feel angry or sad. Neither could I feel fear or shame. Most tragic of all, I didn’t know the first thing about how to be happy.
Until I made the decision in my early forties to go to therapy, it never occurred to me that something was wrong. I had refused to acknowledge even to myself that I was depressed and anxious and that I had been all the way back to junior high. Honestly, there hadn’t been time. I was far too busy trying to cheer myself up.
But one morning I thought, I can’t do this anymore. That thought went round and round my mind. The this I couldn’t do was end up in another relationship with a man who would lose interest in me the moment we got close. I had done this too many times to count. And now I’d done it again. When the relationship came to an abrupt, unexplained, and unanticipated end, I feared I might never recover.
The part of my brain that, for years, had lifted me up was exhausted. The voice that assured me I could change my life, start this or that new project, meet a guy, move to another city, find a better job, had died. Instead, the only words I heard besides I can’t do this anymore were nothing’s ever going to change and I’m going to be alone the rest of my life.
The only state I wanted to be in was asleep. Yet, sleep refused to come. When I dragged myself out of bed late in the morning, my body felt as if it had gained an extra hundred pounds overnight. Even the strong French Roast coffee I loved didn’t help.
On the third morning, my roommate and friend Laura said, “Maybe you should try some short-term therapy.” Interestingly, I had just had the same thought. Many of my friends had been in therapy at one time or another, including Laura. Yet I had always assumed therapy was for everyone else. Even when I could barely drag myself out of bed, the notion that I might need therapy still made me uneasy.
Yes, I had thought about it. But if Laura hadn’t opened the door with her suggestion, I’m not sure I would have managed to pry that door open myself.
Once Laura said the words, I surprised myself by saying, “Yes. I could use some help.”
A few days later, I made an appointment to meet with a therapist named Barbara. I was scared, of course, not just because I was going to therapy but because every new experience scared me.
As it turned out, the fifty-minute hour of therapy was different from all the other places I’d ever been. That space of time nourished me.
If I close my eyes and bring up an image of myself sitting across from my second therapist, Katherine, with the fireplace across the room behind Katherine’s back and a small window to the side, I see a circle form around the two of us. Within that circle, I am safe. I am liked for who I am. Most important, I am in touch with my feelings. That circle is the space I go to still, when I’m wrestling with some difficult problem, or worry gnaws at my belly.
I imagine that lucky children with happy, loving parents are invited to step into that place every day growing up. I have seen this at times when I’ve been in a public place, such as a swimming pool. “Watch me, Mommy,” the little girl will say, right before she jumps in the water and paddles over to the side. When she pops her head out, I listen as her mother tells the girl how wonderfully she’s done.
Or sometimes, I watch as a father pays attention to his young son. Really listens and then thoughtfully responds, letting the child know that he is a person with every right to have his feelings and needs taken seriously.
I did not have such parents, and until I started therapy, I didn’t realize the damage they had done. When I entered that healing space and my therapist wanted to know what I thought and what I felt, I didn’t know what to say. There was no I inside me who felt anything. The I inside me had spent her whole life trying to figure out what she was supposed to feel and think. This was altogether different.
Katherine often characterized the healing process as a journey. During the years I saw her, Katherine frequently referred to my place in that journey as being on the path. I now see the fifty-minute hour as a brief stopover for nourishment and support along the way.
One of the most important aspects of those fifty-minute hours was that I learned how to create a healing space within myself, a portable fifty-minute hour I can take anywhere or enter without leaving the house. My fifty-minute hour might last only five or ten minutes and no more. The length of time doesn’t matter. What counts is that I have learned to nurture, comfort, and heal myself. I have also learned how to check in and ask myself, “Patty. How do you feel?”
None of this happened easily or overnight. And in low or difficult moments it’s something I still struggle to find.
Many people can just feel angry when something doesn’t go their way or cry if they’re feeling sad. My feelings can be like a thread that’s gotten tangled and knotted. When I step into my virtual fifty-minute hour, I am able to start untangling one fragile thread at a time.
Patty Somlo’s most recent book, Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing) was a Finalist in the American Fiction Awards and Best Book Awards. Previous books, The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil) and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace (WiDo Publishing), were Finalists in several contests. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Delmarva Review, Under the Sun, the Los Angeles Review, and over 40 anthologies. She received Honorable Mention for Fiction in the Women’s National Book Association Contest, was a Finalist in the J.F. Powers Short Fiction Contest, had an essay selected as Notable for Best American Essays, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times.
