A Graveyard Full of Camels
By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann
“Do you have any trouble areas?” he asks, looking down at me.
“Um,” I start to reply, tripping on my thoughts, knowing I’m here, on my back, for a reason. But in this immediate moment, I can’t pinpoint my pain. Not exactly. “No,” I say, “not really.”
It wasn’t a lie. I didn’t have any one trouble area. Overall, I do feel fine. Almost fine. Pretty much fine. The kind of fine you feel after a pain so sharp and intense, which stabs at you with such precision, so often, for so long, that when it changes into something—oh, I don’t know, not smaller—just different: from acute to chronic, from precise to dull, from seething to simmer; and compared to what it was, you do feel better. Almost better. The pain is tolerable, acceptable, welcomed. You might even call it good.
“Turn on your side for me,” he says. I do. He presses one palm deeply into my shoulders while conversely pushing on my hips. My spine twists and pops at a million points, the pain sparkles down like a firecracker raining hot embers throughout my body. I release a long slow breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“You sleep on your side?” he asks, though he must already know.
Again, I hesitate, and hate myself for it. Shouldn’t these be simple answers? Do you have pain? Yes or no. Do you sleep on your side? Yes or no.
But they aren’t simple answers. Not for me, not now. Not after everything that’s happened, not after all this time.
I used to love sleeping on my stomach, I want to tell him. And how, after multiple pregnancies, I learned to sleep on my back. I ache to confess: It hasn’t always been this way! But the truth is I do sleep on my side, my left side, the side toward the dresser, the side closest to the edge of the bed, the side facing away from my husband.
Do I sleep on my side? “Yes,” I say. He’s a chiropractor, not a therapist.
“Yeah, I can tell. You're all …” and instead of using words, he contorts his body, contracting elbows together at his chest, splaying wrists out towards me, burying his head. “You’re all scrunched up.”
No hesitation now. “Yes.” He found my exact point of pain.
“Turn the other way,” he instructs. Again, he presses and pulls. My back explodes and I fall forward into my tears. There is no relief, not yet; he’s released what’s been carefully encapsulated, allowing it to course through my veins. Like medicine, like exercise, like marriage counseling, I might feel worse before I will feel better.
“You okay?” he asks.
I will be, that’s my hope at least. But this reset, this realignment, this evidence that the emotional has translated deep into the physical, burns just to the point of unbearable.
“Yes,'' I whisper, one more time.
***
By nature, my husband and I are opposites. To look at almost any circumstance, to have any important conversation, it’s like we stand on two different mountains, one glacial, one volcanic. We’ve long accepted that we bicker, sometimes fight, and yes, can look back on harder seasons than others. We’ve been married a long time, are raising a handful of kids, and are faithful; we’ve always, always, figured out how to limp towards each other, even if it’s somewhere deep down in the valley.
But a little over two years ago, a proverbial camel (who occasionally walks through our home), came into our living room. While she was there, I placed what I believed was a handful of straw onto her back. But from my husband’s perspective, it looked like I intentionally and maybe even spitefully dropped on her a 2-ton block—of the build-a-pyramid-in-ancient-Egypt variety.
Regardless, the camel’s back broke.
It was just a straw! I’d say.
How could you be so careless with something so huge? he’d question.
For months, the poor thing laid there, groaning, bleating, bellowing. On bad nights, she’d growl and spit and hiss. On the nights she was silent, we welcomed the break. This is when I started sleeping on my side.
We knew the camel was in deep pain, but in the past, she’d eventually recover enough to get up and skulk away. But nothing was making her better. Not this time. We tried talking, listening, justifying, defending; explaining, ignoring, blaming, accusing. Nothing would get her to move. And neither of us understood why. It broke our hearts, not knowing how to fix her, not being able to make her better, realizing that this camel had been here so broken, for so long, it might die, right here in our living room, right here in front of our children.
***
“Just tell me, do you want it to be like this?” we ask each other, desperate.
No, we both answer.
“Are you committed to this marriage?”
The answer, over and over, from our respective sides of the bed: Yes.
“How do we make this better?” we ask.
“I don’t know,” we answer.
“We need help,” we finally, finally agree.
***
A few years after we married, we went to the wedding of a childhood friend. The pastor spoke a message I’d never forget: how all relationships between living things are dynamic, ever changing, never static. So in marriage, there are only two choices: like a spiral, you either go up, or go down; you never arrive, you never stay put.
Remember this, he said. Because when you are not actively building up, pouring in, working on, you allow the opposites—tearing down, emptying out, even innocuous destructions—to define your marriage. Today, you are committing to recognize and respond when you realize you are not going up the spiral.
***
A year into the camel laying in our living room, three months after starting marriage counseling, I drive my minivan five miles below the speed limit through our neighborhood on a Tuesday afternoon. “I don’t want to go!” I yell, out loud, to no one.
I will go, of course I will. Everyone knows the back of a camel doesn’t get fixed in just a handful of sessions. It’s never that easy. But this is what I want: I want to be fixed. Tell us who is wrong, who is right, and what we need to do to get better. Give us the prescription, the rehab exercises (to do for what, 3-6 months?) and we’ll be on our way, thanks.
These things take time, we hear.
How much time? I ask.
There is no definite answer.
That is not what I want to hear, to know, to have to live with.
Because tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, I will hardly be able to think straight, for it takes all I have to show up, to give myself over to this labor, of scraping through layers of hurt till we can find the rocks so deeply embedded in our soil we were not even aware they needed to be excavated. It takes all I have to sit in that room across from the man I’ve spent the last twenty years with and know that I love him, and for the first time in our marriage have to trust he means it when he says he still loves me, too.
I don't want to go because I’m tired.
I don’t want to go because nothing is changing.
I don’t want to go because I’m scared: that we’re unfixable, incompatible, irreconcilable. That one day, one of us will wake up and decide “I can’t do this anymore.” And I am scared to hope; I do not know if our marriage is dying, or if—dear God please—it will be reborn.
Also, I don’t want to go because I’m used to sleeping on my side.
***
In our situation, our issues look like two adults trying to catch mist rising off the ground. There is nothing concrete, nothing objectively iniquitous: I felt wronged, and right. So did he.
***
More time passes. We get better. We spiral back down.
It’s just been such a long time, I cry.
It’s not a fast fix, I’m reassured.
We continue, continue, continue showing up.
***
I wish I could tell you when it started to change, when our hurt clawed its way into hope.
I wish I could tell you how it felt to hold my marriage tightly but with open hands, not knowing how this story would end. I wish I could show you the details, the changes, only visible with the lens of time. I wish I could explain my certainty of God’s goodness and how through this, my trust is placed in nothing above the God of my salvation.
While we weren’t looking, or were too busy to notice, the camel left our living room.
It’s peaceful here at night.
We still go to counseling. We continue to learn how to build up, pour in, work on.
And I still sleep on my side, but without pain, and usually wrapped in my husband's arms.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.