On loving your body like it’s a 1994 Dodge Caravan

We entered the car dealership as a family on a mission. The soles of our shoes stuck to hot asphalt as we toured the grounds, looking to buy a minivan. The nondescript gray one, with automatic transmission and no personality whatsoever, fulfilled our objective.

The salesman who greeted us didn’t know what to do with a woman looking to buy a car with cash, but my mom persuaded them not to put my dad’s name on the title. It wasn’t his mission, but hers. This was after Anita Hill, before Spice Girls. It took all day, but she bought the gray minivan with her own savings while my sister and I ate Mike-and-Ikes from the quarter machine in the lobby.

I loved the Dodge Caravan we drove off the lot that sweltering summer. I stretched out in its roomy backseat and looked at the palm trees going by outside the window.

The van broke down before we got it home.

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Thirty years later, I’m scrolling through Instagram while waiting in line at a coffee shop. I just spent an hour at the gym, and my adrenaline high hasn’t worn off yet. When it does, the everyday pain will start at my right hip and work its way down to my foot, finding its way into the crevices between my toes. On my feed, fit people in spandex post pictures of themselves with captions like ‘Love your body’ and I think about that old van.

When you have chronic pain, loving your body is like falling in love with a beaten-up car you can’t replace. Upgrades cost a fortune.

The inside of the van smelled like sour milk. Once, when I was about twelve, an entire gallon of two percent broke open between the seats. Milk washed over the carpeted floorboards like so much white paint, and the smell never really came out. We scrubbed and scrubbed, but the smell came back when it got hot enough. Growing up in Arizona, it was almost always hot enough to summon the smell.

I think that if I’m going to love my body, I’ll love it the same way I loved that minivan.

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I’m in a waiting room, scrolling while my doctor runs late. A friend of a Facebook friend, someone I worked with four jobs and ten-plus years ago, shares a clickbait article between frothy political rants. The article says if you can go from sitting to standing without using your hands, you’ll live longer. 

I won’t even try. My back surgery scar faded into a thin white line, but the ache never left, joining the phantom pinpricks of ablation needles and epidurals past. I hurt whether I sit or stand, and whether or not I use my hands to do either.

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When I was a kid, we took the Caravan on a road trip. I read paperback sci-fi books, fighting carsickness and boredom. The van broke down on a long stretch of high desert highway that looked just like an old western movie set. We pulled over, and there was nothing but red dirt and rocks on either side of us for miles around, like Forrest Gump making his famous stop.

An ice cream truck selling frozen treats came to the rescue. They gave us shaved ice while we were stalled in the middle of scorching nowhere, and to this day, I’m not sure how that story can be true.

How can I not love a car that gave my family that myth?

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An honest surgeon with kind eyes and a degree from overseas tells me my spine is worn out. All the other surgeons promised they could fix me with enough time and copayments. But this one says no. Because the parts of me that still work do their best to compensate for the ones that don’t.

At thirty-nine, my mileage is too high. Like that old van, my discs are worn. I’m out of alignment.

He tells me to keep moving, but sometimes I can’t. My body won’t always start.

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I took the van with me when I went to college, freeing my mom to buy a car that worked. She gleefully bought a Honda, washing her hands of the stinky Caravan.

One night, after a long shift stocking shelves at Target, I tried to open the van’s sliding door and it fell clean off. My red-shirted co-workers helped me use a rainbow of bungee cords to hold it closed. I loved the clunking sound as the door hit the ground. And I loved the way the wind whistled in the not-quite-closed crack of the sliding door.

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These days, I hang out with gym bros and well-meaning runners. They’re hard to avoid here in Colorado. They wear expensive neon clothes and say things like ‘pain is weakness leaving the body.’ I never tell them that when I wake up in the morning, that’s the only time in my day when nothing hurts. For five or ten minutes before I open my eyes, I remember what it’s like to be whole.

Having chronic pain means finding ways to love the parts of you that hurt.

No amount of self-love can change the fact that my check engine light is always on, and I cannot check myself enough to make it stop.

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I handed the van off to my dad, becoming free to buy a car for myself that worked. He sold it for a couple hundred bucks to a young man who looked like his life wouldn’t be complete without a van. He didn’t ask about the smell.

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While driving out to a hiking trail in the mountains, I’m cut off by a guy in a Tesla. I wonder if he would love his car even if it smelled like old milk.

About a mile past the trailhead, my hip goes out. I can’t move, or I’ll fall over. My right foot went numb a long time ago, and the feeling never really came back. I pretend I’m admiring the aspens around us while thinking about all the times I coaxed my minivan up a steep grade. The air conditioning had to be off so the engine didn’t overheat. I whisper encouragement to my body now, the same way I did to the smelly van I once loved.

I never knew if it would get me where I needed to go, but I filled it up and hoped.

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Originally published in Progenitor Art & Literary Journal (2023).

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Mel Lake is a writer from Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared online and in the RMFW 2022 Anthology, “Bizarre Bazaar.” She's querying a quirky vampire murder mystery novel. In her free time, she co-hosts a women’s comic book club, participates in a critique group, cosplays, swims, and enjoys the outdoors.