March 16, 2025

you, me: still here

Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.

I’m interested in keeping this short and sweet. Let’s see how I do.

It’s been five years, everyone. If you’re reading this, you survived. You are surviving.

There’s a video I keep on my phone to remind me. It’s from January 2020, a scene from the right-before-times. That morning we’d gone with my mother to Norm’s for breakfast and then to Target.

My mother is in a mobility scooter and my child has hopped a ride. They travel until my mother can be heard saying Stop stop stop because her granddaughter is controlling the vehicle. They stop and my kid neatly hops off. The end.

The video reminds me it was likely the last time I went into Target unmasked. The child looks nothing like this anymore. My mother no longer drives any vehicle, and even the back of her head looks different today. We try to avoid shopping at Target.

I make it a practice to look around when I’m in public and remind myself that every person I see has survived, is surviving this pandemic. We’ve survived even more than the pandemic. You’ve survived things I don’t know about. I’ve survived things you don’t know about.

And we’re here.

There’s more surviving we’ve gotta do ahead. I hope you’re taking good care of you and yours. Thanks for letting me whisper this in your inbox: We’re still here.