It’s been five years, and my mother still spends two to five nights a week at rest stops and Walmart parking lots all the way up the 205 to Portland. She has a van now, more space to spread out. She knows the sounds of the trucks, the habits of the truck drivers and road-tripping families passing through, which roadside bathrooms are best for brushing her teeth, and which ones will be most conducive to her sleep. She knows the ticks of these places like the beats are a part of her.

This isn’t the first time she’s lived in a car. At some point in our past I was right there beside her, my brother right beside me. We have curled up in those small spaces together before, stretching our limbs as far as we could into the steel perimeters and pulling them as far as we could back into ourselves. We’ve lived in motels; we’ve lived on friends’ couches. My mother, my siblings, and I have spent countless stretches of our lives trying not to take up too much space, trying not to be a burden on our hosts, or on each other. She fought hard for our space and our right to a sense of home; she found apartments eventually; she kept us fed. The biggest labor of her life has been to provide us with the strength and drive to land somewhere where our limbs could unfurl.

So I’ve spent my whole life chasing upward mobility, and in many ways I’ve started ascending the stairs. They’re made of sand, shifting under my feet, but up I go. I graduated from my fancy school and found a fancy job. As a professional writer, my life now is stuffed with privileges I’ve longed for since I found out they existed. I have my own health insurance and the beginnings of a 401(k). My voice is amplified; I have a platform. I haven’t slept in a car in 20 years. I haven’t lived in a motel in 10. With every new success or holiday, my family revels in where I am now, and where I’m working to go. It’s easy to feel at home in that — complacent in it. My dreams are closer to my grasp than ever before, just as she’d always worked for them to be.

And yet: The money I make barely covers a life in New York and my student loans. I don’t have the means to help her the way I’d like to, or in a way that she’d let me. The rougher truths of her life are still a problem we are both searching for a way to solve.