Free It Ain't Over by Marlo Thomas

over forty. All were women. All passed.

    At one point in her cardiovascular class, Gaylee studied herself into what she thought was a heart attack. It turned out to be a panic attack, not uncommon for stressed-out med students.
    And then there was the weirdness: At one student party, Gaylee looked up and was surprised to see her 21-year-old son—who was visiting—kissing one of her classmates, who was around 25 and thought he was Gaylee’s brother. “Everyone had a good laugh,” she recalls.
    Gaylee graduated from medical school when she was 47. Whatever difficulties she faced along the way, being older was notamong them. In fact, she believes that her age was a positive. Her children were old enough not only to support her decision, but to step up and take responsibility for managing the household so she could concentrate on her studies.
    Moreover, Gaylee saw that her accumulation of life experiences helped her keep perspective and manage the challenges of med school in ways the younger students could not.
    “Hey, my husband and I lost all of our worldly possessions in a fire while we were undergraduates,” she says. “Once you get through something like that, being assigned to read a couple hundred pages by next Wednesday isn’t something that’s going to freak you out.”
    Most important, from the moment she entered med school, Gaylee was bolstered by the conviction that she was meant to be a doctor. Today, as an internist practicing antiaging medicine, she sees a through-line connecting her experiences.
    “From taking care of my mother to being a mother, everything I’ve done has helped prepare me for this life,” she says. “I was meant to be a healer.”

PART THREE
Escape
    “I started to realize that perhaps ‘settled down’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

A Dream for Her Daughter
    Maria Figueroa, 52
    Fort Myers, Florida
    E very time Maria Figueroa pushed her cart of cleaning supplies into an office, she’d play out a fantasy in her mind. An immigrant from Peru, Maria was working as a bank janitor—the latest in a series of menial jobs she’d held over the years—but in her dreams, she was a professional.
    “As I went about my work, I’d imagine myself sitting behind one of those big desks as a manager. That’s where I wanted to be, not cleaning,” says Maria, who often had to bring her then-ten-year-old daughter, Melissa, with her on her evening rounds. “I would sit Melissa down and say, ‘This is why you need to study hard, so that you can have an office like this one day, not a job like Mommy is doing.’ And she would say, ‘I promise, Mommy, I will.’ ”
    As a child in Peru, Maria had been a dedicated student. Schoolwork, especially math, came naturally to her, and she always brought home good grades. When she was a teenager, her father, a college-educated high school teacher, told her, “I don’t have enough money to send you to privateuniversity, but you’ve got to continue your education. If you earn your degree, that will be yours forever.”
    So in 1980, Maria enrolled at one of Peru’s free public universities, studying accounting.
    “I had a godmother who was an accountant, and I used to beg to visit her at work. She would joke, ‘Okay, you can visit, but I’m going to put you to work for me!’ She had three boys, and I remember that even after she lost her husband, she never had any worries about providing for them on her own. That taught me a lot about what having a profession could mean.”
    But two years after Maria started college, the Peruvian government, facing economic problems and a violent guerrilla insurgency, began shutting down its public universities, including the one Maria attended.
    “At first, they said the schools would be closed for just a few months, but it turned out to be years,” says Maria, who found secretarial work at city hall while she waited to resume her studies. When the university finally reopened in 1985, Maria was