Doing graduate school in middle age is strange behavior. No one is waiting for the graying to burst into our respective fields screaming, “I have arrived.” I am in the process of pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Mississippi University for Women. It is a strange choice to wallop homework into my life, and I stand by it, even though more appropriate behavior for my demographic (working mother, aging parents) entails flossing away what little time remains at the big box store.

But graduate school has not changed this fact. I continue to spend time in the big box store. I do a number of big box stores on a regular basis: the discount store, the book store, the sporting goods store that under the leadership of a woman CEO has made it harder for school shooters to buy their guns and ammo there. My daughter, who is ten, begs to go to any varietal of big box store with me because then she can beg that I buy her everything inside the store. Earlier tonight we went to the supermarket in the big box store complex and I caved. I let her get the Gingerbread House Cinnamon Toast Crunch on clearance. I am a sucker for a deal at the big box store. My daughter knows this. It is why she has a discontinued Harry Potter pen projection light from Marshalls, where I went last weekend to pick up a cheap blanket for the dogs.

The big box store in late-stage capitalism America bears similarity to middle age. Time accelerates and slows in perplexing ways, and I buy things that wouldn’t sell a few seasons ago at a lower price even though I struggle to close my chest of drawers. I am old enough to remember a time when it seemed flashy for big box stores to have soaring facades above their entrance not backed by actual levels/floors of the building structure itself. At 43 I am old enough, and moneyed enough, to have tried Botox on my forehead once. It was fine but it dissipated after a few months, and I doubt I’ll do anything like that again. Earlier tonight, in the parking lot by the shopping cart carrels, my daughter asked me why I said aging is a feminist issue. My voice shifted to its ‘spirited steed’ gear and I told her we could talk about that on the drive home. She then commanded I explain the concept in 10 words or less. I said, no.

Aging is a feminist issue because women and girls are subject to pressures on their appearance that are unrealistic, make us feel bad, and consume our time, I said. Aging is part of this, and especially for women, I said. My daughter told me that’s too many words. Fine, I said. I’ll explain it in two words: total crap. She squirreled in the backseat and we kept bickering about aging, feminism, and how many words I am allotted to express my ideas to her about politics. God I love her.

I find that to age out loud is a political statement. It is a statement I am making. I am not afraid of my age. I am proud and lucky to be here.

But it is a special type of lunacy to be in graduate school when time is as comparatively limited as mine. The reality of doing graduate school part-time in middle age while working full-time and doing sandwich generation as a fucking prickled verb looks like:

+ Me completing homework in the car in the parking lot outside of gymnastics practice

+ Me responding to emails from the school at the speed of crawling, from a baby who hasn’t learned to sit up yet

+ Me dashing off portfolio of work for the semester in the lobby of a hospital skilled enough to keep old parents old, rather than dead

I would like to revise my statement that it’s not lunacy, but rather optimism or maybe self-love that keeps me in graduate school. To believe that I can improve for the sake of improving, and to commit to doing it, is a gift. I love becoming a better writer. I’ve got a big box store of a brain full of stories and poems and essays I want to improve. I know time is precious, that it runs out. To acknowledge that and keep going in earnest as myself, this spirit attached to a woman with caregiving and professional responsibilities, is the sacrilege that interests me.