I clean four houses every morning and study law every night, at 45

My husband left when my youngest was four, and cleaning other people’s houses became the only work I could find on short notice with three children to feed. I’ve done it for eighteen years now, four houses every morning, starting before the city is properly awake.

A lawyer whose house I’ve cleaned for a decade noticed I always read the newspaper cover to cover during my tea break, and asked, almost as a joke, whether I’d ever thought about studying law myself. I laughed at first. Then I didn’t stop thinking about it.

I enrolled in a three-year law programme at a local college two years ago, attending evening classes after my last house of the day. I’m the oldest person in every one of my classes, and usually the most prepared, because I’ve spent eighteen years listening carefully to how the people I work for talk about contracts, disputes, and rights they don’t always realise they have. I want to represent women exactly like me, someday, in front of the same kind of desks I’ve only ever cleaned.