NIGHTSTANDS & COFFEE TABLES

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“It seemed like no matter how much I tried to prove otherwise, “poor” was always associated with dirty.”

Stephanie Land’s memoir is an intimate look inside the life of a hard-working single mother on government assistance. She finds herself in the system as she is just entering adulthood, having lived in relative comfort for most of her childhood. An unplanned pregnancy, a fight to keep custody of her daughter and a newly disengaged family results in Stephanie and her daughter Mia living in a homeless shelter. Their story is not one of triumph out of the system as much as it is about the trappings and hopelessness of poverty. She is in the cycle having once been on the outside. She admits her prior life of financial comfort gave her the will to fight; she knew a different life than the one she was living.

This both heart-wrenching and heartfelt book is a testament to the hardships of single mothers, a love story to her daughter, and a detailed account of how poverty can make success unattainable. She is a member of the working poor, devoting almost twelve hours a day to scrubbing people’s toilets, vacuuming their carpets, and often remaining a stranger to each home’s occupants. She remains invisible, while her clients’ private lives are exposed to her each week when she cleans their houses. She struggles on minimum wage, spending almost 50% of her pay on gas to get to each home. She mathematically tallies each expense daily, with a McDonald’s happy meal for Mia being a luxury rarely attainable.

She battles each day with the added guilt of not giving Mia a childhood like her own, of living conditions that keep her daughter ill, and shared custody with a man who degrades her efforts and challenges her choices. She is honest about hating her interactions with Mia’s father, but also being thankful for the breaks his custody visits provided. When she uses her food stamps in the grocery store, Mia on her hip, people yell, “You’re welcome,” as if she is sitting home all day accepting charity by choice. She has no time for friendships or rest, as she is ashamed of her condition and mentally and physically exhausted by her work. Her dreams of a better life, of a writing degree from the University of Montana, the school that had accepted her shortly before her pregnancy, this vision keeps her going. She wants to be a writer, and this time in this dark place provides the content for her first memoir.

In the introduction, readers are asked to “abandon any stereotypes of domestic workers, single parents, media-derived images of poverty you may be harboring.” Land forces us to walk in her shoes, the heavy, torn, yet worn anyway shoes of people whose lives are not so different from ours, in that many of us are just one crisis away from financial ruin. This book opens our eyes to how so many live among us, how some of us may be living right now.