Title: Maid Pdf Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
Author: Stephanie Land
Published Date: 2019-01-22
Page: 288
An Amazon Best Book of January 2019: Stephanie Land lifts the rug on the life of the working poor in her eye-opening book, Maid. She is writing about the people who clean our homes, who tend to our yards—yet so often these workers go unseen and their stories untold. As a single mother, Stephanie Land cares for herself and her young daughter through a complicated system of government assistance programs and through employment as a house cleaner. Her experience with government aid programs magnifies their worst inconsistency: how difficult is it for people to become self-sufficient when they are reliant on child care and food assistance credit in order to work and live, yet even the smallest increase in income can mean a significant loss of benefits. Land doesn’t have family or friends who could help her financially. They just don’t have it to give. She is truly on her own, yet using a food assistance card at the grocery store checkout has earned her scorn and judgement from strangers who think anyone using the system is abusing the system. Land is a fighter—her desire to create a better life for her daughter is what drives her to keep trying to dig her way out of poverty, working long hours for low pay, and grasping what kindnesses she receives like a life line. Maid is compelling because it’s so personal. Land isn’t whining or blaming, she’s letting us into her life, sharing feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and desperation that come with trying so damn hard to do better and still living below the poverty line in spite of her efforts. Land has a hard life but she also has hope and resilience. She finds joy in small moments that are often overlooked in the distraction of material things. Maid is an important work of journalism that offers an insightful and unique perspective on a segment of the working poor from someone who has lived it. --Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review
It's not a book about maids - it's a look at the the life of the working poor who happen to be maids Giving this any sort of bad review almost seems like it would be an act of spite, given the circumstances Stephanie Land is writing from - but still, for the first third of the book I really wasn't liking it, and I couldn't put my finger on why.But at about the halfway point, I realized I had been bait-and-switched - this is not a story of a "maid." It's the story of a working, poor, single mother, dealing with a variety of problems both self-inflicted and beyond her control who *happens* to be a maid. But that's a harder elevator pitch so I understood why "maid" became the focus. But I don't think that's really the book.When I changed my focus to the book I realized it actually was I appreciated it a lot more. At that point, I could look at this as a window to this life. Yes, Stephanie Land is often self-pitying and finds confrontation and judgement around every corner - but of course she would. Her relations with her daughter's father is not good, and she's unable to find a really solid boyfriend, because of course she can't. She wishes for a better life and probably misprioritizes things in the moment instead of thinking long-term, because of course she would.That's the hustle and grind of this life - everything is working against her. I don't believe that in every checkout line she went through she got a hard time from people standing behind her, or the checkout person - but I do believe that it felt that way to her. I don't necessarily think she was exploited by her employers quite as badly as she describes - but I'm sure she felt she was. When you're in this situation, everything is exaggerated and every bit of bad luck is magnified. That's an interesting book - harsh and hard - but interesting. Reading it in that lens made it successful in a different way then the title that had originally misdirected me.I had to go on unemployment once (well, I didn't have too - I was laid off, and it was my right), and it's like going into another mirror universe - society's respect you took for granted is suddenly upended. You're no longer seen as a responsible member of society who can be trusted to be self-reliant. You're a liar, a rube, a sap who can't write a resume. Everything becomes lowest common denominator - the assumption is you're a grifter who's trying to get one over, or an idiot who has to be talked too like a child. I could see very easily how someone in that situation long-term could quickly stop caring about honesty or integrity because the people on the other side assume the worst. I hated it, hated myself, and it was only six weeks.So *of course* Stephanie Land is defensive and self-pitying at times, because society is expecting her to be. That's the role the working poor play - we feel bad for them, toss them some baseball tickets now and then, and make sure they know we're better than they are.When I read her book THAT way, it all came into focus. This is not a book about a maid - it's the book about a life when the only job you can find is being a maid. In that way, it is valuable - because somebody needs to tell that story, and the only way to tell it is if you live it. Even Barbara Ehrenreich's famous "Nickel and Dimed" was sort of a grift - she just pretended for awhile. Great writing, but an act. Stephanie Land isn't acting, so the occasional self-pity and various poor decisions are all part of that real life. It's not that poor people have especially bad luck, it's that they can't easily recover from even sort of bad luck.So - don't look at the title and think it's a book about maids. Think of it as a look into the world of the working poor that most of us look past and hope we never encounter in our own lives. Nobody wants to hold up a line to deal with food stamps, and all the clowns who say "you're welcome" and act like food stamps are being lifted out of their own pockets, should hope and pray the situation never reverses.To digress on the subjects of maids. I was in a big hotel in Mobile, Alabama once and I was getting ice from the bucket or whatever I was doing, and I walked by the maid's station and the group was in a conference. It was probably a dozen African-American women doing their meeting before the day's shift - most of them were young in typical maid uniforms, but there were two older women in business casual leading the meeting. I realized (or at least assumed) that these two women had probably been on staff for years, working up through those ranks. This was their kingdom; I had to think, back in their neighborhoods, they controlled everything - who could get a job at this nice hotel, where it probably was a good place to work, taking calls from mothers trying to get their daughters that opportunity, no doubt laying down the false compliments amid the desperation. How would they choose? I thought of all the compromises they had to make to get to that level of responsibility - all the customers they had to put up with, the managers who probably disrespected them, the owners who looked past them, all to get to this morning meeting. I want to read that book.So I left a very good tip in the room when I left, for some woman I never saw. I think I did. I've told myself I did. I'm a nice guy so I'm sure I did. All white, middle-class Americans are very nice. We're happy to give you $10 tips and free baseball tickets. Just don't hold us up in the checkout line with your food stamps and your crying kid.Along with Evicted, should be required reading This incredibly bleak book is also incredibly beautiful. Land is a skilled author, able to create and sustain a mood throughout this work. At times, I had to take breaks and do something else, because it was simply so hard to be in her world for prolonged periods of time. And while I like to think I'm a pretty progressive person, this book did make me face some of my own unconscious biases. Some spoilers to follow.In the U.S., we worship individualism and the idea of bootstraps prosperity to what I already thought was a healthy degree. Our social safety net is a patchwork that doesn't sustain the people who need it most, and because we have such a deeply ingrained cultural belief that anything is possible and anyone can achieve the American Dream if they just work hard enough, we also have a persistent cultural belief that if someone is poor, it's probably because they're lazy and, therefore, deserve to be poor.The thing is, as Land's book proves, poor people work incredibly hard, harder than many so-called hard working Americans. Not only do they work hard at the menial jobs that middle and upper class people sneer at, ignore, or pretend don't exist, they work hard at proving their poverty to the myriad organizations and government agencies that are supposed to help lift them out of poverty. From a purely practical standpoint, anyone who believes that welfare should come with work requirements ought to ask themselves how welfare recipients are supposed to work while also juggling hours-long waits at the offices they need to go to for housing supplement, child care supplements, food assistance, etc. Land writes some truly vivid scenes in which she describes waiting in these lines, all the while stressing out about missing a day's wages to do so, and fearing she won't be done in time to go pick her daughter up from childcare, adding further expenses to her alread-stretched-to-the-breaking-point finances.The book also vividly describes what it's like to scrape together a living by doing low-paid manual labor. Her descriptions of what she has to do at clients' houses is enough to make even a person with a strong stomach feel vaguely queasy. And yet while carrying out this intimate work, work that exposes her to some people's darkest, most well-guarded secrets, she is all but invisible, a phantom who comes through and restores order to the chaos of her clients' dirty houses.Equally compelling are Land's accounts of how she struggles to find decent child care she can afford. I don't think this issue gets enough coverage. There is a stigma to single motherhood in this country (and, let's face it, pretty much every other country in the world) that when coupled with the disregard for the work involved in all types of mothering places single mothers in a lose-lose situation. They're scorned and scolded and berated by the right side of the spectrum, which portrays them as lazy welfare queens, living off tax dollars rather than earning a living, while the left side doesn't do nearly enough to help them secure affordable, high-quality childcare. As someone who's had to use childcare in the past, I can personally say that it is prohibitively expensive unless you're wealthy. Often, the vast majority of my wages went toward covering child care costs. So if a woman can't find safe, decent child care she can afford, what are her options? How is she supposed to work without a safe place to leave her child?Land's single motherhood offers yet another angle to her story, as it's the result of her having to leave an abusive relationship. Again, this is an issue that tends to be brushed under the rug or dismissed with simplistic answers. Women are chided that they ought to leave their abusers, yet there's no real means for them to do so in a way that will ensure their children's financial and physical safety, let alone the woman's own. When a woman's only option might be homelessness, is it that big a surprise many choose to stay with their abusers and try to bear the abuse? These days, there's also a lot more information coming out about how abusive situations contribute to housing insecurity, and if America is serious about decreasing relationship violence and improving women's conditions, it has to consider this aspect of the problem.Reading about Land working endless hours, drinking coffee to stave off her own hunger so that she could feed her daughter, and dealing with her daughter's recurring illness--a direct effect of Land's inability to secure decent housing on her poverty wages--was agonizing. It should be unimaginable that any parent would have to go without feeding themselves so they can feed their children, or that a parent should have to live in a place that makes their child literally ill, and yet this is the reality for millions of Americans. What does it say about our country? When Land recounts the cold, cruel way her daughter's doctors reacted, I wanted to reach through the pages and throttle them. On the one hand, I can only imagine the kind of systemic abuse doctors witness on a day to day basis, but on the other it's so disheartening to see indifference in people whose priority ought to be the health and welfare of their patients. Attributing Land's daughter's illness to Land's bad parenting might have made for a neat, convenient diagnoses by the doctors, but it's akin to them using their medical knowledge to treat the symptom rather than the disease.And, really, that's all the U.S. is doing in general: treating the symptoms of poverty rather than the disease. What makes it even worse is that while so many people are dealing with grinding poverty, they are doing so in an environment that offers them no dignity. I was aghast reading about the man who said, "You're welcome" to Land when she paid for her groceries with food stamps. How can anyone be so indifferent to the plight of others?Then again, I also know the answer to that. It's easier for Americans to point the finger at the poor and accuse them of being the cause of their own poverty than it is for us to accept that the vast majority of us are one step away from poverty ourselves. All it would take is a serious illness, the loss of a job, a divorce, or some other unforeseen problem to knock many of us straight out of financial security and straight into poverty. So rather than addressing the terrifying reality, we're content to instead blame the poor and convince ourselves that we'd never end up in a situation like Land's.I know some will read this book and accuse her of making bad choices, using this to dismiss the many problems this book ought to illuminate. I understand that impulse, especially because if most of us stopped to think about our own bad choices, we might have to face how close we've come to disaster. While reading this book, I experienced a big moment of epiphany when Land talked about her struggle to convince herself to choose a secure, practical field rather than chase her dreams. What is privilege if not the ability to choose your own path in life without sneeringly being told you should have done something more practical? Is dreaming big the sole province of the rich? And if so, how do we reconcile that with the idea of America being the land of opportunity? The poor shouldn't be forced to settle, be forced to struggle to survive, simply because they are poor.One thing I struggle with when it comes to this book is the ending. I am absolutely, 100% glad Land was able to get herself out of poverty eventually, that things worked out for her in the end. That she had to go through what she did in the first place shouldn't have happened, and her daughter deserved the same early childhood opportunities as any child born into a millionaire family. But what about the people who don't make it out of poverty, the people who struggle and scrape by until they die, only to pass this legacy on to the next generation? While I by no means think Land is mythologizing the whole American Dream, this book kind of is the American Dream personified. This is certainly not Land's fault, but I think it is food for thought.There are many better books discussing what it is like to live in poverty, and how people get there This just rubbed me the wrong way. I do think that it is of the greatest importance for people to learn more about what it is like to live in poverty and how one gets there. Happily, there are many excellent books that are relevant here: $2 a Day, Evicted, Both Hands Tied, and Ehrenreich’s book come quickly to mind. There are also a very, very good five-part podcast on poverty (co-produced by On the Media and some one else, probably in 2016), and a couple of sympathetic and illuminating books about payday lenders.I have read all of those books (and quite a few others), and would recommend any of them rather than Maid. Maid is not a terrible book. But neither is it a good one. I was often frustrated by what certainly seemed like obtuseness or lack of insight on the part of this author.
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