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

“Being poor, living in poverty seemed a lot like probation—the crime being a lack of means to survive.” 

Land explains that all government services and subsidized housing comes with a strict set of rules and behavioral protocol. Residents cannot drink or do drugs and must undergo random drug tests. Residents must also follow strict guidelines for reporting all earned income to dispel suspicions they are using or selling drugs or earning money from other illegal activities. With her use of the term “probation,” Land reveals that poor people are subjected to the very same behavioral guidelines—and prejudices—as ex-convicts. Thus, hardworking government aid recipients such as Stephanie feel they must not only battle against stigmatic perceptions from people in the community, but within the very system administering these services. 

“In choosing to keep the baby, I would be choosing to stay in Port Townsend. I wanted to keep the pregnancy a secret and continue with my plan to move to Missoula, but that didn’t seem possible. I needed to give Jamie a chance to be a father—it felt wrong to deny him that opportunity. But staying would mean delaying my dreams of becoming a writer. Delaying the person I expected myself to be.” 

Using her unexpected pregnancy as an example, Land explains how one event or misstep in life can send someone careening into a cycle of poverty that is very difficult to escape. Here, Land breaks down the ways her choice to keep the child limits her physical mobility (because she must split custody with the father), her job options (because she must balance her work between childcare and drop-off dates with the father), and her ability to plan for the future (because she is constantly juggling work, childcare, and the demands of obtaining and maintaining the government aid she receives). Thus, she is also forced to defer her dreams of becoming a writer and begins to see herself as a struggling mother in poverty rather than a young writer on the rise. Throughout the book, Land continues to examine how poverty—and the short-term demands of economizing money, time, and resources—makes it difficult to plan for (or even imagine) a potential future. 

“I got my own space, a place for Mia to be with me. Still, most nights I wrapped myself in guilt for what we lacked. Some days, the guilt was so heavy that I couldn’t be totally present with Mia. […] I’d tell myself that tomorrow would be better; I’d be a better mother.” 

After Land’s caseworker helps her find a transitional housing apartment, she remains traumatized by the possibility of slipping back into homeless desperation. This trauma makes it difficult for Land to “be totally present” with her daughter, and her guilt over not being a “good mother” adds to this trauma, creating a vicious emotional cycle. Thus, Land illustrates how the trauma of poverty—and the short-term prioritization it necessitates—not only prevents her from planning for the future, but from enjoying and fully inhabiting the moment. 

“Recovering from the trauma was also vital, maybe the most critical, but not only could no one help me with that, I didn’t know yet that I needed it. The months of poverty, instability, and insecurity created a panic response that would take years to undo.”

Here, Land implies a connection between the trauma of poverty and the trauma of recovering from her abusive relationship with Jamie. She subtly suggests how certain kinds of poverty-related trauma—and the stigmas surrounding it—are most prevalently experienced by women. She also suggests that her “panic response” related to the experiences of poverty and instability prevents her from moving forward in her life. She becomes trapped in a traumatized cycle that orbits around her worst fears: losing her home, losing custody of her daughter, and losing her dignity. 

“If I had stopped to add it up, the Pell Grant, SNAP, TBRA, LIHEAP, WIC, Medicaid, and childcare would totally seven different programs I’d applied for. I needed seven different kinds of government assistance to survive.” 

In a short space, Land gestures to many issues experienced by those surviving on government aid. While the money Land receives from these government services is vital to her existence as a busy, poor single mother, she is overwhelmed by the responsibility of documenting and maintaining these services. With the phrase, “If I had stopped to add it up,” Land implies just how busy she is maintaining these services: so busy she doesn’t even have time to think about what they are, let alone how many she uses. Her line, “I needed seven different kinds of government assistance to survive” suggests the complicated mix of shame and anxiety she feels. It also suggests how broken American economic systems are that they force low wage workers to so heavily rely on government aid.

“When I tried to confide in my aunt and brother about the bruises Charlotte has shown me, Dad had already talked to them and told them I’d made it up for attention, that I’d made up everything that’d happened with Jamie for attention, too.” 

Land tells of a stress-driven moment wherein her own father abuses his romantic partner, Charlotte. Afraid to face the consequences of his actions, he makes Land move out of his trailer, and denies the incident ever occurred. Thus, Land illustrates how many women experience similar doubt, gaslighting, and shaming when they attempt to speak about their—or other women’s—abuse. She also suggests there is an unfair social understanding that women exaggerate mistreatment “for attention.” This expectation is often turned against women because it is easier to blame them for their abuse than it is to face the complex issues related to male violence, and the (financial and emotional) stress poverty places upon relationships.

“I became a witness. Even odder was my invisibility and anonymity, though I spent several hours a month in their homes. My job was to wipe away dust and dirt and make lines in carpets, to remain invisible. I almost felt like I had the opportunity to get to know my clients better than any of their relatives did. I’d learn what they ate for breakfast, what shows they watched, if they’d been sick and for how long. I’d see them, even if they weren’t home, by the imprints left in their beds and tissues on the nightstand. I’d know them in a way few people did, or maybe ever would.” 

Over the course of Maid, Land frequently alludes to the loneliness and isolation she feels as a low wage worker. Part of her job is to remain “invisible” in order to keep the uncomfortable realities of her labor—the disgusting acts of cleaning grime, grit, and bodily fluids—unseen by her clients. If her clients were to see Land cleaning, they would be forced to acknowledge her humanity and thus would likely feel uneasy about her intimacy with their bathtubs and toilets. Of course, the preservation of their comfort means Land is forced into even greater emotional discomfort: Not only does she have to deal with physically grueling, unpleasantly dirty tasks, she must feel emotionally dirty, ostracized, and lonely for performing them.

Land’s search for communion with her fellow humans—through her various observations of their rituals and habits, “what they ate for breakfast, what shows they watched, if they’d been sick and for how long”—becomes a powerful survival mechanism. With many clients, this form of silent “witness" is the only things preventing her from feeling a dangerous level of loneliness and despair. 

“My schedule had about five or six houses rotating on it, but those were all bimonthly or even monthly cleans, meaning most of my paychecks had about twenty hours total for two weeks. I couldn’t get another job because my schedule varied from week to week, so I got caught in a bind of waiting for more hours to become available, no matter what the job might be.” 

With this explanation of her constantly rotating and shifting schedule, Land further illustrates the cycle of poverty. Because her schedule changes, she is prevented from pursuing other opportunities, including a second job to help supplement her income or a better-paying job that would require hours of unpaid labor searching, applying, and following up, not to mention the time burden of scheduling an interview. Land’s job provides her with essential income but keeps her trapped in stasis, unable to move beyond poverty and precarity. 

“I’d grown stoic by then, after enduring attacks from Jamie that came without warning finding my lungs seized, my chest tight like a large person had me restrained in their thick arms. The floor had dropped out from under me too many times already, and I still walked carefully on it, knowing one upset could bring me tumbling back to where we began, in a homeless shelter. I had to keep it together.” 

In this passage, Land once again draws a connection between the experience of trauma in her abusive relationship and the trauma of poverty. In both regards, Land feels persistent anxiety over the possibility of “tumbling back” and suddenly losing control, of being effectively triggered into panic mode. She speaks of this trauma while cleaning in a particularly bad situation: a trailer so filthy she contemplates quitting her job altogether. She associates the horror of cleaning this house—and the client’s eventual accusation that she didn’t do a “good enough job”—with the trauma and misplaced blame she experiences in other aspects of her life.

Though the “move out” trailer clean is only a one-time affair, Land experiences other panic attacks when working on particular houses. Whenever she cleans in those spaces, her panic response is triggered and she feels the same trauma over and over again. In this sense, Land’s job becomes a cyclical extension of her poverty trauma and her relationship trauma.

“My job afforded me little money to spend on clothes, even for work. I worked through illnesses and brought my daughter to day care when she should have been at home. My job offered no sick pay, no vacation days, no foreseeable increase in wage, yet through it all, still I begged to work more. Wages lost from missed work hours could rarely be made up, and if I missed too many, I risked being fired. My car’s reliability was vital, since a broken hose, a faulty thermostat, or even a flat tire could throw us off, knock us backward, send us teetering, falling back, toward homelessness. We lived, we survived, in careful imbalance. This was my unwitnessed existence, as I polished another’s to make theirs appear perfect.”

Land further explicates the many layers of uncertainty, frustration, and tenuous reliance she lives with as a low wage worker. Because her survival depends on so many inherently unreliable and unstable elements—from her used car to her severely limited savings—she feels she must live in “careful imbalance,” constantly knowing any small failure could send her back to homelessness. As an often “invisible” house cleaner, Land feels she must hide these concerns and struggles. She feels a constant tension between the “polished” surface she cultivates in the lives of others and the dark realities of her own existence—the sacrifices she must make to help others maintain the “perfect” appearances. Ironically, as Land works to erase the grime, dust, and filth from the surfaces of her clients’ homes, she is further affecting her own erasure, making her labor “invisible.” 

“You’re welcome for what? I wanted to yell back at him. That he’d waited so impatiently, huffing and grumbling to his wife? It couldn’t have been that. It was that I was obviously poor and shopping in the middle of the day, pointedly not at work. He didn’t know I had to take an afternoon off for the WIC appointment, missing $40 in wages, where they had to weigh both Mia and me. We left with a booklet of coupons that supplemented about the same as those lost wages, but not the disgruntled client whom I’d had to reschedule, who might, if I ever needed to reschedule again, go to a different cleaner, because my work was disposable. But what he saw was that those coupons were paid for by government money, the money he’d personally contributed to the taxes he’d paid. To him, he might as well have personally bought the fancy milk I insisted on, but I was obviously poor so I didn’t deserve it.” 

Here, Land describes an uncomfortable encounter in the grocery line (wherein the people behind her witness her struggle to purchase organic milk on food stamps). In this encounter, a man who was being rude and impatient throughout the interaction tells her, “You’re welcome,” suggesting Land should be grateful to him simply for paying taxes. Land implies this man’s prejudice against government aid recipients is primarily based in ignorance—a lack of understanding for the struggles she endures to obtain and maintain food stamps. She suggests his lack of awareness enables him to see her as less than him: a person who has disrupted his day by failing to remain “invisible.” Thus, this encounter becomes a metonym for the privileged, entitled attitudes of the many wealthy clients Land serves: people who prefer she remain “invisible” so they don’t have to witness her struggles. 

“I found myself wondering what it would be like to have enough money to be able to hire someone to clean my house. I’d never been in that position before, and I honestly doubted I ever would be. If I ever had to, I thought, I’d give them a big tip and probably offer them food or leave them good-smelling candles, too. I’d treat them like a guest, not a ghost. An equal.” 

Land alludes to the psychological difference between most of her cleaning clients—for whom she is invisible—and the select few who treat her “like a guest, not a ghost.” She suggests hard labor such as cleaning houses need not be degrading if people simply treat their workers as human beings (and graciously acknowledge all the hard work they do).

By identifying with her clients, Land also slyly ventures into an unintentional moment of foreshadowing: her imagination of a potential future beyond cleaning. This imagined scenario ironically fulfills itself in her recent essay in The Atlantic (where she describes hiring a house cleaner after her back goes out). In this essay, Land takes great pains to behave just as she describes, here: offering money, commiseration, and treatment as “an equal.” 

“[…] I craved grandparents, aunts, and uncles who were like some of my clients—their houses covered in photos, their children’s numbers first on auto-dial, a basket full of toys in a corner they kept on hand for the grandchildren. Instead I had brief moments of familiarity on a highway, memories ingrained in me so deeply they could almost pass as a belonging.” 

Land expresses envy of some of her clients’ lives. She sees the closeness of their families embodied in their objects and wishes she could have the same intimacy and stable support network. Objects are especially important to Land because she often lives in spaces that do not have enough room for her to keep many personal affects. In place of material symbols of family, she seeks out “brief moments of familiarity” that momentarily fill her longing. It’s telling that this passage alludes to being “on a highway”: in transit, on the way from home to work, or from one work site to another. Because Land is so busy, she has no time to deeply contemplate or process her human connections and is instead forced to seek short-term, utilitarian emotional solutions. This short-sightedness—and tired, bleary perspective—is part of what contributes to Land’s accident. She makes poor decisions based on a need to move from one step to the next: an attitude that arises from a lack of support. 

“Every time I saw him, he tried to give me some family heirloom or coloring book with my mother’s name scrawled in the front. Sometimes I’d take a few to appease him and then leave them in my car to donate. I didn’t have room for any of that stuff. […] I couldn’t keep any of those heirlooms or give them the space they deserved to live in. I didn’t have room in my life to cherish them.” 

Here, Land refers to the grandfather who picks up her and Mia after the car accident that almost kills Mia and totals their vehicle. He often urges Land to take objects he does not have the time, space, or money to preserve and she guiltily admits she doesn’t have “the space [these objects] deserved to live in.” Unlike her wealthy clients, Land does not have the ability to own and cherish copious things. Her limited space—and sparse living environment—embody the lack of stable support she receives from family and friends, whereas the abundance of sentimental objects her clients have suggests their level of under-appreciated connection (and privilege). 

“I put my hand on the back hatch, where the window met the edge, on the corner beyond where the wiper could reach. My eyes closed; my head dropped. I swore I felt her pain. This tank of a car had kept my girl safe and now faced being sold for parts and flattened. ‘Thank you,’ I said to her.” 

After the car accident, Land experiences a tender good-bye with the car who served her so well over the years. She feels an intense level of emotional attachment to this car because it has been so necessary for her survival for so long—helping her reach daycare, cleaning sites, and earning the money she needs survive. Whereas Land has no room in her life for family heirlooms or luxury items—such as those owned by her clients—she feels a deep bond with her car, to the degree that she even personifies it as “she.” On some levels, this car has provided a more sincere human connection than her clients who treat her as an invisible ghost. This moment aptly follows the book’s motif of embodying human characteristics, personalities, and habits through their objects.

“Most of my life as a mother had been tiptoeing uneasily on a floor, both real and metaphorical, becoming hesitant to trust the surface at all. Every time I built back a foundation, walls, floor, or even a roof over our heads, I felt sure it would collapse again. My job was to survive the crash, dust myself off, and rebuild.”

This reflective moment follows a call from a lawyer who tells Land she is not at fault for the accident. Land initially struggles to accept the reality that she is not at fault. She was convinced she would be blamed because she has been so traumatized by the experience of poverty and instability, constantly worrying the metaphorical financial and emotional “foundation” she struggled to build could “collapse” at any time. This moment reveals how deeply poor people often internalize fault—the perception they are to blame for their problems because the greater systems they operate within refuse to take responsibility. 

“This studio apartment we lived in, despite all its down-sides, was our home. I didn’t need two-point-five baths and a garage. Anyway, I saw how hard it was to keep them clean. Despite our surroundings, I woke up in the morning encased in love. I was there. In that small room. I was present, witnessing Mia’s dance routines and silly faces, fiercely loving every second. Our space was a home because we loved each other in it.” 

After working in “The Loving House”—the home of an elderly man who adoringly cares for his wife with dementia—Land reflects on the ways she has constructed her own loving home. Just as the couple in The Loving House forges a home not from belongings or material foundations but from mutual fondness, Land strives to build a home around the small moments of connection she experiences with Mia. This realization follows the book’s ongoing investigation of what “home” means as Land and her daughter move from homelessness to transitional housing, and continue to migrate from liminal home to liminal home. 

“Poverty was like a stagnant pond of mud that pulled at our feet and refused to let go.” 

As Land begins to dream more and more frequently about moving to Missoula, Montana, and becoming a writer, she feels stuck in the “stagnant pond” of her dynamic with Jamie. His control over Land’s living situation—and her ability to find a home that meets her needs and desires—is an extension of the way poverty dictates her choices, perspectives, and goals for the future. As Land begins to recognize this control, however, she begins to boldly imagine the possibility of a better future. 

“This wasn’t the life I wanted for us, but it was the one we had for now. It won’t always be this way. I had to keep telling myself that, or the guilt for calling this room a home, telling my daughter that this was al there was, whether it was space or food, would consume me. I wanted so much for her to have a house with a fenced backyard and a cement patio or sidewalk for hopscotch. Mia said she wanted a sandbox and swings like they had at school whenever I played the “imagine our dream house” game with her. Visualizing where we’d end up, where we’d live, what we’d do, seemed to be just as important for her as it was for me.” 

Here, Land continues her explorations of motherhood in poverty. She describes the importance of not only imagining a better future with her daughter, but of bolstering her own self confidence—and her own imaginative capabilities—by hearing her daughter’s dreams. 

“‘What are your living conditions like?’ she asked. I frowned at the question, fighting off an urge to feel incredibly hurt and offended. She could have said, ‘How are things at home?’ Or ‘Is there something that could be making her sick?’ […] or anything but asking what our living conditions were like.” 

In this scene, a doctor treating Mia—for health conditions related to the black mold in their apartment—is harshly judgmental of Land. This doctor implies Land is at fault for her daughter’s failing health, and she needs to “do better” as a mother. This line of reasoning follows earlier moments—such as the stringent drug tests of transitional housing and the EBT milk-buying encounter in the grocery store—where others assume poor people are at fault for their problems. 

“Without food stamps, we would have frequented food banks or free meals at churches. Without childcare assistance, I wouldn’t have been able to work. The people lucky enough to remain outside the system, or on the outskirts of it, didn’t see how difficult those resources were to obtain. They didn’t see how desperately we needed them, despite the hoops they made us jump through.” 

With this passage, Land not only reveals the short-sightedness of people who criticize government aid recipients, but the cause-and-effect layers of the cycle of poverty. For many Americans, it would be impossible to buy groceries or even to work without the services Land uses. As Land implies here, people privileged enough to remain outside these systems (even just barely) often remain unaware of how complicated they can be—both to obtain and maintain. 

“As a poor person, I was not accustomed to looking past the month, week, or sometimes hour. I compartmentalized my life the same way I cleaned every room of every house—left to right, top to bottom. Whether on paper or in my mind, the problems I had to deal with first—the car repair, the court date, the empty cupboards—went to the top, on the left. The next pressing issue went next to it, on the right. […] This shortsightedness kept me from getting overwhelmed, but it also kept me from dreaming. ‘Five years from now’ never made it to the top corner.” 

Land continues her psychological examination of poverty and the long-term trauma it often produces. Because she has so many pressing short-term problems on which to focus, she feels unable to look too far ahead into the future. This cycle of thought makes it very difficult—almost impossible—for her to move forward in her life and transition out of poverty.

Land cleverly uses the metaphor of cleaning houses not only to explain the trauma of poverty—and the future-blind perspective it generates—but to insinuate the connection between her job and her psychology. For Land—whose busy life revolves around work—her job, family, writing, and experience of trauma are all inextricably linked. Thus, she experiences even more difficulty imagining a life beyond her present existence. 

“I wondered about the people who waited in lines next to me for benefits who didn’t have such a past to look back on. Did they share any piece of this confidence? When a person is too deep in systemic poverty, there is no upward trajectory. Life is struggle and nothing else. But for me, many of my decisions came from an assumption that things would, eventually, start to improve.” 

In this passage, Land continues to develop her explorations of the way poverty affects perception and the ability to plan for the future. She acknowledges her privilege as a person who grew up middle-class and thus had a different life experience to reference in her imagination. Land also implies that because she saw her mother pursue a master’s degree and move out of poverty, she had a role model for transitioning beyond government benefits and low wage work. She acknowledges that for many Americans, “life is struggle,” and low wage work, liminal planning, and day-to-day subsistence is all they’ve ever known. Thus, moving beyond poverty feels impossible.