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

Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America. Includes a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich.

"My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter."

While the gap between upper middle-class Americans and the working poor widens, grueling low-wage domestic and service work—primarily done by women—fuels the economic success of the wealthy. Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, pulling long hours while struggling as a single mom to keep a roof over her daughter's head. In Maid, she reveals the dark truth of what it takes to survive and thrive in today's inequitable society.

While she worked hard to scratch her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labor jobs, higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of overworked and underpaid Americans.

Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. "I'd become a nameless ghost," Stephanie writes. With this book, she gives voice to the "servant" worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children.

Well…talk about your privilege being shoved in your face. I  don’t mean this in a bad way. After this audiobook was over, I just sat there..stunned. It is not often that a book will do that to me, especially after some of the stuff I was forced to read in college but damn this book was like a punch in the gut.

I thought I knew what it felt like to be broke. After I had a psychotic break in 2007, I lost everything. MY story however from that point on reeks of privilege. My parents swooped in to move me back in with them. A social worker signed me up for every program that the US government has for people with severe mental illnesses. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and for a while, I was unable to do anything. BUT I did not slip through no cracks I was able to get an excellent dr that my parents found, and I even got a section 8 the holy grail of housing. Fast forward to last year when my immune system messed up and I STILL was very privileged even that did not feel like it.

I used to like to joke about my weak and destitute status, and in my head I was. I mean I got friends from college that is driving around in Jaguars and there my ass was in a section 8 apartment. There is one incidence where Stephanie was talking about going to the food and public program and being told over and over that she did not have the correct papers to come back the next day. I remembered a couple of years ago after I started doing a decent living writing I had to fill out the forms for Medicaid to renew it and so did and the declined me saying I did not qualify and shut my whole damn case down. That insurance is the only way 99 percent of us with bipolar and other severe mental illnesses can afford our meds, so this was a dire situation to be in. After filling out that fucking for three times and getting denied my case manager said that we were going to go in person to get it fixed. Seeing so many people getting turned away made me nervous, but it was finally my turn and guess what I had been sent the FOOD STAMP application, and I already knew I made far too much to get that benefit, but I knew that I was still eligible for the insurance. They started to tell me to come back when my case manager took control, and the lady that was attending us asked who is this? I told her my case manager from the behavioral health services and lo and beheld they got that form fixed in 10 mins. I had NO IDEA that was a form of extreme privilege I was just pissed cause I had to wait in a windowless room with no AC for 4 hours in July. It never dawned on me that cause I worked from home that I HAD the luxury of waiting that long. There are people such as Stephanie Land who did not have the same privilege and so was swept up in the bureaucracy of it all.

Stephanie Land talks about how there are people who land right into the government’s hands and get everything that they are eligible for AND there are people such as the author who fall on the fringes and struggle every damn day to stay alive.

I was also shocked that none of her family let her stay and she ended up in a homeless shelter. As I said before my parents moved me back in and I have never experienced being homeless in my life.

As I was reading, I kept remembering how much different being broke was for me. It seemed as if the only thing that the author of this book and I had in common was the lack of cold hard cash. Everything else she spoke of seemed worlds away.

Even though this book left me gutted in that my eyes were opened to how a lot of people in this country live I am glad that I decided to read this book.  It forced me to take a hard look at myself and the way I interact with people and even the way I sometimes get all judgy. I listen to this a month ago and ever since I have been trying to unpack my privilege and to understand how cruel real poverty is.