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

Throughout Maid, Land examines the social stigma surrounding poverty and the subsequent psychological effects relating to this stigma. As a recipient of seven different kinds of government aid, she is obligated to maintain and submit detailed records of her finances and to balance appointments with several different social services offices. In transitional housing, she must undergo tedious and patronizing life skills training courses that presume poor people are unintelligent and ignorant, and don’t understand how to perform basic tasks such as laundry and cleaning. She must also frequently submit to random drug screenings (like ex-convicts in halfway homes). Land reflects that these forms of screening and behavioral regulations—and the distrust driving them—make her feel like a criminal. She writes, “Being poor, living in poverty seemed a lot like probation—the crime being a lack of means to survive” (8).

As a low-wage house cleaner, Land directly experiences this stigma in several ways. When cleaning the homes of clients, Land seldom has any face-to-face interaction and feels “invisible.” In addition to feeling socially isolated, Land struggles with the physical pain of her labor. The intense floor and surface scrubbing she performs results in back pain that she is financially unable to treat. The long hours without conversation bolster loneliness. She feels degraded by her work, knowing most of her clients prefer not to imagine a human being is cleaning their dirty kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms. They treat her as a “ghost,” so they won’t have to confront their own uncomfortable accumulations of grit, dirt, and grime.

Land also has several encounters that reveal how ignorant privileged people are of working poor struggles. She cites the particularly poignant example of an impatient man waiting behind her in line at the grocery store while the cashier fails to ring up a gallon of organic milk on her food stamps. The man angrily tells her, “You’re welcome,” insinuating she is both lazy and lucky his taxes “pay” for her food. Just as Land’s clients fail to see her invisible labor, this man is ignorant of the complications with which she deals just to survive on food stamps:

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. […] 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 (154).

As several of Land’s encounters in Maid illustrate, many privileged people also blame poor workers for their lives in poverty. When Land takes her daughter to the doctor for health complications related to the black mold in their apartment, the doctor judgmentally orders her to “do better” as a mother, insinuating her carelessness and negligence caused her daughter’s illness. Judgmental comments such as this make Land feel guilty, inadequate, and hopeless for the future.

Because Land must manage several complex financial tasks in order to survive—from balancing her budget to tracking government appointments to negotiating her constantly shifting work schedule—she finds herself almost incapable of thinking about the future. She explains:

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. […] “Five years from now” never made it to the top corner (241-42).

Examples such as this expose how difficult it is for poor people to move beyond poverty. They must not only overcome physical, practical, and financial obstacles, but cycles of perception preventing them from imagining an alternative future.