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

Stephanie reflects on the events that led to her poverty. She remembers how, ever since she read John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, she dreamed of becoming a writer and moving to Missoula, Montana. She recalls the early days of her relationship with a man named Jamie.

Both Jamie and Stephanie were service industry worker in Port Townsend, Washington and were hoping to move to different places (she to Montana, Jamie to Portland, Oregon). Just one week after they started dating, Jamie suggested Stephanie move into the trailer he rented to save money.

Despite using birth control, Stephanie became pregnant. She decided to keep the baby because it felt wrong to deny Jamie the chance to be a father. Soon after Stephanie revealed the pregnancy, however, Jamie became verbally and emotionally abusive. His rages were seldom physical, which made it easier for him to convince Stephanie she was crazy or exaggerating. Stephanie ripped up her college application, knowing she had to defer her dreams in order to become a mother.

Stephanie explains how her parents moved her from Washington to Alaska when she was seven-years-old, away from their impoverished roots. Though she enjoyed a middle-class childhood, her family was only one generation removed from poverty. She felt, however, “safety was instilled in [her],” musing, “I never questioned that, until I wasn’t” (24).

Stephanie recalls how Jamie had an outburst of violent rage seven months after his daughter’s birth when Stephanie announced her intention to move and stay with her father and his partner Charlotte. Jamie threatened to prevent her from leaving, declaring he would find a way to take their daughter, Mia, away from Stephanie. After he punched a hole in the window, Stephanie called a domestic abuse hotline and the police came to help her leave.

Stephanie reflects that her attentions are often divided between processing her trauma, trying to gain custody of Mia, and arranging to receive government benefits needed to survive. Even a simple trip to the grocery store requires careful math, as Stephanie can’t afford to spend more than her monthly allotment of food stamps. Stephanie guiltily obsesses over the idea that she isn’t a good enough mother and cannot provide Mia with the food, shelter, and care she needs.

For work, Stephanie continues to serve as a landscaper with her friend’s husband, John. Landscaping is hard, low-paying work and often requires time-consuming travel between jobs. Furthermore, the work is seasonal in nature, and Stephanie knows she will need something else to get by in the winter months.

One afternoon, paramedics come to the transitional housing facility. Stephanie learns a severely depressed woman in a nearby apartment drank herself almost to death (despite how residents are not permitted to drink alcohol). For a moment, Stephanie darkly contemplates how tantalizing it would be to make a self-destructive decision like this, to let go and “give up completely” (32). 

Julie helps Stephanie sign up for TBRA, or Tenant-Based Rental Assistance. It is a housing assistance program similar to Section 8 whereby tenants receive a rent voucher to cover housing costs beyond 30-40% of their income. The program has a long waitlist and Stephanie enters her name in several counties.

Because the rental voucher is adjusted based on Stephanie’s income, she must report everything she makes. She is also required to take several tedious classes to receive the assistance. In these classes, Stephanie’s fellow TBRA applicants complain of the discrimination they’ve experienced from landlords who assume they are lazy or dirty simply because they are poor. Stephanie reflects that surviving poverty—much like surviving abuse—is its own kind of trauma: “The months of poverty, instability, and insecurity created a panic response that would take years to undo” (35). Through TBRA, Stephanie eventually finds a nice apartment that even includes baby items from previous tenants.

Stephanie struggles to balance her schedule with childcare needs and realizes she cannot rely on Jamie to help her. When Stephanie learns of a work opportunity and asks Jamie to watch Mia, Jamie refuses, yelling that he is not helping her. Jamie is trying to control Stephanie’s life.

Stephanie explains between the Pell Grant (an educational grant for low-income students), SNAP (food stamps), TBRA (housing assistance), LIHEAP (another form of housing assistance), WIC (a nutrition service grant), Medicaid, and a childcare grant, she uses seven different kinds of government aid. Because she makes so little from landscaping and her income is so irregular, she depends on these services to survive. Procuring them and keeping them, however, is very challenging since they all require complicated paperwork, repeated filing and reporting of income changes, and regular lengthy visits to multiple offices.

Poverty is isolating, and Stephanie struggles with loneliness (to the degree that she even invites Jamie to spend the night). Overwhelmed by loneliness on her birthday, Stephanie calls her father. She recalls how her father had a mild nervous breakdown while she was staying there and physically took out his frustration on his girlfriend, Charlotte. Stephanie witnessed these outbursts and was asked to leave. When Stephanie tried to confide in fellow family members, she learned her father told them she’d invented his outbursts for attention and that she’d also fabricated Jamie’s abuse.

To soothe her loneliness, Stephanie makes an online dating profile. Through online dating, she meets a man named Travis who lives in a rural farming community. Travis’s descriptions of the farm initially sound romantic, and remind Stephanie of John Steinbeck’s writing. She quickly becomes attached to the idea of sharing a life with Travis in this environment.

Soon after Stephanie moves onto the farm with Travis, their relationship becomes strained. She struggles to find a job and is only able to contribute her funds from government assistance and Jamie’s child support. Thus, Stephanie’s worth in the relationship is defined by how much she helps on the farm. Though she does a great deal to help Travis (who gets paid for his labor), he insists Stephanie doesn’t deserve any payment because she doesn’t pay any bills.

Stephanie finds a job with a cleaning business and feels excited by the opportunity to gain her own money (and, thus, some measure of independence). Travis balks at the idea of receiving less help on the farm, but Stephanie begs for the chance to work, promising to continue working with Travis on the weekends.

The cleaning company for which Stephanie initially works is run by a woman named Jenny; Stephanie describes her as someone who’d “been popular in high school and expected people to still appease her” (58). The company is not very well organized, and Stephanie quickly observes that many of the employees are not hard workers. With Jenny’s operation, getting clients and hours depends less on work ethic than friendliness among workers. Stephanie quickly finds herself ostracized from the company’s social culture.

Stephanie notes that even though she feels invisible as a cleaner, she becomes a silent witness to her clients’ lives. She reflects:

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 the tissues on the nightstand (63). 

Stephanie doesn’t receive enough work through Jenny’s company, so she applies to work for a larger company called Classic Clean. Though the job pays less, Stephanie is attracted to the company’s methodical systems, open communication, and commitment to quality. She also finds that the HR representative Lonnie and company owner Pam are much more caring and invested in their employees than Jenny. Stephanie’s initial trainings are within Lonnie and Pam’s own homes. Both Pam and Lonnie provide gentle, precise, attentive instruction.

Stephanie learns a new system working for Classic Clean. She must enter houses through the back or side door, set up a “work station,” and formally check in using a time sheet. When she first starts out, she finds she must work very hard to finish within the allotted timeframe (knowing she will get in trouble for going over-time). Stephanie finds odd moments of joy and communication on the job. For example, she enjoys when Lonnie “introduces” her to each new house, telling her about rooms to watch out for, places she’ll really need to scrub, and what the clients are like.

Stephanie comes to identify different houses with the fragments of knowledge she gains about her clients. She regularly cleans the home of a widowed man who displays photos, lists, and mementos from his dead wife, and refers to it as “The Sad House.” She also nicknames other houses, including the “Cigarette Lady’s House,” the “Farm House,” and the “Porn House.”

The “Porn House” earns its name from the pornographic magazines, lube, and other sex items the male resident leaves around his bedroom. Stephanie observes the man’s wife appears to sleep in a separate bedroom filled with her own kind of “porn” (romance novels). Based on these details, Stephanie surmises that their marriage isn’t very happy. Stephanie also resents the careless, entitled way they leave messes she must scrub and scour.

Reflecting on the emotional distance of the “Porn House” couple leads Stephanie to face her own uncomfortable distance with Travis. She notes that they have little in common: While he prefers to spend evenings numbly watching TV, she spends her free time reading and writing in her online journal. 

The daily “good-bye” when Stephanie drops Mia at daycare is always very emotional. Mia kicks and screams, which may indicate separation anxiety. Stephanie deals with her own persistent anxiety surrounding the necessity of daycare, worrying, “what if I died in a car accident and her last memory was me walking away, leaving her screaming and crying with strangers?” (84)

Stephanie tries to develop a stable and predictable day-to-day existence for Mia, including the same nightly bath and bedtime rituals. Though it’s a major struggle to maintain a strict schedule and set of habits amidst the many varied demands of her work life, Stephanie emphasizes the importance of having at least one parent in a child’s life “who doesn’t waver in being there when they say they will” (81).

Stephanie struggles to obtain enough hours, as many of her cleans are scheduled every other week, or even every month. Thus, she jumps at the opportunity to take on a “move-out” clean for a man’s remote trailer in the countryside. Unfortunately, the job proves absurdly difficult. Every room is filthy with black mold and dirt. Stephanie is so overwhelmed by the physical labor and the bad smells that she must take regular breaks throughout the day—something she typically cannot do. She feels degraded that she is only being paid minimum wage to endure such a challenging job.

A few days after Stephanie completes the job, Lonnie calls her back. Lonnie claims that because the client was unsatisfied with Stephanie’s work, she will have to drive back and reclean it without getting paid for her gas or time. Deeply frustrated, Stephanie explains she cannot afford to do this. Lonnie empathizes with Stephanie’s desperation and takes care of the situation on her own.

Stephanie begins working in the home of a man named Henry. At first, she is intimidated by him because he wasn’t satisfied by the last cleaner who worked in his house. As she becomes familiar with his home environment and cleaning needs, however, Henry becomes friendly with Stephanie. He asks her to help him prepare for a dinner party over the weekend, and cooks two lobsters for her to take home as a special treat.

Stephanie hopes that when she presents the lobsters to Travis, they will take pleasure in them and find a moment of happiness in their relationship. She confides in Henry about her arguments with Travis over money, differences in their interests, and disparities in their life priorities. The happily married Henry advises her, “When it stops bein’ fun, it stops bein’” (102). Henry’s kindness and respect means a great deal to Stephanie, who reflects that he is one of the few people in her life who treats her with dignity.

Travis is distant with Stephanie both during and after their lobster dinner. Stephanie is disappointed and senses their relationship is coming to an end. Soon after, he asks her to leave, giving her only one month to find a new living situation.