Maid summary

When she learned she was pregnant, Stephanie considered either getting an abortion or keeping her pregnancy a secret from Jamie. That way, she would be able to still pursue her dream of attending the University of Montana and becoming a writer. But she was drawn to the idea of motherhood and felt obligated to give Jamie a chance to be a father, so she literally tore up her college application and decided to stay in Washington.

Jamie wanted her to get an abortion and was furious when she refused. He was enraged at the prospect of having to pay child support, and his behavior became abusive toward her – full of insults, outbursts and threats. Later in life, Stephanie wished that she had been strong enough to leave him at that point, but she stayed with Jamie through her pregnancy and after the birth of her daughter, Mia. Though he continued to abuse her, there was a practical benefit to staying with him. His job allowed her to stay at home with her baby.

When Stephanie moved into the homeless shelter, it was the first in a series of government-provided or subsidized housing situations in which she would take refuge over the course of her story. The next one was an apartment in a transitional housing building. Both the shelter and the apartment were provided by the local housing authority, and they shared some features in common. First, they were rather dreary places. The shelter was a small, secluded cabin with dirty floors, dingy walls and minimal furniture. The apartment building had paper thin walls and was filled with people yelling at each other. Second, they were only temporary. They both had strict time limits – 90 days for the shelter, 24 months for the apartment.

Third, they required her to jump through hoops to stay in them. While she was living in the shelter, she had to spend much of her time visiting the government buildings of various public assistance programs, meeting with an array of caseworkers and joining long lines of other people living in poverty. All of them carried folders full of paperwork that proved they were poor, which they had to present whenever they sought aid.

While Stephanie felt grateful for the housing assistance she received from the government, she also felt degraded and stigmatized by the rules and surveillance that accompanied it. To her, they suggested a rather demeaning view of people struggling with poverty.

Rather than compassion, trust and respect, low-income people are treated with condescension, suspicion and contempt. They’re assumed to be so dirty, drug-addicted or incompetent that they need curfews, housing inspections and urine tests to keep them in line. Stephanie perceives this as just one manifestation of the general stigmatization of poor people in American society – especially those who receive forms of government assistance, which are collectively referred to as welfare.

As she tried to move forward with her life, Stephanie was well aware of the critical role that welfare played in her journey. Far from making her “lazy” or allowing her to be a “freeloader,” it was the very thing that enabled her to return to having a job after she had her baby.

For instance, as a single mother without familial support, she couldn’t leave her daughter at home with a partner or a family member to go to work. She needed to find childcare. But without governmental assistance, she wouldn’t have been able to afford daycare for Mia. This support allowed her to find work as a maid with a cleaning company.

While it provided her with a much-needed income, Stephanie’s job as a maid came with many difficulties. First, she had to drive her own car to each of the houses the cleaning company assigned to her. Because the company’s clients were so spread out, it could take her up to an hour to drive to a single house. This travel time was unpaid, and the company didn’t even compensate her for the cost of fuel, which took up to a third of her paycheck.

Once she arrived in a house, her task was to clean nearly everything as quickly and meticulously as possible – no matter how disgusting it was. She removed the grime from the showers, the urine stains from the toilets, the mold from the bathroom ceilings, the grease from the stovetops, the dog hair from the carpets and the dust from all of the hard surfaces. She went through each house changing bedsheets, fluffing the pillows, replacing the toilet paper, taking out the garbage and doing the laundry – all while navigating unwelcome surprises, such as semen-soaked socks on a porn-loving client’s bedroom floor or blood-speckled sheets on a sick client’s bed.   

In addition to being poorly compensated, Stephanie’s work as a maid was physically demanding. It required a relentless series of repetitive motions, strenuous exertions and punishing positions, such as scrubbing, lifting and kneeling. It also involved the heavy use of cleaning chemicals in moldy, often poorly ventilated conditions.

This took a heavy toll on Stephanie’s body. She had persistent sinus infections, nasty coughs, chronic back pain and aching muscles, on top of constant exhaustion. But even though her low wages left her in poverty, Stephanie’s income was too high for her to qualify for Medicaid, the government-run healthcare insurance program for low-income Americans. As a result, she was unable to afford to see a doctor. To deal with her pain, she had only one recourse – frequently downing 800-milligram doses of ibuprofen.

Every cloud has its silver lining, as the old saying goes. While it was tough being a single mother and a maid, Stephanie managed to find the bright side of her predicament. She felt lonely without a partner – but she also felt free to concentrate on enjoying her time with her daughter. If she wanted to play with her or take her out for ice cream, she didn’t have to worry about another adult feeling bored or left out.

Their relationship was thus able to blossom, and she felt a growing sense of companionship with her daughter, which mitigated her feelings of loneliness. She realized that she was not alone – she had Mia.   

Stephanie continued living in northwest Washington for about five years after giving birth to Mia. What happened to her dreams of moving to Missoula, Montana, and becoming a writer?

They were indefinitely deferred – but she hadn’t forgotten them. She just needed to wait until Mia got older, she reassured herself. Then she would pursue them. But the years rolled by, and she stayed in Washington. What was holding her back?