After years of living in the absence of friendliness, after the toxicity with my family, losing my friends, the unstable housing and black mold, my invisibility as a maid, I was starved for kindness. I was hungry for people to notice me, to start conversations with me, to accept me.
I really wanted to be able to say that I liked Maid – I think it will be hard to explain why I didn't like the author's story without it sounding like I blame poor people for their situations – but ultimately, Stephanie Lane doesn't come off as very likeable, there's no insight into how her situation relates to the larger problem of institutionalised poverty, and this memoir is simply not well written. As always, the emotional trap is to rate a book higher because the topic is important – which poverty certainly is – but while Lane is getting plenty of recognition for this book, it was just okay for me.
One of the greatest things about a willingness to get on your hands and knees to scrub a toilet is you'll never have trouble finding work.After presumably partying away her twenties and wistfully dreaming of attending college for Creative Writing one day, Stephanie Lane found herself pregnant at twenty-eight by a casual boyfriend; an abusive and emotionally manipulative man who screamed at her to get an abortion when he heard the news. Although Lane was in favour of abortion in principle, she “began to fall in love with motherhood”, and determined to keep her baby. When her homelife with the abusive partner became dangerous after the birth of Mia, Lane eventually escaped to a homeless shelter – with no money, no family support, no job, and no prospects. Eventually, Lane began working for a cleaning service, and the meat of this book describes how hard it is to live and raise a child on minimum wage at twenty-five hours a week, even with the support of government programs.
“Welfare is dead,” I wanted to say. There was no welfare, not in the sense they thought of it as. There was no way for me to walk into a government office and tell them I needed enough money to compensate for the meager wages I needed in order to pay for a home. If I was hungry, I could get a couple hundred bucks a month for food. I could visit a food bank. But there was no cash to buffer what I actually needed to survive.At one time, Lane was receiving funds from seven different government programs, and I totally understand how frustrating it would be to deal with that level of bureaucracy; to deal with all the red tape, time in government offices that could be spent working, to have grocery store cashiers and other shoppers in line evaluate what you're purchasing with methods the government makes obvious came from them. But while Lane has a valid point about how demeaning all of that is, she also complains that the WIC program stopped allowing coupons to be redeemed for organic milk, that she couldn't use her childcare vouchers for Montessori preschool, that her Pell Grant – which covered tuition for part-time college courses – didn't cover textbooks or courses over the summer. More than one person who noted Lane using government programs – from friends to strangers – said “You're welcome”, as though, Lane sneers, they paid for the items personally out of their taxes. And while I agree that's an awful and petty thing to say to someone, weren't those items paid for out of other people's taxes? Which is, of course, the way it should be, and no person who needs help ought to feel ashamed for receiving it, we're all in this together, but there's just something a bit entitled to Lane's tone throughout.
I cannot deny that Lane worked hard in near-impossible circumstances: raising a child basically alone (despite his emotional manipulation of their daughter, Lane sent Mia to her father's house every other weekend and whenever she could convince him to give a hand with childcare); running a household and constantly worrying about the bills; attempting to get a degree part-time to improve their lot; (literally) breaking her back to scrub other people's nastiness out of their homes. Lane spends a lot of the book talking about these big homes that she cleans – snooping through their medications, judging the messes they make; writing sometimes as though she's jealous of what they have, and then turning it around as though she feels superior to them:
My clients' lives, the homes they worked so hard to afford, were no longer my dream. Even though I had long since let that dream go, I still, in my most honest moments, while dusting rooms covered in pink, flowers, and dolls, admitted that I desperately wanted the same for my kid. I couldn't help but wonder if the families who lived in the houses I cleaned somehow lost one another in the rooms full of video games, computers, and televisions. This studio apartment we lived in, despite all its downsides, 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.Eventually, Lane applied for scholarships and student loans in order to prioritise her schooling over working just to get by. Although she continued to clean some homes privately, she balked at the idea of getting licensed or insured: there was no way she was going to make housecleaning feel so permanent. And that was another problem that I had with this book: Lane continually writes as though cleaning other peoples' homes was demeaning, basically beneath her, but while her good fortune did lead to a degree (and a book deal), there are millions of other poor women out there still doing the housecleaning without hope for better. And they probably work for more than the twenty or twenty-five hours a week that Lane complains she found so exhausting. In Roxanne Gay's review, she notes “the lack of acknowledgment of white privilege and how that made the arc of her narrative possible”, and I couldn't agree more. Lane had things very hard – and much of that was due to her own choices (choosing to become a mother without savings, a job, a supportive partner, or a home; choosing to remain in a city which offered no community support or gainful employment; choosing to juggle school, casual employment, and single-motherhood) – and I admire her obvious hard work and ability to overcome her circumstances. However, this isn't the kind of story that can be used to explore the general issue of poverty, and neither is it particularly heartwarming – for me, it pretty much fails on the large and the small scale. This is a low three stars.
