Maid by Stephanie Land Book Summary


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Living in neediness, being a solitary parent and working a humble activity – every one of these undertakings is testing enough without anyone else’s input. Yet, envision the trouble of confronting each of the three in the meantime – and anyplace, however in the United States of today, where open help is difficult to find.

For some Americans, this isn’t a creative exercise, however, a lived reality. Except if you’ve encountered it yourself, however, the forms of that reality might be new to you. Maybe you know a few certainties and insights about neediness – yet how is it really?



In her journal, Stephanie Land gives a response to that question. This is the narrative of her late 20s and mid-30s when she was a single parent filling in as a servant and living on the pay of under $1,000 every month. A few parts of the story are specific to her, however, others show bigger substances looked by a great many single guardians and low-wage specialists in the US.


Stephanie Land had huge dreams before she turned into a single parent and a servant.


Toward the start of this story, Stephanie was in her late 20s and had as of late moved to Port Townsend, Washington – a little oceanside city on the upper east tip of the Olympic Peninsula. Regardless of having profound roots in the encompassing northwestern area of the state, she felt disengaged from them.

The two sides of her family had lived in close-by Skagit County, where she was conceived, for different ages. Be that as it may, when she was seven, her family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where she grew up and spent her young adulthood.

By coming back to northwest Washington, Stephanie planned to come back to her foundations – yet not for long. Port Townsend was just expected to be a pitstop on her adventure far from Alaska. Her definitive goal was another remote: Missoula, Montana.

Stephanie had constantly adored books and longed for turning into an author. Furthermore, as far back as she read John Steinbeck’s suggestive portrayals of Montana in his travelog, Travels with Charley, she had longed for living in “Enormous Sky Country” – a typical moniker for the state. In Missoula, she imagined her fantasies meeting up.



The city is home to the University of Montana, which has an experimental writing program she had for the longest time been itching to visit. On the whole, she expected to set aside enough cash to bear the cost of the move to Missoula, which was a costly spot to live. Shockingly, business openings were rare in Port Townsend, and the greater part of them was low-wage employment in the administration business. Stephanie cobbled together a salary by working at a bistro, puppy childcare, and a rancher’s market.

At that point, she met Jamie. He was a young fellow in a comparable circumstance as her – coming up short on a school training, maintaining odd sources of income and intending to move elsewhere when he could. For him, it was Portland, Oregon. He lived in a little camper trailer loaded up with books by essayists like Charles Bukowski and Jean-Paul Sartre.


Stephanie was pulled in to Jamie’s artistic tastes. They began a relationship, and she moved into his trailer – yet this was simply expected to be a transitory game plan. By part the trailer’s $300 lease, they would set aside enough cash to seek after their fantasies. When they could bear the cost of it, they anticipated going separate ways – he to Portland, she to Missoula.

However, at that point, directly after her 28th birthday celebration, life rattled Stephanie – she found she was pregnant.


Stephanie’s drop into destitution was accelerated by an oppressive relationship and an absence of familial help.


When she learned that she was waiting for a baby, Stephanie considered either getting a premature birth or keeping her pregnancy a mystery from Jamie. That way, she would almost certainly still seek after her fantasy of going to the University of Montana and turning into an author. Be that as it may, she was attracted to the possibility of parenthood and felt committed to allowing Jamie to be a dad, so she truly destroyed her school application and chose to remain in Washington.

Jamie needed her to get a premature birth and was incensed when she cannot. He was infuriated at the possibility of paying youngster backing, and his conduct wound up injurious toward her – loaded with abuse, upheavals, and dangers.

Further down the road, Stephanie wanted that she had been sufficiently able to abandon him by then, yet she remained with Jamie through her pregnancy and after the introduction of her little girl, Mia. In spite of the fact that he kept on mishandling her, there was a down to earth advantage to remain with him. His activity enabled her to remain at home with her child.



In any case, when Mia was seven months old, Stephanie chose that enough was sufficient – the time had come to move out. Jamie reacted by punching a gap through a window, which did what needs to be done for her. With her infant, Stephanie moved into her dad and stepmother’s trailer, which was situated in a close-by part of Washington.

It was 2008, and the subsidence had negatively affected her dad’s pay as a circuit repairman. Supporting Stephanie and her infant put him under further budgetary strain, causing pressure in the family unit.

Stephanie felt progressively awkward with her living circumstance. One night, her dad and stepmother got into a gigantic battle. The following morning, Stephanie saw wounds on her stepmother’s arm and felt mindful. That very day, she gathered her packs and moved into a destitute safe house.


Here, we experience one of the common subjects in Stephanie’s story – the constrained familial help in her life, her dad’s questionable money related circumstance and his failure to offer much help. Her granddad needed to help, yet he was considerably more broke than her dad.

Jamie sent the kid to bolster installments of $275 every month, and cared for their girl for a couple of hours on the ends of the week – yet that was it. What’s more, Stephanie’s mom moved to Europe, so she was to a great extent good and gone. Lacking familial help, Stephanie’s fundamental wellspring of assistance wound up open help – be that as it may, as we’ll find in the following section, this was restricted too.


Stephanie got away vagrancy on account of government help – however, this guide was constrained and accompanied numerous drawbacks.


At the point when Stephanie moved into the destitute haven, it was the first in a progression of government-gave or sponsored lodging circumstances in which she would take shelter throughout her story. The following one was a loft in a transitional lodging building.

Both the sanctuary and the condo were given by the nearby lodging specialist, and they shared a few highlights in like manner. To begin with, they were fairly inauspicious spots. The sanctuary was a little, confined lodge with filthy floors, soiled dividers, and insignificant furnishings.

The condo building had paper slender dividers and was loaded up with individuals hollering at one another. Second, they were just brief. The two of them had exacting time limits – 90 days for the sanctuary, two years for the condo.

Third, they expected her to go through the motions to remain in them. While she was living in the asylum, she needed to invest a lot of her energy visiting the administration structures of different open help programs, meeting with a variety of case managers and joining long queues of other individuals living in neediness.

Every one of them conveyed organizers loaded with administrative work that demonstrated they were poor, which they needed to show at whatever point they looked for help.

Fourth, they accompanied principles – no guests, no liquor and no medications. Also, the occupants needed to keep a severe 10:00 p.m. check-in time. At long last, to guarantee consistency with these standards, the lodging specialist exposed occupants to reconnaissance. This implied irregular pee tests and reviews of their living quarters. “This is a crisis cover,” the standard book expressed when she moved into the lodge. “It isn’t your home.”



To move out of transitional lodging, Stephanie needed to explore a many-sided labyrinth of government sponsorship programs and they’re going with necessities. One of them was LIHEAP – the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. This program finances low-pay individuals’ service charges depending on the prerequisite that they go to a three-hour class on the most proficient method to limit those bills.


In this class, members “realize” that they should kill their lights when they leave a room, alongside comparative “exercises,” which Stephanie found exceedingly stooping. Another program was Section 8, which takes care of all lodging costs surpassing 30 to 40 percent of an individual’s pay. There was likewise TBRA, Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, which works along these lines.

To utilize these sponsorships, candidates must persuade private landowners to acknowledge them. Be that as it may, the proprietors are under no commitment to do as such, and huge numbers of them will not acknowledge Section 8 and TBRA occupants as a result of their contrary impression of low-pay individuals – recognitions they share with numerous individuals from American culture, as we’ll find in the following part.


In the US, individuals who live in neediness and get help from the government are seen and treated unreasonably.


While Stephanie felt appreciative for the lodging help she got from the government, she likewise felt corrupted and demonized by the principles and observation that went with it. To her, they proposed a fairly belittling perspective on individuals battling with neediness.

Instead of sympathy, trust, and regard, low-salary individuals are treated with loftiness, doubt, and scorn. They’re thought to be so messy, sedate dependent or uncouth that they need curfews, lodging examinations, and pee tests to keep them in line. Stephanie sees this as only one sign of the general disparagement of needy individuals in American culture – particularly the individuals who get types of government help, which are on the whole alluded to as welfare.

There’s an inescapable and relentless generalization that these individuals are lethargic freeloaders who squander their time and cash on medications, liquor, and different indecencies.

This generalization, thus, plays into the possibility that they have nobody to fault however themselves for their destitution. In the event that they just worked harder and carried on better, they could lift themselves out of their money-related gaps, or so the reasoning goes. In any case, this slights the unforeseen conditions, absence of help and constrained open doors that can prompt neediness, as for Stephanie’s situation. Numerous individuals feel angry toward welfare beneficiaries since they see the advantages of being undeserved gifts.



Stephanie encountered this hatred firsthand. For instance, after she moved into the destitute sanctuary, she called a companion to talk about her arrangements for pushing ahead with her life. Huge numbers of these plans included using different types of welfare to acquire necessities, for example, sustenance, lodging, gas, and milk for her child.

After finding out about these endowments, the companion mockingly stated, “The pleasure is all mine,” inferring that her expense cash was paying for them. On another event, an outsider said something very similar to her at a supermarket when he saw her purchasing sponsored milk.


In the interim, Stephanie was presented to numerous statements of hostile to welfare conclusion via web-based networking media. For instance, one of her companions worked at a supermarket, and she began a Facebook string in which she ridicules the items that low-pay individuals purchase with the official vouchers known as nourishment stamps. The reason was that the items were some way or another rich and in this way demonstrative of needy individuals’ iniquity – despite the fact that they were simply tidbits and soft drink.

Subsequently, as a welfare beneficiary, Stephanie confronted a poisonous mix of resentful and judgmental social frames of mind and suspicious, selfish administrative strategies. What’s more, as we’ll find in the following section, this took a significant mental toll on her.


The belittling of welfare beneficiaries took an overwhelming mental toll on Stephanie.


As she attempted to push ahead with her life, Stephanie was very much aware of the basic job that welfare played in her voyage. A long way from making her “apathetic” or enabling her to be a “freeloader,” it was the very thing that empowered her to come back to having a vacation after she had her child.

For example, as a single parent without familial help, she couldn’t abandon her little girl at home with an accomplice or a relative to get down to business. She expected to discover childcare. In any case, without legislative help, she wouldn’t have had the capacity to manage the cost of childcare for Mia. This help enabled her to look for some kind of employment as a house cleaner with a cleaning organization.

As we’ll see later, this work was strenuous, however, it gave an unmistakable advantage to other individuals’ lives. It may appear to be sensible that she would have felt unashamed of getting the welfare that made that work conceivable. Be that as it may, she was spooky by the social shame going with destitution and welfare.

For instance, each opportunity she returned home from the grocery store with a pack of foodstuffs, she likewise got back home with what she called a “sack of disgrace.” She was tormented by contemplations of what the clerk or different clients may have thought of her for utilizing sustenance stamps.



Her dread of judgment turned out to be internalized to the point that she felt as if there were concealed cameras watching her constantly, simply holding on to get her in the demonstration of satisfying one of the generalizations about welfare beneficiaries, for example, apathy. She felt the nearness of these allegorical cameras even in her very own home. There, she was unfit to unwind. She couldn’t peruse a book without inclination liberal.


With this steady feeling of the investigation came a consistent feeling of expecting to demonstrate her value for the welfare she got. That implied discrediting the generalization of sluggishness.

Furthermore, this, thusly, implied always working – at her specific employment, yet in addition, dealing with her little girl and keeping up their home. However, this isn’t to imply that her hecticness was simply in her mind – a long way from it. As we’ll find in a minute, she had a lot of work to do as a housekeeper and a single parent.


Having a job as a maid was requesting and unrewarding for Stephanie.


While it furnished her with a truly necessary salary, Stephanie’s activity as a servant accompanied numerous challenges. To start with, she needed to drive her own vehicle to every one of the houses the cleaning organization relegated to her. Since the organization’s customers were so spread out, it could take her as long as an hour to drive to a solitary house. This movement time was unpaid, and the organization didn’t remunerate her for the expense of fuel, which took up to 33% of her check.

When she touched base in a house, her errand was to clean about everything as fast and carefully as would be prudent – regardless of how appalling it was. She expelled the grime from the showers, the pee stains from the toilets, the shape from the restroom roofs, the oil from the stovetops, the canine hair from the floor coverings and the residue from the majority of the hard surfaces.

She experienced each house evolving bedsheets, cushioning the pads, supplanting the tissue, taking out the trash and doing the clothing – all while exploring unwelcome amazements, for example, semen-splashed socks on pornography cherishing customer’s room floor or blood-dotted sheets on a debilitated customer’s bed.



Everything must be done in an exact way, down to the manner in which the tip of every bathroom tissue fold ought to be collapsed into a little triangle. What’s more, everything must be done in only three or four hours, contingent upon the house. This was not a great deal of time, as the greater part of the houses were quite huge, with upward of four rooms, two full restrooms, two half washrooms, a kitchen, and different normal rooms.

Notwithstanding going only 15 minutes over the dispensed time limit was seriously disliked by the cleaning organization, so Stephanie wound up in a consistent race with time as the opponent. What’s more, when she was finished with one house, she was headed toward the following – more often than not cleaning a few houses for each workday.


In any case, notwithstanding the majority of this requesting work, Stephanie was unfit to escape neediness. She was just ready to get 10 to 25 hours of paid work every week, and her compensation began at Washington’s lowest pay permitted by law – $8.55 every hour. Accordingly, her pay was around $800 every month.

This low pay came at a mind-boggling expense, as we’ll find in the following section.


Crafted by a house cleaner is physically and mentally troublesome, just like crafted by a single parent.


Notwithstanding being ineffectively redressed, Stephanie’s work as a housekeeper was physically requesting. It required a determined arrangement of monotonous movements, strenuous efforts and rebuffing positions, for example, scouring, lifting, and bowing. It additionally included the overwhelming utilization of cleaning synthetics in mildew covered, regularly inadequately ventilated conditions.

This negatively affected Stephanie’s body. She had tireless sinus diseases, awful hacks, perpetual back agony and hurting muscles, over steady fatigue. However, despite the fact that her low wages left her in neediness, Stephanie’s pay was unreasonably high for her to fit the bill for Medicaid, the administration-run social insurance protection program for low-pay Americans. Subsequently, she was unfit to stand to see a specialist. To manage her torment, she had just a single plan of action – much of the time bringing down 800-milligram portions of ibuprofen.

She became no ill days or excursion days, so missing work implied missing wages. This put her compelled to never miss a multi-day of work, regardless of how she or her girl were feeling. This added to the mental toll of the activity, which was likewise significant.



The work was once in a while very horrendous, as it included incessant experiences with the remaining parts of all way of organic liquids, including regurgitation and excrement. The cleaning was regularly managed without the customers consistently observing her or knowing her name, so she additionally experienced a sentiment of imperceptibility and namelessness.

And after that, there was the disengagement. She headed to the houses alone, and she cleaned only them. Depleted by her timetable and humiliated by her destitution, she had a brief period or tendency to see companions or family. Her fundamental wellspring of human contact was her girl, Mia. Be that as it may, the time she went through at home with her was another activity in itself.


Being a single parent, the majority of the undertakings of dealing with a youngster and keeping up a family fell on Stephanie’s shoulders – cooking, cleaning, purchasing basic needs, paying bills, washing Mia, playing with her and perusing to her. The rundown continued forever.

But then, regardless of how much work she did, Stephanie’s neediness left her inclination deficient as a mother. The main loft she could manage the cost of was moldy to the point that it caused Mia to contract interminable sinus and ear diseases. Also, the main childcare she could manage the cost of was an underfunded office ailing in warmth, care, and improvement.

In any case, she figured out how to remain solid, as we’ll find in the following part.


Stephanie’s encounters as a single parent and a housekeeper trained her what she truly values throughout everyday life.


As the familiar proverb goes, each cloud has its silver lining. While it was intense being a single parent and a housekeeper, Stephanie figured out how to locate the splendid side of her quandary. She felt desolate without an accomplice – however, she additionally not hesitated to focus on making the most of her time with her girl. On the off chance that she needed to play with her or take her out for frozen yogurt, she didn’t need to stress over another grown-up inclination exhausted or left out.

Their relationship was consequently ready to bloom, and she felt a developing feeling of camaraderie with her little girl, which moderated her sentiments of dejection. She understood that she was not the only one – she had Mia.

For Stephanie, the significance of this was fortified by her work as a house cleaner, which gave her a window into the lives of the cleaning organization’s well off customers. At first, she felt desirous toward them. With their huge houses, extravagant vehicles and extravagant apparatuses, they all appeared to experience the American Dream. Be that as it may, as time went on, she began to detect a void in their lives.

While cleaning their washrooms, she saw that a large number of them take prescriptions for gloom, uneasiness and dozing issue. She additionally observed indications of their dejection. In one home, for example, she saw that a couple seemed, by all accounts, to be dozing in independent rooms.



She thought about how the customers could be despondent notwithstanding the entirety of their material solaces, and she hypothesized that maybe it was a portion of those extremely same solaces that drove them to feel detached from their families. When she envisioned their lives, she imagined them lounging around in isolated rooms, consumed by their TVs, computer games, and PCs.

While she really wanted to yearn for a portion of their assets, she never again related to their fantasy of having a major house and different trappings of riches. This helped her hone her very own origination of what’s extremely imperative to her – human association, love and a feeling of home.

She discovered these things in the existence she manufactured with her little girl – however, there was one thing missing: a feeling of network. How she discovered this conveys us to the last section of her story.


In Missoula, Stephanie found the missing part of the existence she needed to live.


Stephanie kept living in northwest Washington for around five years after Mia’s birth. What about her fantasies of moving to Missoula, Montana, and turning into an author?

They were inconclusively conceded – yet she hadn’t overlooked them. She simply expected to hold up until Mia got more established, she consoled herself. At that point, she would seek after them. However, the years moved by, and she remained in Washington. What was holding her back?

There were two fundamental elements. The first was money related – stuck in destitution, regardless she felt unfit to bear the cost of moving to, living in or even simply visiting Missoula. The other was lawful – she figured she wasn’t permitted to move far from the zone in which Mia’s dad Jamie lived except if he gave her consent.

Be that as it may, at that point she got some extremely supportive counsel and consolation from a couple of injured individual promoters, who worked for a neighborhood charitable association that helps overcomers of abusive behavior at home and rape.

She discovered that she didn’t require Jamie’s authorization to move. She simply expected to document a notice, which he would then get an opportunity to the item to. She was additionally influenced to apply for instruction grant went for ladies who have gotten away injurious local circumstances. She wound up getting a $3,000 grant, which gave her the monetary pad she expected to take her first get-away in five years lastly visit Missoula.

When she arrived, the town more than satisfied her desires. She ended up immediately encompassed by similarly invested, amicable and sensible individuals, alongside a free-energetic, somewhat unpleasant around-the-edges climate. Amid her short visit, there was an expressions celebration and a nearby ranchers’ market going on.



She saw ladies with whiskered body hair, men with children tied to their chests, young men with unkempt tangles of hair and young ladies in crunched tutus. Almost every grown-up appeared to have tattoos, much the same as Stephanie. She quickly went gaga for the spot and got a solid sense that she and her little girl had a place in Missoula. “This could be our home,” she reflected. “These individuals could be our family.”


Finally, she chose to make the huge move to Missoula. Not long after she arrived, she and her little girl climbed up the mountain that ignored the town. When they achieved the top, she felt like they had made it, in both an exacting and figurative sense.

They had conquered a pile of difficulties, climbing to a superior life. Here, one story finished and another one started. From high over the ground, she saw the University of Montana underneath, where, a couple of years after the fact, she would acquire a four-year college education in English and experimental writing.


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


After her life was flipped around by a sudden pregnancy and an oppressive relationship, Stephanie Land had the capacity to escape dejection by accepting government help and functioning as a house cleaner. In any case, the impediments of the help and the low-paid nature of the work implied that she stayed buried in neediness.

Her life as a low-pay single parent with a humble activity was troublesome from various perspectives, yet it additionally showed her some significant exercises, and she figured out how to accomplish her fantasy.


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Savaş Ateş

I'm a software engineer. I like reading books and writing summaries. I like to play soccer too :) Good Reads Profile: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/106467014-sava-ate

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