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

Maid:Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land (releases 1/29/19 from Hachette
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book at Book Expo

Goodreads Summary:
Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America. Includes a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich.

"My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter."
While the gap between upper middle-class Americans and the working poor widens, grueling low-wage domestic and service work--primarily done by women--fuels the economic success of the wealthy. Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, pulling long hours while struggling as a single mom to keep a roof over her daughter's head. In Maid, she reveals the dark truth of what it takes to survive and thrive in today's inequitable society.
While she worked hard to scratch her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labor jobs, higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of overworked and underpaid Americans.
Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. "I'd become a nameless ghost," Stephanie writes. With this book, she gives voice to the "servant" worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children.

My Review:
I'm not sure if I agree with the comparison to Evicted and Nickel and Dimed, but I do agree that this book would be in the same genre as those two. Author Stephanie Land bravely laid herself bare on the page and didn't ask for an once of pity. Reading this book was very hard for me but I was so thankful to read about someone else who had some of my same experiences. For a short time as a young single mother I was also on various forms of public assistance and over 20 years later I still carry the emotional scars. I know all about being sneered at and openly criticized in the grocery store for using WIC vouchers and food stamps. I know all about juggling a variety of appointments to verify income, track weight gains, and be asked the most intimate and private of questions about my daily routines and sex life. These appointments consumed hours and hours of waiting time. I brought my daughter to each appointment because just like this author--it was only me. I did not have family support and my daughter's father thought he deserved an award for performing the bare minimum required of him (every other weekend visits and state mandated child support, which was sporadic and minimal due to his unreported cash payments "under the table".) I worked retail with a close eye on how many hours I could work without losing my assistance. I scrambled to find child care. I slaughtered pigs. I built refrigerators. I worked as hard as I possibly could and it was still never enough. Even when I worked my way up to a full-time factory position at $13/hr in 1997 which equated to roughly $400/week after taxes. After I paid for daycare ($250/wk for second shift care) and rent ($270/month for a single-wide trailer) I was left with just over $300 to cover food, diapers, clothing, utilities, car insurance, gas, and any other unexpected expenses for the entire month. It doesn't take a mathematician to see that those numbers won't work in the long term.  

I hope that anyone who reads this book will at least have some compassion for the "invisible" working poor by seeing how Land's daily struggles are representative of millions of workers who barely dare to dream of "getting ahead" because they are too busy struggling to make it through every day. A personally heart wrenching read that I hope everyone takes the time to experience.