Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,11
hours replaying the moments in court with Jamie.
I’d stood in front of a judge, next to Jamie and his lawyer. I was homeless and fighting for custody of Mia. It was no secret that months of Jamie’s angry words against me had caused my depression, and now he used this as the basis of his claim that I was unfit to parent our daughter. My failure seemed to shroud me. It was like Jamie’s lawyer and the judge thought I preferred it this way, like I thought raising a child without a stable home was okay. Like I didn’t think every single second about how I needed to improve our situation, if I had the ability to. Somehow, it reflected badly on me that I’d removed Mia from a place where I was punished and brutalized until I was curled up on the floor, sobbing like a toddler. No one saw that I was trying to give my daughter a better life—they only saw that I’d taken her out of what they considered a financially stable home.
Somewhere, I found an almost primal strength, and I won the custody case. I got my own space, a place for Mia to be with me. Still, most nights I wrapped myself in guilt for what we lacked. Some days, the guilt was so heavy that I couldn’t be totally present with Mia. I’d muster reading her books before bed, rocking her gently in the same chair where my mom had read me stories. I’d tell myself that tomorrow would be better; I’d be a better mother.
I’d sit and watch Mia eat, or I’d pace around the kitchen, drinking my coffee and staring at our budget and my work schedule, which I hung on the walls. If we went out and got groceries, I’d spend the morning scrolling my bank account balance and my EBT (electronic benefit transfer) card, a debit card for food paid by the government, to see how much money we had left. EBT cards were still relatively new and had been used only since 2002. I’d applied for food stamps when I was pregnant, and Jamie still remembered his mom paying for groceries with paper stamps and always sneered at the memory. I was grateful for programs that fed my family, but I’d also carry back home a bag of shame, each time mentally wrestling with what the cashier thought of me, a woman with an infant in a sling, purchasing food on public assistance. All they saw were the food stamps, the large WIC paper coupons that bought us eggs, cheese, milk, and peanut butter. What they didn’t see was the balance, which hovered around $200 depending on my income, and that it was all the money I had for food. I had to stretch it to the end of each month until the balance was re-upped after the beginning of the month. They didn’t see me eating peanut butter sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, rationing my morning cup of coffee to make it stretch. Though I didn’t know it then, the government had worked that year to change the stigma surrounding the twenty-nine million people who used food stamps by giving it a new name: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But whether you called it SNAP or food stamps, the assumption that the poor stole hardworking Americans’ tax money to buy junk food was unchanged.
Despite getting lost in my head, I obsessed over whether or not I was a good mother. I was failing; I was more in tune with how we’d survive the week than with my child. When I was with Jamie, his job had provided me the ability to stay home with Mia. I missed having whole days to ourselves, stopping to look and learn and wonder. Now it felt like we barely got by. Always late for something. Always in the car. Always in a rush to finish meals and clean up. Always moving, barely pausing to take a breath. In fear that I’d fall behind on something, forget something, screw up our lives even more—I just didn’t have time for Mia to watch a caterpillar inch its way across the sidewalk.
Though I heard almost every ghostlike toilet flush and chair moving across the floor of my neighbors’ apartments, the lady who lived below me would make herself known, hitting her ceiling with a broom or mop handle and yelling whenever Mia ran across the floor. When we first moved in, I swept the