Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,94

up to resemble some kind of smile.

“So, Stephanie,” the other woman said, “you’re a single mom, right? My friend just went through a horrible divorce, and she’s in such a tough spot. Do you know of any organizations that could help her?”

“Um, sure,” I said, my eyes darting nervously. Three women stood around the table beside us, holding tiny plates of carrot sticks and bits of broccoli with ranch. All of them now looked at me. The token single mom. I mumbled out a few programs for food and childcare.

One of the moms, a short lady with brown, bobbed hair and a round face, sniffed and held her head high. “When Jack got laid off last winter,” she said, “all three of us had to move into my parents’ house. Remember that?” She nudged the woman next to her. “That tiny room with Jilly’s little bed scrunched up against the wall? It was like we were homeless. We were homeless!” The friend she’d elbowed nodded, making a sad face. “But thank goodness we’d saved for emergencies.”

Another mom nodded. They all turned back to me for a response. I looked down at Mia’s long-forgotten plate of chips and a soggy hot dog I’d been holding for her. I hadn’t contributed any food, so I chose not to eat any of it. I had absolutely no idea what to say. What would they say about the room Mia and I lived in? I couldn’t provide her with a home, or food, and accepted handouts to help with the tiny space we occupied. The most frustrating part of being stuck in the system were the penalties it seemed I received for improving my life. On a couple of occasions, my income pushed me over the limit by a few dollars, I’d lose hundreds of dollars in benefits. Due to my self-employment, I had to report my income every few months. Earning $50 extra could make my co-pay at day care go up by the same amount. Sometimes it meant losing my childcare grant altogether. There was no incentive or opportunity to save money. The system kept me locked down, scraping the bottom of the barrel, without a plan to climb out of it.

One of the moms in the group asked who it was, who got divorced, and they nestled into their comfort of gossip so I could slink away.

Maybe they did feel a little like me. Maybe their marriages left them feeling more alone than I knew. Maybe we all wanted something we had equally lost hope that we’d ever have.

I thought about Mia’s rages, about almost losing her in the car accident, about wearing our coats in the house because we couldn’t afford to turn up the heat. About entire weekends without Mia spent cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors.

That winter, I made another decision and wrote in my online journal with renewed purpose. The blog I’d kept up until that point had been about whatever struggles I’d been having, unsure where else to put it. Every once in a while, I wrote about a moment of beauty, of clarity, of marvel at the life Mia and I had. I decided to make the entire focus on just that, changing the theme of our life, and called it Still Life with Mia. I wanted to capture those moments, like the one I was in now, sitting at our table, me deep in thought as I watched her paint, to keep them fresh in my memory.

The online journal became a lifeline I’d been craving, an outlet for words and pictures, a way to cut through the stress and fear of my life and focus on what I loved most—my daughter and writing. I took a photograph of Mia’s face engaged in wonder. Those seconds of time were the ones I found made me feel as if I’d been there for her even more than I was.

This wasn’t the life I wanted for us, but it was the one we had for now. It won’t always be this way. I had to keep telling myself that, or the guilt for calling this room a home, telling my daughter that this was all there was, whether it was space or food, would consume me. I wanted so much for her to have a house with a fenced backyard and a cement patio or sidewalk for hopscotch. Mia said she wanted a sandbox and swings like they had at school whenever I played the “imagine our dream