essay about house maid

I Left Poverty After Writing ‘Maid.’ But Poverty Never Left Me

I signed my first book contract without paying much attention to what it said. I didn’t know at the time that the book would be a best seller or that it would one day inspire a Netflix series . I just needed the money. I was a single mom with a 2-year-old and a 9-year-old, living in low-income housing, and because of a late paycheck, I hadn’t eaten much for a few weeks, subsisting on pizza I paid for with a check I knew would bounce.

This wasn’t my first bout of hunger. I had been on food stamps and several other kinds of government assistance since finding out I was pregnant with my older child. My life as a mother had been one of skipping meals, always saving the “good” food, like fresh fruit, for the kids I told myself deserved it more than I did. The apartment was my saving grace. Housing security , after being homeless and forced to move more than a dozen times, was what I needed the most. Hunger I was O.K. with, but the fear of losing the home where my children slept was enough to cause a mind-buzzing anxiety attack that wouldn’t let up.

Hunger changes you. As your body begins to claw at you, your stomach churning in anger, every person who shares a photo of the fancy meal they’re about to eat is no longer your friend. Around that time, a guy who had a crush on me kept texting me what he was making for dinner, and I finally had to ask him to stop without really explaining why.

Read More: These Mothers Wanted to Care for Their Kids and Keep Their Jobs. Now They’re Suing After Being Fired

When the advance money to write the book came, I wasn’t exactly “free” from poverty. I got a book deal that most writers, especially BIPOC writers , do not receive. It was an amount of money that didn’t seem real, so I always thought it would disappear as quickly as it came. I could fill my fridge again, but I had $20,000 in credit-card debt, a truck that kept breaking down and almost $50,000 in student loans. I had years of untreated complex PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder. All of our clothes, furnishings and towels were falling apart. Beyond that, mentally speaking, living in poverty is walking a tightrope over a floor that’s about to drop out from underneath you. Every time I felt like my head was finally just above water, when I had a day off to take my kids out for an afternoon, that’s when my car wouldn’t start. My brain had learned to be suspicious of good things. To almost fear them. As things started to feel more comfortable, the panic attacks screamed, When? When will the bad thing happen, because I know it’s there.

In the year leading up to publication of my book , I woke up in panic maybe 100 times. (By the time I was on book tour, it happened every morning at 4.) Every night, my anxiety seemed to come up with a new “what if” scenario based on what I’d been through as a freelance writer. I thought the trolls would catch wind and share photos of my kids on 4chan again, calling us names I will never repeat. As a single mother who had written about being on food stamps, I’d experienced enough death threats that I paid a service to keep my information off search engines. Now I had written an entire book about mothering my older kid when we had nothing, and I worried for their safety too.

When I started meeting people who had read my book, I was unprepared for their hugs and words of appreciation. People saw themselves in my story. It had been my hope, but not my expectation. As a shy introvert, I had no idea what to do but nod and say thank you. Then it started happening in grocery stores, and when I dropped my kindergartner off at school. I could usually spot them coming, but sometimes they surprised me. Like the time I heard, “Oh my God, are you Stephanie Land?” from the pharmacy clerk as I reached for a bag containing medication to assist my body’s first miscarriage .

I had moved to a house with a yard. My kids and I lived with a tall, handsome man I’d recently married, his daughter, and our mix of fish and dogs. I was never hungry. I could afford to purchase clothes that didn’t come from consignment stores or Target. What’s more, I had been pushed up to a different class of -society, one I had been mistreated by for most of my adult life. I no longer felt like I could be part of the community of people I’d worked beside, stood in line with to buy the cheapest burrito as our only meal for the day.

I was a “success story,” and an extremely likable one. I’m very conscious that my story is the palatable kind of poor-person story. There’s no doubt in my mind that people paid more attention to it because I am white, hold a bachelor’s degree, and even though my parents grew up poor, I was raised in three–bedroom, 2½-bath homes for most of my childhood.

After living in poverty for the previous decade, struggling to pay bills by cleaning poop off toilets, it jarred me to be treated as an equal by people who previously could have been my clients. At cocktail parties put on by my publisher or the organizer of a speaking event, I wanted to hang out with the caterers. I had tattooed the backs of my hands—what my tattooist called “the ever-lasting job -stopper”—to not blend in even more. On book tour, people asked over and over why someone like me had worked as a house cleaner. Some said, “Of course you made it out of poverty, but why do you think others can’t?” Some even said “won’t,” as if poverty is a decision people make when they wake up in the morning.

Not only did strangers hug me, but emails and direct messages started pouring in with highly personal questions often rooted in anger. Why didn’t you get an abortion? Do you really think what you experienced was abuse? What did all of this do to your children? One woman was obsessed with the kids’ mental health and kept messaging me that I should give them up for adoption. On a photo of my youngest, who was about 5 at the time, smiling while eating ice cream, someone commented how terrible it was to get pregnant when you can’t afford your kids. I had been off government assistance for three years.

Read more: After a Terrible Year for Women in the Economy, These Places Are Working Toward a Feminist Recovery From COVID-19

Over the past 18 months of being home during the pandemic, I have struggled to process why this has affected me in the way it has. I finally identified that it was going straight from the trauma of poverty to the trauma I discovered as a sudden public figure, then experiencing the biggest type of success a writer can at a time when people are dying and being evicted in droves. Some might call this survivor’s guilt, but that feels too simple to me. After my now 14-year-old and I watched the first two episodes of the Netflix series, they turned to me with tears in their eyes and said, “We made it out, but so many didn’t.”

When people tell me I deserve all of this, I tell them everyone does. When people tell me I earned this, I picture the machine that printed out so many copies of my book and know that it did so because I am that resilient, educated person whom most expect to be successful. I am Little Orphan Annie skipping around in new shoes, singing, “Yesterday was plain awful, but that’s not now, that’s then.” I’m the story we love to hear, and every time I speak to an audience, I point that out. It has become my purpose. But as my friend Rene Denfeld recently wrote on Facebook, “We live in a world that embraces the success story only because we are O.K. with the majority suffering.”

We need to look marginalized people in our community in the eye and listen to their stories of struggle, heartache and impossibility. We need to sit with the pain people in systemic poverty and systemic racism experience, especially because those two things go hand in hand. There are excellent books on this subject, like Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race. When people ask me how to help, I tell them to ask people what they need. I’m betting the answers are things like tampons and diapers and $10 for gas, because life is so small and short-sighted when you’re that hungry that you can’t demand affordable housing and a living wage . That’s for all of us who have means to fight for.

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The author whose story inspired Netflix’s Maid on why welfare is broken

How Stephanie Land went from Vox article to book deal to Netflix show.

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Share All sharing options for: The author whose story inspired Netflix’s Maid on why welfare is broken

When Stephanie Land moved out of her abusive boyfriend’s house at age 29, she was a single mother, unemployed, with no savings and no college degree. So she did what she had to in order to keep herself and her daughter alive. She moved into a homeless shelter and then into subsidized housing, enrolled in every government program she could, and got a job as a maid. It was all only barely enough to keep her going.

Land eventually drew on the back-breaking, grueling experience of cleaning houses for an essay that she would publish on Vox in 2015. Titled “ I spent 2 years cleaning houses. What I saw makes me never want to be rich, ” the piece went massively viral. It was full of voyeuristic details about what Land learned about her clients from cleaning their homes, and in its descriptions of the difference between Land’s precarious existence and her clients’ lavish lifestyles, it seemed like a perfect encapsulation of the US’s ever-widening income inequality. To date, it’s garnered over 1.3 million page views.

In 2019, Land turned the experience into her memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive , which became a New York Times bestseller. And now, Land’s book has become a Netflix series .

With Maid now streaming, Land returned to Vox for some full-circle perspective. Over the phone, we discussed the failure of the welfare system in the US, why her experience publishing with Vox in 2015 was not wholly great, and why the narrative of a poor white woman is so attractive to Hollywood. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

One of the things that both your book and the Netflix show are so good at laying out is the incredible number of hoops you have to jump through to receive government assistance. What were some of the biggest frustrations you had to deal with during your time in the system?

Honestly, it was child care. The last time I tried to get a child care grant, my youngest daughter was 1. It was probably in 2015, right around when the Vox article came out. I had been freelancing for a little while.

You have to hand in three months of income, and they do their calculations. And it turned out that I was $100 over the limit for [continuing my] child care grant.

When my caseworker told me that, I was just kind of like, “ Really ? Like, for 100 bucks?”

My income at the time was so variable. I was extremely honest with my income, and as a self-employed person I could have lied a little bit, but I didn’t.

And so when I was talking to [my caseworker], she said, “Well, it looks like your work hours are from 9 at night to 2 in the morning, so you don’t really need day care.”

I said, “Well, that’s not ideal!” I would much rather work during the day and not lose that amount of sleep.

It’s the child care grants. I mean, I was audited. They called me and threatened to remove my child care grant immediately because I had handed in a handwritten pay stub at one point. It’s terrifying, because I can’t work without child care, and that was the most important thing that I had.

The book does a really great job of laying out that problem. You describe having to choose between child care and the work that you need to do to survive. So what do you think needs to change about the way we approach child care in America so that people don’t have to keep making those kinds of choices?

I argue for universal child care all the time. I think they’re trying to cover that in the infrastructure bill that they’re trying to pass. Child care is part of the infrastructure of our country, because parents need to have a safe place to bring their children while they’re working. It’s just as important as the road that they’re driving on.

It was such a struggle just to have that support. It was baffling to me. And it’s all wrapped up in work requirements. I never really understood why I constantly had to prove that I was working. It just seemed like my value and my worth as a human being were completely wrapped up in how many hours I was working a week at a very low-wage job.

That’s something that you also write about in the book and that comes out in the show as well. This sort of sense of judgment that you get from strangers and even from close friends who would say things like, “Oh, you’re welcome,” about receiving government assistance. There seems to be a lot of people who have this idea that people on welfare are just lazy and taking advantage of hardworking taxpayers. So what do you wish that people who had that idea understood about the experience?

The SNAP program is such a small part of the federal budget. It’s something like 1.3 percent . It’s such a small amount, but because it is so visible, people kind of feel personal about it. When I pull out my SNAP card at the grocery store, people start to look at all the things that I’m buying, like, “Oh my god, she got blueberries! Those are $5. Why didn’t you just get grapes?”

They feel some kind of connection because they believe that their tax dollars are buying me organic milk.

Another thing that’s really quite haunting about your experience, and that I think the Netflix show does a really great job of evoking, is just how much time and mental energy gets taken up keeping track of a budget when you’re making minimum wage. What was the hardest part of making that money stretch?

A lot of it was just being able to afford toiletries and tampons and toilet paper. I remember very specifically standing in the grocery store aisle. I really needed to buy a sponge, and I was trying to think, “How much money do I have on my credit card balance?” Because usually I would pay the minimum payment on my credit card, and that was the money that I had to purchase all of those things like toothpaste and shampoo and diapers if I needed them.

So that’s one memory that I have, of just trying to figure out if I could purchase a $2 sponge that I needed, and deciding that I couldn’t.

It’s also really striking, looking at this story, how much our system seems to incentivize survivors of domestic violence to stay in relationships that can be damaging, and the way it keeps pushing people to fall back on their existing personal connections, which might not be the most healthy. What do you think needs to change in our system to move away from that model?

I think emotional abuse needs to be recognized as violence. It’s domestic violence, and it’s deadly.

Once emotional abuse really takes hold, you are controlled in almost every way. Abusers will most often turn you against all of your friends and family and isolate you. They will take away your self-worth, and they financially control you. They control your phone, your vehicle, just everything. And that’s when the physical abuse starts to happen.

Often up until that point, you don’t believe that you’re in an abusive relationship because they haven’t hit you. And then they start hitting things near you, but that’s still “not really domestic violence” until you have bruises.

For me in that situation, not only did the court system tell me that a reasonable person wouldn’t feel threatened, they saw me as the bad person because I was removing a child from a stable environment and a stable home. My abuser was seen as the better parent because he had a house and a full-time job and had resources, and I was homeless.

In the book, you write about the sheer physical pain that comes with cleaning houses, and how that can be exacerbated by a lack of medical benefits. How common is it for house cleaners not to get any basic benefits?

I don’t know how every cleaning company handles their employees, but as far as I know just from talking to agents with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, it’s incredibly common to not have any kind of benefits whatsoever.

If you’re working for a cleaning company, your pay is usually cut in half. They will charge a client what they charge, but then they will pay you a very low amount. What comes with that is insurance, so if you are hurt or if you damage something, then you have the company to pay for all of that. But you also risk losing your job if you mess up in any way.

And then if you go on to be self-employed, you don’t have that safety net of workers comp, or even unemployment insurance if you lose your job, like so many domestic workers did at the beginning of the pandemic.

You’re also just so vulnerable. I remember going to really shady places. Sometimes there was no cellphone coverage. I was a single mom and I had just dropped my kid off at day care and she was sick, and there was no way for anybody to contact me. And I also didn’t know what kind of situation I was going into. It’s pretty scary.

There’s no sick pay, there’s no vacation days, and there’s just nothing for you if you get injured.

Then you also write about having to pay for your own gas and cleaning supplies and other equipment. How does that end up cutting into the paycheck?

I was making at one point $9.25 an hour. I did the math and figured out it was actually about $6 an hour with all the gas. And I had to wash my own cleaning rags and the clothes that I worked in, and that wasn’t covered in my paycheck either.

At one point, I finally made enough of a stink that they offered me a little bit of pay for mileage, and then my boss offered to wash my rags. But that was after six months of struggling and finally just saying, “I can’t afford to do this.”

On top of the low wages and physical pain, there’s also having to deal with the way clients treated you. We see a lot of disdain for people who clean houses in popular culture — I’m thinking of the influencer Rachel Hollis , who was heavily criticized a few months ago for referring to her house cleaner as “the woman who cleans my toilets.” What is it like for you, having done that work, to see that sort of sneering, dehumanizing attitude playing out in the culture at large?

I think that’s the reason why I can’t bring myself to hire my own house cleaner. I felt that so much.

I remember one time I went to clean a person’s house who was the same age as me. They had a really nice place and a couple of kids, and their kids’ bedrooms were just immaculate and like something that I wished for my own kid. And as she was walking me through, she pointed to a couple of spots that I had missed on a light switch. She said, “Can you just make sure that you get this next time?”

I just remember thinking, “Really? You’re going to point that out to me?”

It was just so demeaning. I mean, every single time that I had to get on my hands and knees to scrub something and the client was home, it was just a really horrible feeling. There were times that I would be cleaning, and the client was home and they answered the phone and they said, “Oh I can’t talk, the maid is here.” It was a really odd feeling.

I wish that type of work held the same amount of dignity that [my clients’] work did. I’m not really sure why it doesn’t. Because domestic work is the work that makes all the other work in this country happen.

In 2015, you published a piece on cleaning houses for Vox . Then in 2019, you published the book. And now it’s a Netflix series. Can you walk me through what happened to get you from one to the other?

The Vox essay was my first big paycheck as a freelance writer. It was something that I had worked on in college and beyond. I saw a call for pitches through another publication, I think it was Literary Mama . They put out an email that said these people are looking for personal essays.

So I emailed Vox and entitled it “Dear Editor,” and sent them a couple of paragraphs that I thought were really good. And they emailed back immediately and offered me $500. That was like the most money I’d ever seen. I was just falling all over myself.

The morning that it was published online, my friend actually called me on my flip phone and said, “Are you okay?”

And I said, “Yeah, why?”

And she said, “You need to go look at your computer.”

That essay went so viral. I really wasn’t set up for that amount of virality. I started getting hundreds and hundreds of emails through the contact form on my website, and they were all so angry.

I was called dumb. God, what did they call me? They called me a roach. They called me a bum. A leech on society. I was called dirty a lot.

That essay was edited to make me a very unlikable character. At the time I was just like, “Fine, whatever. Just pay me my money!” But now that I have some experience, I definitely would have pushed back on some of those edits. [The editor of Land’s essay is no longer employed at Vox.]

I received hate mail for so long and at such magnitude that I remember going out for a walk in the woods with a friend of mine and feeling so exposed and raw. It just really affected me.

But on the other hand, an agent from New York reached out to me that morning and asked me if I had a book in the works and I lied and said yes. I wrote up a couple of chapters and a book proposal, and we had a book deal 11 months later.

After that, every time I pitched an editor and included a link to that essay, they said, “Oh my goodness, you’re the woman behind the house-cleaning essay!” My freelancing career really took off after that.

I still get hate mail from that essay every once in a while.

Oh god, I’m so sorry you had to deal with that. So you get this book deal. And then how does that become a Netflix deal?

I have a wonderful agent at CAA, Michelle Crows, and she sent out advance copies of the book. So I ended up talking to different groups of producers and directors and people who were interested in this story.

John Wells and Margot Robbie were my last call. Up until that point, a lot of people really wanted to do a straight adaptation of the book. And to me, that sounded horrible. Because it’s such a white person story, and it’s such a privileged story. In memoir, you’re tied to your experience, and I was very isolated. I didn’t talk to anybody. I kept thinking about the movie trailer guy saying, “One white woman dipped into poverty — and how she got herself out.”

John Wells and Margot Robbie proposed fictionalizing it, and bringing in a really diverse cast, and making the story look like the real world does. I love that, and so that was why I went with them.

I’m glad you brought that up because I know you’ve written about how the ways we talk about poverty can feed into a lot of ideas about systemic racism. For instance, the way we talk about poor Black people as welfare queens , and all of the political baggage around the idea of the white working class . I don’t think this is necessarily present in the book, but you can see a way in which the idea of a white single mother is politically attractive to certain agendas in a way that it might not be if it were the story of a woman of color who is having to navigate this treacherous system. Is that disconnect something that you’ve seen in the reception of this story?

It’s something that I talk about every chance I get. I knew right off the bat that my story was very attractive to publishers because it was marketable. I am a very palatable and very likable poor person because I am white. I could look like your cousin or your neighbor for a lot of the population who purchases memoirs and reads these books.

Going into that, I had a moment of realizing that I was being lifted up. And what am I going to do with that? So even though I am a pretty shy introvert, I realized that they’re listening to me. And because they’re listening to me, then hopefully that will open up space for other people to share their stories.

We don’t listen to people of color. We especially don’t listen to people who are in systemic poverty or systemic racism, which go hand in hand. And we especially don’t listen to people who are still in that situation and who are angry.

One thing that I’ve seen on social media that honestly really encourages me is that people are angry, and they’re talking about their anger, for that thing that you’re talking about: It’s a white woman’s story who’s being lifted, when the majority of domestic workers are women of color. I’m grateful that they are able to talk about that anger. I want them to have space to talk about how angry they are about the systems that are in place that keep them in poverty.

I talk a lot about how the government assistance program is broken. But it is almost impossible if you’re a person of color in this country or you’re an immigrant.

What is the biggest thing that you hope people who read the book and watch the show take away from them?

I hope they gain some empathy for people who are in poverty, especially the people who are experiencing homelessness. I think we have this idea in our heads that it’s always the person who is sleeping on a sidewalk, when that’s really not the case. There are many, many families in this country who are sleeping in their vehicles and taking their kids to school and going to work. And it’s a real tragedy.

I hope that people start to realize that and have some compassion, and take that compassion with them when they go to the voting booth. And vote some people into office who have lived experience in the margins, or have empathy for those who do.

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Announcing, my forthcoming memoir: MAID: A Single Mother’s Journey from Cleaning House to Finding Home

This is like the happiest, best, most important post I’ve read in a long time. Yay you. Yay women. Congratulations and thank you for being you and sticking with it.

Wow…this is an awesome news, I just started following you and I’m excited for you and optimistic about forthcoming news from you. Please keep us posted on your book!

So very over the moon happy for you!!! I’ll pre-order whenever I can!! I’ve shared your blog with so many people since I began reading you – we talk over meals about you, your family, your writing – we identify, empathize and hear your voice in our heads when we are faced with a circumstance you’ve described – so thank you for all of that and all the best wishes to you for this new journey – KUDOS to a very bright, insightful, well spoken and humble woman – you’re bravery and honesty are qualities I so admire that inspire me regularly!!

Oh, I am so absolutely thrilled for you!! Congrats, what a journey. I cannot wait to read your book.

Well done and most deserved! I’ve been following you quietly for a while now. Applauding from the other side of the world. Liz 🙂

wooohooo! What a GREAT story! I’ll watch for it and do my best to hand-sell it for you at my store in CT. Fantastic.

Yesterday I realized I had not heard from you and wondered if I had somehow been dropped. So it was with relief that I got your blog today. Congratulations!! I am proud of you.

Well done Stephanie, so proud of you. You have been a beacon of light in the dark days since my marriage breakdown and life as a single parent. You deserve every success, you’ve worked damn hard for it!

Congratulations! More power to you!

Congratulations!! I saw this news tweet on WP. I will watch for your book to come 🙂 Yay fellow WP blogger! 🙂

Congratulations! This is one of the best pieces of news I’ve read all week. I wish you all the success in the world! We need more writers like you out there 🙂

This is the start of something amazing in your life!

I am so happy for you, as an aspiring writer myself, I am so so happy for this breakthrough. It will make all of your struggles worth it. I follow your blog and I see your struggle as a single mom to 2 girls and how you try to keep your dream alive while parenting alone. It’s amazing.

Congrads! it is wonderful, and empowers others to keep pushing on..

This is so beautiful, I’m glad to hear your story and it’s so wonderful to see your determination to speak out for those who are victims of an unwavering injustice which has been inflicted upon them. This is the first time visiting your blog, and I instantly fell in love.

Amazing revelation! Now, I feel so inspired to write– knowing that there are more sublime reasons to write and touch lives. I am looking forward reading your book.

This was really interesting, thanks for sharing Stephanie. Sam http://www.sexualityandthecityblog.wordpress.com

Just amazing. Stories like yours are what keeps us all pecking away! Rock on girl!

You are an inspiring and you will continue to inspire all the woman out there. I’m proud of you. Girl Power!

I am so glad that it is easier financially for you now ? good luck with the rest of your journey!

Congratulations!!! I don’t know you, I just found your post. But, I am from Kalispell, Montana. And to see your success—you’re an inspiration and a role model! So excited for you!

Wow! beautiful and inspiring. I have had a similar journey for the last 15 yrs being single. Hope life continues to bless you! Lisa

Looking forward to reading it!

I’ve never heard of you before and wandered over from WordPress where I saw a brief from GoodReads. I like Ehrenreich myself, so i had to come check you out. Congratulations to you, and I am following you now. I look forward to reading more, and will waiting to read the book as well. 🙂

Thank you so much! I appreciate you taking the time to write and check me out! I look forward to sharing my book with you!

I can totally relate, Stephanie! I, to, worked my way through college and grad school, with my two kids. The bills, the stress, it took a toll on me and the kids, it was so difficult for all of us. Even after, working multiple jobs to put them through college so they wouldn’t have the burden of student loans. They now understand how difficult it was, why I did it. It wasn’t that way when they were still young. They thought me going to school and having multiple jobs was just me chasing money. Now they understand the need to pay bills. I now own a 20 acre farm in Southern California, have horses and dogs, see my kids and grandkids as often as I can, and know that I’ve worked and fought for every single bit of it. I’ve made my own bright future, as you have. I wish you the best of luck!!! I’m looking forward to your book!

Thank you so much! That’s very kind of you to say.

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I Used to Clean Houses. Then I Hired a Maid.

I know how grueling the job can be, and I swore I’d never ask someone to do it for me. But then I found myself in need of help.

Exactly one month before we got married, my fiancé and I made the final steps in combining our families. We were both full-time single parents—his kids 18 and 14, mine 12 and 5, with some dogs, fish, and a tortoise—moving into a house I described to acquaintances as “too big to clean” and to my close friends as, somewhat fondly, “a shithole.”

“It’s worse than any house I’ve ever had to clean,” I told one friend. As someone who’d just published a whole memoir about cleaning houses, this description spoke to the level of grime, dust, grease, and dog urine throughout. “I can’t walk around in bare feet,” I said. “I’m going to have to deep-clean the place from top to bottom.”

In interviews leading up to, during, and after the publication of my memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive , I was asked repeatedly whether I’d ever hire a housecleaner myself. “No,” I said, almost with my nose in the air. “I don’t want to live in a house that’s too big for me to clean myself.” A few times I laughed and said I’d never be able to afford a housecleaner because I’d tip so much, leaving $20 bills scattered about the house: one on the back of the toilet, one in the grimy bathtub, at least two in my kids’ bathroom. One reporter joked along with me, and then my eyes dropped down as I remembered the feeling of kneeling in front of a stranger’s toilet, and I said, “I could never ask someone to do that job.”

Read: The decline of domestic help

After months of searching, though, this huge house was the only one both available and big enough where the landlord actually returned our messages. We would make it ours, right? Our first home together. Besides, love is a rose-colored lens onto the world—including half a decade’s worth of grime covering every bare surface.

On moving day, I made trips up the stairs, hauling shelves and boxes of books. Boxes containing jars of rocks. Somewhere inside me, I knew the ridiculousness of moving piles of rocks, so I stubbornly hauled them up the steep stairs myself. By the end of the day, I had the box resting on my left thigh, my leg doing the work to get it up the stairs. I knew this wasn’t good for me to do. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing this. Years of pain, chiropractors, massage practitioners, and physical therapists for my scoliosis had taught me that.

Those with back pain might understand the sordid pop that happens at an unexpected time. Make one tiny movement, and there’s a pop and a deep ball of dread in your gut. Mine happened that night, while lifting the 5-year-old into her bed. By the time I lay down again, the numbness had begun. The lightning bolts of spasms. I immediately knew this was going to be bad.

Our first morning in our new house together, we all got to work unpacking and cleaning. I set out to deep-clean the kitchen—something I always do when moving into a new house—and a muscle in my back wouldn’t let me. I tried kneeling, sitting, anything to get the layer of sticky black grime off the front of the cabinets and the floor, and no position was comfortable. Grabbing onto a stool to stand, I leaned a hip into the counter and typed “Housecleaner Missoula Montana” into the search bar of my phone’s internet browser.

My shoulders drooped; I would have sunk to the floor in complete defeat if it weren’t speckled with black grease and dust. At first, a bunch of companies popped up, and I scrolled quickly past them. Cleaning companies often pay their employees less than a living wage and offer no sick days or health insurance. My years of working for them still made me grimace every time I saw a little yellow car with “Merry Maids” written on the side. I tried “Housekeeper” instead and found a few sole proprietors. Reviews were varied, and I sighed again. Then I saw one with five stars, and a good number of reviews. Then, “Michelle’s a single mom …”

I called and left a voicemail immediately.

When she called me back that night, she sounded tired, but relieved. I’d told her in my message that I needed help as soon as possible in moving into a house. I said whatever hours she could do were fine, even if she had to split them up.

“I had a client cancel her deep clean tomorrow afternoon, so this works out really good,” she said.

I told her I was glad, and said I’d text her the address after we hung up. She said she’d be there after her first house the next morning, sometime around 1, and I said that would be great.

Read: The price of ascending America’s class ladder

“How much do you usually charge?” I asked, knowing I’d pay her more.

“For this kind of thing, probably 30 an hour,” she said.

“Oh wow!” I said. “You get 30 an hour?!” Then I backtracked. “I used to clean houses in Missoula, but I charged like 15 to 20. That was a while ago, I guess.”

“Yeah,” she said, and nothing else.

I told her I’d see her tomorrow.

When Michelle arrived the next day, I put the dogs in the yard so they wouldn’t bother her. I’d already picked up the kitchen as much as I could, putting away all the dishes and clutter. I’d swept the floor. I’d grimaced at the thought of scrubbing it, even though that’s exactly what I had asked someone else to do. As Michelle walked into the kitchen, I fumbled through the story of hurting my back, and Michelle nodded, knowingly, and told me about her herniated disks. My hands found each other, and I fiddled with my ring.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll leave you to it. I have to check up on some emails today, so I’ll just be in the next room.”

Michelle nodded and walked toward the front door to get more supplies.

She ended up cleaning for four hours that afternoon, and I chatted with her a bit whenever I grabbed a glass of water, or something from the fridge. I gazed at her yellow gloves; her bucket full of water, soapy from Murphy’s Oil; and the scrubby sponge that looked to be on its last leg, but was new when she arrived. She was often on her knees or sitting when we talked, and I tried not to make a face. I remembered what it was like to talk to a client in the position Michelle was in: on her knees, looking up at a person the same age or younger who has hired you to clean a huge house by yourself , and I told her so, asking her if she needed anything.

“No,” she said, then asked how long I cleaned houses. We ended up talking for quite some time. I eventually told her about my book.

“Oh, my daughter would love to read that! She wants to be a writer,” Michelle said. I ran to get her a copy, pausing to personalize and sign it first.

When she left, I wrote a check for $40 an hour instead of $30, and said I might need more help with cleaning out my old house for my landlord. She smiled, and we agreed to keep in touch.

That night my back went out completely, and I was in bed for three days. The pain was some of the most excruciating I’d ever experienced; my left leg later went numb. By the time I saw Michelle again to do a walk-through at my old house, it was the third day I’d been able to walk more than a few feet, and I told her so.

“Yeah,” she said, rubbing her lower spine. “I hurt my back carrying a cooler this weekend when we were camping.” She’d already had a long day. “That’s why I was late getting here. Moving a little slower, I guess.”

“Oh God, don’t worry,” I said, wanting to hug her, but refraining. “I definitely know how that goes.” I shifted my weight from my left leg, almost standing on one foot from the feeling of numbness and residual pain. “So,” I began, “you won’t have to do much here, I don’t think,” and I started to walk into the garage.

Michelle did the move-out clean while I was in California for a speaking gig, texting how well it worked out because a couple of other clients had canceled and she really needed some hours to fill. She quoted me a price and ended up charging me close to it, but I paid her a lot more. When she texted about what she thought was a mistake, I told her the extra money was a tip, grateful to be able to afford to do that.

Days after Michelle had cleaned out my old house, when I finally went back to finish clearing out the garage, I slowly walked through each room. Everything looked so perfect, so spotless, I couldn’t believe she’d done it in a day. Michelle left lines in the carpet, placed onto the kitchen counter the little toys and bouncy balls she’d found tucked into the girls’ closets, and folded the toilet-paper rolls into a triangle. I smiled, looking down at that little detail, wondering whether my clients had ever appreciated my work the way I was now appreciating hers.

Then my mind traveled back to a moment from the previous week when I was showing her around that place. I had been standing in the bathroom when I looked down at the toilet and let out a huge sigh. Asking her to clean my new kitchen was one thing—it wasn’t my mess. And for the most part, the move-out clean was pretty basic: vacuuming, mopping, washing the windows, and such. But asking her to clean the toilet—the one thing I’d said, even boasted, I’d never do—pained me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cleaned my old bathroom, maybe a week before I’d moved out, and I knew from experience there were spots beneath the rim and at the base that would require attention. I knew my back wouldn’t let me clean it, so I had to ask her to do it for me. There I was.

“This is hard for me, asking you to do this.” I looked down, knowing she would have to get on her knees to get behind the base, basically hugging a stranger’s toilet. “I told myself I’d never ask someone to do this.” My voice cracked.

She gave me a half smile, and for a second I thought she was going to pat my shoulder. “We all need help sometimes,” she said to me. I knew it was true, people need help, but if it weren’t for my physical inability, I wouldn’t have considered asking for it. I looked down and nodded, feeling the familiar negative thoughts of failure. I breathed in, and instead let the vulnerability pour into me. In that profound moment, I believed her. I needed help. And that was, for once, okay.

The Housemaid

62 pages • 2 hours read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 12

Part 1, Chapters 13-27

Part 1, Chapters 28-37

Part 2, Chapters 38-50

Part 3, Chapter 51-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

The Housemaid (2022) is a mystery novel written by Freida McFadden. The story follows Millie Calloway, a young woman with a criminal past, who is employed as a housekeeper by a rich woman, Nina Winchester , with a seeming mental health condition. McFadden is the author of multiple bestselling psychological thriller novels. In The Housemaid , McFadden explores themes of discipline and power, and victimhood and abuse.

This guide is based on the Bookouture Kindle edition.

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Content Warning : This book describes violence, domestic abuse, and attempted death by suicide.

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In the Prologue, an unnamed maid worries about being arrested after a body is found in the house where she works. The story behind this incident begins as Wilhelmina “Millie” Calloway interviews for a job as a live-in housekeeper for Nina Winchester, a rich, middle-aged woman. Despite her criminal record, she gets the job and moves into the mansion. She’s given a tiny room in the attic that only locks from the outside and has a window that doesn’t open. Unnerved, Millie requests a key, which Nina gives her along with a new phone.

The landscaper, Enzo , warns her of danger but won’t elaborate. She meets Nina’s handsome husband, Andrew, and her nine-year-old daughter, Cecelia. Millie spends hours cleaning the filthy house before fixing dinner. Andrew compliments her cooking and invites her to join them, but she declines, as Nina seems irritated. During the night, when Millie wakes to use the bathroom, the doorknob sticks, and she starts to panic; she gets the door open but has a sense of foreboding.

Unpredictable and high-strung, Nina oscillates between being warm and friendly toward Millie, giving her old clothes that don’t fit her anymore and insisting that Millie call her “Nina,” and accusing Millie of things she hasn’t done, creating huge messes in the house, and yelling at Millie to clean them up. Cecelia is a spoiled bratty child; the only tolerable member of the family is Andrew, who is kind and appreciates everything Millie does. Millie hears gossip from other mothers and nannies about Nina’s mental health and discovers an “antipsychotic” medication, among others, in Nina’s bathroom cabinet. In addition, she learns that Nina spent time in a psychiatric hospital after trying to kill Cecelia when she was a baby.

Nina and Andrew separately confide in Millie that they’re trying to have a child. Andrew is especially excited to be a father; Cecelia isn’t his biological daughter. However, a fertility specialist determines that Nina can’t have more children, which devastates the couple. The next night, Millie overhears Nina raging at Andrew about how a younger woman would make him happier. To cheer Nina up, Andrew asks Millie to book tickets to a Broadway show; however, Nina gives her the wrong dates and can’t go. Andrew pacifies Nina and, once she leaves, offers Millie the tickets; she has no one to go with, so Andrew accompanies her. They have a great time and drink too much at dinner afterward, so they stay at a hotel in the city overnight. They give in to their mutual attraction and have sex but agree that it can’t happen again. However, Millie soon realizes that Nina knows about her and Andrew. Nina makes Millie’s life hell and even accuses Millie of stealing the clothes she gave her. Andrew defends Millie, confessing that he has feelings for her, and orders Nina to leave.

After Nina leaves, Andrew and Millie sleep together, and he claims that he wants to give them a real shot. In the morning, Andrew fires Enzo, whom he says hangs around the house too much. While grocery shopping, Millie runs into a friend of Nina’s, who reveals that Nina installed a tracking app on Millie’s phone. Stunned, she returns home and spends the day reading. She receives a phone call from a blocked number, warning her to stay away from Andrew, and assumes that the caller is Nina. As Millie packs her things to move into the main house, Andrew comes home. Millie doesn’t disclose the day’s details concerning Nina, and she and Andrew sleep together in her room. She wakes up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and finds herself locked in; her is phone missing, and three heavy books have mysteriously appeared.

A flashback from Nina’s perspective reveals the true events of the past years. Nina is forced to drop out of college and begin working after she gets pregnant after a drunken one-night stand. Andrew is the CEO of the company where she works. A charming, handsome man, he asks her out. After a whirlwind courtship, they marry, but she soon learns that he has hidden sadistic tendencies. He often locks her in the attic and tortures her as punishment for minor transgressions. He drugs her and her baby, places Cecelia in a bathtub, and makes it look like Nina did it, which lands her in a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of depression and delusions, ensuring that no one will believe her account of things.

After trying to escape, Nina confides in Enzo, who tells her that his sister was in a similar situation and died because of her husband’s abuse. Enzo promises to help Nina escape, and she decides to hire someone to replace her. She finds Millie and, through a private investigator, learns that Millie was in prison for murder—in high school, she killed a boy who tried to force himself on her friend. Millie’s pretty face belies a long history of violent retaliation against people who wronged her. Nina hires Millie to kill Andrew but doesn’t tell Enzo this. Millie is young and pretty, ensuring that Andrew will be attracted to her, and is desperate for a job. She stays on despite Nina’s mistreatment of her. Nina deliberately drives Millie to hate her, framing her as a victim to earn Andrew’s sympathy, and sets up opportunities for Andrew and Millie to be alone together. This culminates in Andrew and Millie sleeping together and Andrew throwing Nina out of the house.

Andrew eventually returns to Millie, who is locked in the attic, and instructs her to balance the heavy books on her stomach for three hours as punishment for not replacing the books she read. He makes her repeat the exercise after she falls short by a minute the first time; when he opens the door, however, Millie pepper-sprays him with a bottle Nina left for her in the room, steals Andrew’s phone, and turns the tables on him, locking him in and torturing him similarly.

Meanwhile, Enzo, who has been watching the house, worries because Millie hasn’t left the house in days; he calls Nina, insisting that they go back to help. When Nina returns, she finds the house empty; assuming that Millie is locked upstairs, she unlocks to door to help and finds Andrew’s decomposing remains. Millie appears, confessing to locking Andrew in for almost six days. She begins to cry, worried that she’ll go back to prison for life. Not wanting Millie to bear the consequences of something she tricked her into doing, Nina asks her to leave.

During the detective’s interrogation, Nina learns that his daughter was once engaged to Andrew. Although she never disclosed what happened, she changed her name and moved away. The detective reveals that the police never investigated Nina’s claims of being locked in the attic because of the pull that the Winchesters had over the department. He rules Andrew’s death an accident and closes the case. At Andrew’s wake, Evelyn Winchester, Andrew’s mother, reveals to Nina that she disciplined Andrew as a child in a similar manner to how Andrew tortured Nina. She praises Nina for stepping up and disciplining Andrew in this way, and then she walks away.

Nina and Cecelia move to California, while Millie lives off money that Nina sends her after Andrew’s death. Almost a year later, Millie interviews for a job at another household, with a woman to whom Nina recommended her. Millie realizes that the woman is being abused by her husband and assures her that she can help her.

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The Housemaid

In 1881, the housemaid at Shibden Hall was Louisa Ann Kitchener who was 29. She was born in Berkshire, many miles from Halifax.

Louisa worked for the family for over 20 years, eventually becoming the Housekeeper to the family. A number of her relations also worked at Shibden.

The housemaid was responsible for keeping the house clean and in order. She was meant to do much of this out of view of the family and so had to rise very early in the morning to complete her work. It was also necessary to keep to a very strict routine to ensure that all the work was done. Each hour of the day and each day of the week had clearly defined tasks.

If, as at Shibden, there were other subordinate maids, the head housemaid would be responsible for supervising their work, and would do the cleaning in the ‘best’ rooms of the house, particularly cleaning the most important pieces of furniture and ornaments.

In smaller households where there was no lady’s maid, the housemaid was also responsible for helping to dress the mistress of the house and to care for her clothes.

The Under Housemaid

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Heartbreaking Netflix series 'Maid' is based on the true story of this single mom

If you or someone you know is experiencing relationship abuse in any form, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for free, confidential support 24/7/365. Text START to 88788, call 1-800-799-SAFE(7233) or chat online at TheHotline.org .

Stephanie Land worked as a maid walking the tightrope of poverty and homelessness for years chasing the American dream. Then, she wrote the memoir “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive.”

The bestselling book, which caught the attention of esteemed leaders like former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris, highlights the reality of people who live off of low-paid service work — a population in America that Land refers to as “invisible.”

Released in 2019, Land’s memoir has since been adapted into the critically-acclaimed, unflinching Netflix miniseries “Maid,” starring actor Margaret Qualley . Despite the title of both the book and series, each have proven to be about much more than a female protagonist tasked with cleaning the homes of the affluent.

“I wanted the book to be more about domestic violence and, and kind of the estrangement from family and then making it to college,” Land said in an exclusive interview with TODAY.

Living in poverty

The autobiography chronicles Land in her 20’s and 30’s as a financially-strained single mom, survivor of domestic abuse and nomad, taking odd jobs such as cleaning bathrooms at the homes of friends and working in landscaping. She explained that she did it all to provide for her child, who now goes by their middle name “Story" and uses they/them pronouns.

While documenting her time as a maid, Land wrote about the various peculiarities in the homes she cleaned. She named most of the homes after their anomalies — titles like “Porn House,” “Sad House,” “Farm House,” and the “Cigarette Lady’s House.”

She said that throughout the years, naming homes for their obscurities became her only creative outlet.

Land explained that she worked as a maid to put dinner on the table and to provide some sort of structure for her child who went to daycare during the hours she cleaned.

“I think a lot of my determination was making their life as best as possible,” she said. “Kids kind of keep you structured in some way because they need structure really bad.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CU3wSE1lamr

Land said that after a string of domestic abuse incidents initiated by Story’s father, Jamie, she took Story and moved into a homeless shelter with only $100 in her pocket.

“However temporary, I had done my best to make the cabin a home for my daughter,” Land wrote in her memoir. “I’d placed a yellow sheet over the love seat not only to warm the looming white walls and gray floors, but to offer something bright and cheerful during a dark time.”

No matter how capable Land tried to appear for her child, she noted in her memoir that she didn’t always feel secure in her usual optimism. She even would occasionally pretend that her life were different.

“If I focused on the portrait of the family I wanted to be, I could pretend the bad parts weren’t real; like this life was a temporary state of being, not a new existence,” Land wrote.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUyvUBTFGuI

She said that she lived in a constant state of fear that she would one day be “forced to hand over” her child to a man she said she knew “was dangerous.”

Jamie’s frequent outbursts quickly turned into emotionally violent threats . And though the abuse that she suffered was reality, Land revealed to TODAY that she would oftentimes find herself thinking that no one would believe her pain if she lacked marks and bruises.

“I would go to the post office in town, and people would stop me and say, 'I can't believe you're taking this child away from their dad, like, how horrible can you be?'” she recalled. “Even in the court system, I mean, I was told a reasonable person wouldn't feel threatened by his actions.”

When Jamie's threats turned into physical blows, Land said that she took careful note of his actions so she could tell the court.

“When he finally punched out the window in the door, it was like I finally had physical evidence and something that I could show somebody,” she said. “It was like a certificate that I wasn't crazy, because before that, he had convinced even my family that I was just desperate for him to love me, and was doing everything that I could including having a whole entire human to stay with him in some way.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CU_cCGKFsiL

While fighting for custody of Story, she was also fighting for her own will to survive and even recalled losing part of herself during the fight.

“Had I turned the camera around, I wouldn’t have recognized myself. The few photos of me showed almost a different person, possibly the skinniest I had been in my whole life,” Land wrote in her memoir.

"In the mirror, there was that woman — overworked but without any money to show for it.”

Land was on seven forms of government assistance and she needed every single one to help her get through to the next day.

And it would take years before Land truly recognized what she had gone through.

With the help of a therapist, Land said she was able to “identify that it was actual abuse, that some of his actions were actually rape and, and I had this kind of mind blowing couple of months of realizing what I have actually been through and how much trauma that had caused.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CWfNzGjrIKO

“I don't think I really accepted that it was some kind of abuse until we moved to Montana,” Land said.

Trading toilets for transcripts

In 2008, Land left Washington and moved to Montana with Story to attend college. She enrolled in the creative writing program, following her passion of becoming a writer.

“I knew that I would just be miserable if I didn't at least try to be a writer, because I've known I was a writer since I was, you know, 10 years old,” she said.

After earning her degree in 2014, Land became a fellow at the Center for Community Change in Washington D.C. Before landing a publishing deal for her memoir in 2016, Land wrote for various websites shining a light on her life as a poor and single mom.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CXCJBrBBZwM

When her first essay went viral, Land was certain that she misunderstood.

“I got paid $500 for that essay, and, and I thought I had hit the jackpot," she told TODAY. "I thought it was a mistake.”

Soon after, she was contacted for a book deal and was able to quit her other jobs.

The humble author — who at one point did not have enough money to afford a burger — successfully pursued her dream of becoming a writer. When her memoir debuted, it appeared as No. 3 on the nonfiction chart of The New York Times. When the miniseries premiered in October 2021, it put her memoir back on the NYT nonfiction list, where it lived for nine weeks.

The three-time Golden Globe nominated series enthralled an audience of over 67 million in the first four weeks and is set to become Netflix’s top-watched limited series.

Despite the wide-acclaim and recognition, Land said it wasn’t all that easy reliving what she views as the most difficult time in her life, even calling some of the moments she watched “traumatic.”

“It was really difficult, I think, because they got so many things right. It was just so similar to what I experienced,” she told TODAY.

Land also revealed that watching the show with Story was especially difficult for her.

"At one point, they turned to me and said, 'Was it really like that with my dad?'" Land explained. "And I had to say, yeah, that's pretty close to what it was."

Though after a few episodes, she explained that she was able to enjoy the story for “its own creation,” and referred to the series as both “gorgeous” and “brilliant.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CWY0Wo8lcBV

When riches did come, Land said she didn’t trade in her rags so fast.

“I was just so scared that I was going to screw it up somehow. And that is, I think, you know, when you go from food stamps to being able to buy a house and a new car in a very short amount of time, like nothing really seems like it's going to last because it came on so quickly," she said. "And so I don't know if I'll ever stop hustling.”

And she was hustling since the day she put pen to paper.

Land added that she recognizes her privilege as a white person in America and understood what would sell.

“'I’ve kind of known since my book started getting a lot of attention, like a year before it was published that people were grasping on to my story because it was a story told by a white person," she said. "And a privilege story, it's a success story. It's the rags to riches story, it's all of these things that society in general really loves to listen to."

She explained that's her motivation to "stand up and talk about it and advocate.”

“I always thought if they're listening to me that maybe they'll listen to other people,” she said.

What Land is doing now

Before she got her book deal, Land saw America’s divide first-hand and albeit her triumphs, the activist has not lost sight of her past.

The author and activist has garnered nearly 140,000 followers across her social media accounts and is using her voice to “expose the reality of what it’s like to pursue the myth of the American Dream while being held back at the poverty line.”

Since the book’s release, Land has been traveling the United States, voicing her struggles and successes. She plans to continue raising her voice, “speaking up for the invisible people who are struggling to survive.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CW1edYiFxdK

In addition to the memoir and the limited series, Land has a multitude of published essays centered around social justice, single parenting, domestic violence and more. She also co-founded a freelance writing course to share her breadth of knowledge with aspiring writers.

Land conquered her goal of pulling her and Story out of poverty. She now has another child — a daughter named Coraline — and a husband, plus two stepchildren. She also has a stable food supply, a roof over her head and even a “she-shed” to write in.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYK6Otxl7cy

But her journey is far from over. This year, Land plans to continue traveling the country exposing the reality of what it's like to be a low-paid service worker in America.

“Domestic work in the service industry is the backbone of our society, and what makes all other work possible," she told TODAY. "And so we're asking all these people to support us, and we're not supporting them."

Land is currently working on writing her second book, “Class," where she plans to address the inaccessible nature of higher education for low income populations.

Watch CBS News

"Maid" author Stephanie Land on the struggles of emotional abuse and what people get wrong about welfare

By Zoe Christen Jones

November 1, 2021 / 12:01 PM EDT / CBS News

Before her memoir "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive" was even an idea, Stephanie Land was a single mother who had escaped an abusive relationship, was living in a homeless shelter and cleaned houses for money.

Land was inadvertently thrust into the private lives of her clients, getting an up-close and personal look at how the other half lives. She began journaling everything she witnessed, which turned into a small piece, then a viral essay , and eventually, a bestselling memoir. It even made former President Barack Obama's summer reading list in 2019. He called it an "unflinching look at America's class divide."

The Netflix adaptation, "Maid," debuted on October 1, exposing an entirely new audience to a fictionalized version of Land's life. The series follows Alex, a hardworking mother played by Margaret Qualley, who grapples with leaving an abusive relationship as she struggles to survive in a system that seems destined to fail her. 

CBS News spoke with Land about how she wrote "Maid," the feelings of watching your life's story become a television show, and what people don't understand about welfare. 

CBS News: "Maid" was a big hit when it was first published. Why do you think your story resonated so strongly with readers at that time, and why do you think it continues to entice audiences? 

Stephanie Land: Going into publication, I thought people would be attracted to that story because it was a true story of a house cleaner. I think there was a lot of voyeurism there. 

I assumed that people would pick up the book to read and purchase it because of that: "What's it like to be inside of other people's houses?" But I tried to kind of give them a gut punch on how the safety net programs and the government assistance programs and that what we think of as welfare is actually a system that works against you.

I really didn't think that people were going to listen to that or care about it because I had lived such an invisible life. There was a part of me that knew why they were listening. I mean, I'm a White person. I am a success story. I'm on the other side of things. We don't like to listen to people who are still angry, who are still in poverty, especially people of color. I kind of saw that happening leading up to it and it terrified me. 

But I at least hoped that if they were listening to me they would start listening to others and it would open doors for more marginalized people to talk about their lives. 

Tell me about the experience of watching your story come to life?

There were obviously a lot of mixed emotions. (My child and I) watched the first two episodes in my bed on my laptop, kind of cuddled up together. It was of course really triggering and hard to watch and traumatic in some parts. It was also a huge relief to see how good it was and how authentic it was. 

The reason why I wanted to write the book that I did was because I never saw myself in any form of media. There was no authentic representation of my life anywhere. Our main purpose of writing is so we don't feel alone and that others don't feel alone. So before i watched the series, I was really nervous because there's so many ways you can get poverty wrong and perpetuate stigmas even more. But the creators did such a fantastic job and I was so thrilled that it was something that I could proudly stand by and talk about. 

What influences of yours can you see in the final product? 

Definitely the ponies. 

(In one episode, a fellow resident at the battered women's shelter gives Alex and her daughter hundreds of left-over My Little Pony dolls. Alex and her daughter parade around the house with the toys, in one of the first times the shelter feels like home). 

They were mentioned very briefly in a sentence in the book, but when I got to hang out with the creators, they all came to Washington and did the "Trauma tour." We drove around, I showed them the trailer that I lived in but I also shared hundreds of photos with them. They recreated a lot of those and one of those things was the ponies. 

And that was the first time I cried watching the show. 

The show almost makes you root for the abuser in some episodes. Was it important to show how difficult emotional abuse can be to categorize? Is that something others have confided in you about? 

Someone told me they didn't like that Sean was a likable character and they had feelings or some kind of sympathy for him. I thought they did really well with showing that this person who is totally charming on the outside and everybody else thinks is this wonderful guy, everybody's heartthrob, can be really violent at home and just kicks you down in so many ways. And it was really incredible how close to my experience that was. 

I've been getting a lot of comments about "I realize my current relationship is toxic and I need to leave, or "I was able to process past relationships and be more forgiving of myself" and I had a lot of people either tweet or comment that they immediately donated to a domestic violence shelter or started volunteering. 

In the book, I didn't really talk up the emotional abuse because one, my kid was going to read. But two, I didn't want to make the story about him. I didn't want to give him more space than he deserved, so if focused more on how it affected me. The "show don't tell" type of writing I guess. 

But now that the series is out, that's a lot of the focus. It's been fifteen years and I don't really think about him unless I absolutely have to and I didn't realize... It's been weird what has come up for me physically and how it feels to talk about that time in my life again. I don't know… the body remembers and I think the series is doing that for a lot of people. 

What have you learned since you wrote your book? How have you grown both as a mother and your own person? 

I think my biggest role as a parent is teaching empathy. I of course wanted them to be smart and to read and write, but they kind of do that on their own. But I dole out lessons in empathy as much as I can, [which is] not only my biggest challenge but my goal in being a parent. 

I also think I've learned how important it is to be able to advocate for others. As my platform has grown and the reach of my audience has grown, I have continued to be very raw. I also started to get really angry. 

I am not an angry person, I try to avoid it as much as possible, but the more I spoke in public speaking events, not only the book tour audiences but the public speaking audiences, they were mainly White people who maybe had house cleaners of their own. But for non-profits, who had the ability to reach others in their communities and still chose to fly me out,  I basically tell them it shouldn't be me up here. You need to listen to people in your own communities and you especially need to listen to people of color. I think even though it's exhausting for me, I see an importance in my role in advocating.

What emotions get brought up when discussions of national safety nets like child tax credits or paid leave get placed on a national stage? What do you think people misunderstand about the nature of poverty? 

The thing is, most of the people on safety net programs are working already and they're working two to three jobs just to feed their families. When I was on food stamps, there were a lot of talks and memes and hatred on social media about how we need to drug test people on welfare. And it really affected me for a really long time. I just constantly felt like someone was watching me, like, if I sat down and wasn't working for a few minutes, I felt like suddenly I had lost value as a human being because so much of my value and dignity was wrapped up in how many hours I could work. 

I just think America is so work-focused, and it goes back to that stupid American myth that if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps then you'll make. But if you're not making it, then [people] think you're just not working hard enough. They forget people aren't actually being paid a living wage. 

It's also because we assign dignity to the type of jobs people do. People think that the janitor in the airport has less dignity than the pilot does and really the janitor is supporting that pilot and making that pilot's job possible.  So, I think that we really just need to take dignity out of the equation as far as work is concerned and assign it all to us equally as human beings. I think we all deserve the same amount of dignity. 

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Review: Love, Anger and Disgusting Toilets in Netflix’s ‘Maid’

Margaret Qualley plays a woman cleaning houses, and not always getting by, in an adaptation of a best-selling memoir.

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By Mike Hale

“Maid” begins just after the last straw has been broken. Alex, a 25-year-old aspiring writer living north of Seattle, lies awake watching the man who just ended an argument with her by punching a hole in a wall. When she’s sure he’s asleep, she gathers their 2-year-old daughter, Maddy, and tiptoes out of the mobile home they share. She and Maddy are about to be homeless for the first time, but not the last.

Across the 10 roughly hourlong episodes of “Maid,” premiering Friday on Netflix , Alex (Margaret Qualley) and Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) undertake a bitter, circular, hugely frustrating journey through the precincts of poverty. They move in and out of domestic violence shelters, halfway houses, friends’ and relatives’ homes and, for a particularly dismal spell, back into the trailer. A counter pops up onscreen with a running tally of Alex’s diminishing funds when she’s pumping gas or making agonizing purchasing decisions in a convenience store.

And “Maid” itself can be a frustrating experience, sometimes moving and convincing, sometimes scattered and trite. It was adapted from Stephanie Land’s memoir “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive” by Molly Smith Metzler, a writer and producer whose credits include “Orange Is the New Black” and “Shameless.”

It’s no surprise that Land’s modest, straightforward book, with its nuts-and-bolts account of the housecleaning work she took on to support herself and her daughter, has been radically transformed — only the broadest outlines of her story, along with the usual smattering of arresting or convenient details, have been retained. (Even some of those details have changed: the Oreck vacuum that Land hauled to her cleaning gigs is, in Alex’s hands, a Dyson.)

It’s too bad, though, that the expansions on Land’s tale tend toward clichéd story lines involving mental illness, alcoholism and recovery — worthwhile and sometimes well-made but utterly familiar. The material dealing directly with domestic violence is also more well meaning than dramatic. It may move you, but it won’t surprise you.

Slightly lost, or diminished, in the reimagining is the central place of housecleaning itself, and the critique of the class and economic structures that can put a working single mother in a nearly inescapable box. It’s not that the physical toll and meager payoff of Alex’s work, or her observations about the lives and houses of her clients, don’t get screen time. But they’re not as central as they could be — they tend to be there to embellish or illustrate other, more melodramatic story lines. You don’t get the feeling that Metzler or her fellow executive producer John Wells (“The West Wing,” among others) were that engaged by the maid angle, or spent much time thinking about how to incorporate it organically into a standard television drama plot.

In “Maid,” that plot is built around two opposed sets of characters, divided by gender. On the male side are Maddy’s father, Sean (Nick Robinson), and grandfather, Hank (Billy Burke), both with addiction and anger issues, whose violence has had the largest role in derailing Alex’s life.

On the female side are Alex’s mother, Paula (Andie MacDowell, Qualley’s mother), a bipolar free spirit and narcissist who is an enormous burden on Alex, along with two women who throw out life lines: Denise (BJ Harrison), the manager of a domestic violence shelter, and Regina (Anika Noni Rose), a testy, tightly wound lawyer whose house Alex cleans.

These talented performers do their best with parts that feel like writers’ room composites. MacDowell can’t do much with Paula, whose inappropriateness and hurtfulness take on cartoonish dimensions. Rose, on the other hand, makes something sharp and touching out of Regina’s insecurities, even in a dreadful scene in which she unburdens herself to Alex over chardonnay and Thanksgiving pies.

If you stick with “Maid,” though, it will be because of Qualley, who is onscreen virtually every minute. (She’s helped tremendously by the charming Whittet as Maddy.) “Maid” is a test of endurance for both character and actress, and Qualley’s businesslike, warily tight-lipped performance (quite different from her provocative Pussycat in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”) is a good match for the proud, sometimes abrasive, reflexively suspicious Alex.

Wells, who directed four episodes, and the rest of the crew, including the cinematographers Quyen Tran, Guy Godfree and Vincent de Paula, give “Maid” a burnished, engaging look, helped by the Washington and British Columbia locations. Beyond that, the mini-series doesn’t exactly have a style — there are elements of wry comedy, of social-problem bleakness and of teenage-drama dreaminess, along with recurring touches of magical realism that illustrate Alex’s writerly imagination (such as when, in a very low moment in the trailer, she literally sinks into a couch).

But maybe that is a style: the Netflix method, for when you’ve committed 10 episodes to what would have made a good two-hour movie.

Mike Hale is a television critic. He also writes about online video, film and media. He came to The Times in 1995 and worked as an editor in Sports, Arts & Leisure and Weekend Arts before becoming a critic in 2009. More about Mike Hale

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30 House Maid Interview Questions and Answers

Common House Maid interview questions, how to answer them, and example answers from a certified career coach.

Entering the world of domestic work as a house maid requires diligence, attention to detail, and a strong dedication to providing high-quality service. It’s about creating a clean, organized, and comfortable environment for homeowners while demonstrating respect and care for their personal space.

While many people might underestimate the skills required for this role, experienced employers know that hiring the right house maid can make all the difference in their household. Therefore, it is essential to prepare thoroughly for your interview.

In this article, we provide insight into some common interview questions posed to prospective house maids, along with suggestions on how to answer them effectively and confidently. With these tips, you’ll be able to showcase your ability to meet and exceed the expectations associated with this vital role.

1. Can you describe your previous experience as a House Maid?

It’s a way for potential employers to gauge your familiarity with the tasks associated with the job. As a house maid, you’re expected to perform a variety of tasks ranging from cleaning and organizing to cooking and laundry. The more experience you have, the more likely you are to be effective and efficient in your role. This question helps potential employers to understand your skills, work history, and level of expertise.

Example: “I have over five years of experience as a house maid. My tasks included cleaning, laundry, cooking and childcare. I am highly skilled at maintaining cleanliness and organization in all areas of the house.

My previous employers appreciated my attention to detail and ability to anticipate their needs. For instance, I often prepared meals based on dietary preferences without needing specific instructions each time.

Furthermore, I’ve handled childcare duties for children aged 2-12, including school drop-offs and pick-ups, meal preparation, and assisting with homework.

Overall, my goal is always to create a comfortable and clean environment for families.”

2. What methods do you use to prioritize your tasks throughout the day?

When employers ask this question, they’re trying to gauge your organization skills and how well you can manage your time. As a house maid, you’ll likely have a long list of tasks to complete each day, and the ability to prioritize these tasks effectively ensures that the most important jobs get done first and nothing is overlooked.

Example: “To prioritize my tasks, I start by understanding the needs and preferences of the household. For instance, if there are children in the house, their needs often come first.

I also consider the urgency of each task. Some chores like cooking or laundry need to be done at specific times while others can be flexible.

Moreover, I use a list system where I jot down all tasks for the day and check them off as they’re completed. This helps me stay organized and ensures nothing is overlooked.

Lastly, I try to multitask when it’s efficient. For example, cleaning one room while laundry is going on. However, I ensure this doesn’t compromise the quality of work.”

3. How do you handle a situation where you are unable to complete all tasks in a given day?

The essence of this question lies in evaluating your time management and problem-solving abilities. As a house maid, your job involves juggling multiple tasks, some of which may take longer than expected. Employers want to know how you prioritize your duties and how you communicate with them when unexpected circumstances disrupt your schedule.

Example: “In situations where I can’t complete all tasks, I prioritize based on urgency and importance. If something unexpected arises, I communicate this promptly to my employer, providing a realistic timeline for when the remaining tasks will be completed. I believe in managing expectations and maintaining open communication to ensure smooth operations.”

4. Can you provide an example of a challenging situation you faced in your previous job and how you solved it?

In the housekeeping industry, you’re bound to run into a variety of challenges, from dealing with stubborn stains to navigating difficult client requests. The hiring manager wants to see how you handle these situations. Your ability to problem-solve, adapt, and maintain a professional demeanor is key to your success in this role.

Example: “In my previous job, I faced a challenging situation when the family’s toddler was having frequent tantrums. It disrupted the household routine and caused stress for everyone.

I decided to approach this issue by understanding what triggered these tantrums. After observing for a few days, I realized that they often occurred when the child felt ignored or hungry.

To solve this, I ensured that the child had regular meals and snacks throughout the day. I also made sure to involve him in simple tasks around the house, like setting the table, which made him feel included and valued. This significantly reduced his tantrums and restored peace in the home.”

5. How do you ensure that you maintain the privacy of the household members while performing your duties?

Privacy is a paramount concern for most households hiring a maid. The question is designed to assess your understanding and respect for the privacy of the household members. They want to ensure that you can perform your tasks without interfering with the personal space of the family and that you understand the boundaries that come with your role.

Example: “Maintaining privacy is crucial in a household setting. I ensure this by respecting personal spaces and boundaries, not entering rooms or areas unless necessary for my tasks. Confidentiality is also key; any information I come across during my work stays within the house. Furthermore, I avoid discussing private matters unless directly addressed by the family members. Lastly, I believe that trustworthiness is vital in maintaining privacy, so I always strive to be reliable and trustworthy in all aspects of my job.”

6. What steps do you take to ensure the safety of children and elderly in the house?

Safety is a paramount concern when you’re responsible for a home that houses children and elderly individuals. They’re often the most vulnerable and require extra attention to safeguard. This question helps the employer gauge your awareness and proactive approach to ensuring their safety, whether it’s through child-proofing certain areas, recognizing potential hazards, or understanding the unique needs of older adults.

Example: “To ensure the safety of children and elderly, I prioritize creating a safe environment. This includes removing potential hazards such as sharp objects or small items that could be swallowed by children. For the elderly, I make sure walking paths are clear to prevent falls.

I also believe in active supervision especially for children during playtime or when they’re eating. With the elderly, it’s important to assist them with mobility and provide help with tasks that might pose a risk like cooking or bathing.

Emergency preparedness is crucial too. I am trained in first aid and CPR which can be vital in case of accidents. Regularly checking smoke detectors and knowing emergency exits are part of this plan.

Lastly, maintaining cleanliness reduces health risks. So, I ensure all areas are clean, food is safely stored, and personal hygiene is encouraged.”

7. How do you manage your time effectively when you have a large list of tasks to complete?

Time management is a crucial skill in housekeeping, as you can often have a long list of tasks that need to be completed within a certain timeframe. With this question, hiring managers want to understand your ability to prioritize and organize tasks efficiently, ensuring that all jobs are done thoroughly, but without wasting time. They are interested in knowing if you can manage your time wisely to accomplish all tasks at hand.

Example: “To manage my time effectively, I prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance. For instance, cleaning tasks that are needed for immediate use like the kitchen or bathroom would be done first.

I also believe in multitasking where it’s efficient. While laundry is being done, I can simultaneously clean other areas of the house.

Lastly, planning ahead helps me stay organized. At the end of each day, I review what needs to be done the next day so I can hit the ground running. This approach ensures all tasks get completed in a timely manner without compromising quality.”

8. What strategies do you use to maintain cleanliness and order in a large house?

The essence of a house maid’s role is to keep a house clean, orderly, and comfortable. Employers need to know that you have a system or strategy in place to handle the vast array of tasks involved in maintaining a large house. Having a methodical approach not only ensures all tasks are completed efficiently, but it also demonstrates your ability to manage your time and resources, which are critical skills for this role.

Example: “To maintain cleanliness and order in a large house, I prioritize tasks based on the frequency they need to be done. Daily tasks include tidying up common areas, doing dishes, and laundry. Weekly tasks could involve deeper cleaning such as vacuuming or dusting.

I also believe in the ‘clean as you go’ approach which prevents messes from accumulating. For example, wiping down counters immediately after use.

Furthermore, organization is key. Everything should have a designated place so it’s easy to tidy up.

Lastly, for larger tasks like spring cleaning, I break them into manageable parts over several days to ensure thoroughness without overwhelming myself.”

9. How would you handle a situation where a household member is not satisfied with your work?

The essence of a housemaid’s job lies in ensuring the comfort and satisfaction of the household members. Therefore, an employer would want to know how you’d react to criticism or dissatisfaction. It’s a test of your problem-solving skills, your ability to handle feedback, and your commitment to providing the best service possible.

Example: “In such a situation, I would first seek to understand their dissatisfaction by asking for specific feedback. Once I have a clear understanding of their concerns, I would apologize for any inconvenience caused and assure them that I will make immediate improvements.

I believe in continuous learning and improvement, so constructive criticism is always welcome. It helps me better my skills and meet the expectations of those I serve. My goal is to provide excellent service consistently and ensure household members are satisfied with my work.”

10. Describe your approach to handling delicate items or antiques during cleaning.

Your potential employer wants assurance that you can handle valuable and possibly fragile items with the appropriate care. This is particularly important for roles in homes or establishments where antiques or delicate items are present. Your response will demonstrate your understanding of the importance of these items and your ability to handle them with the necessary caution.

Example: “When handling delicate items or antiques, I prioritize safety. I ensure to wear gloves to prevent oils from my hands causing damage. For dusting, I use a soft microfiber cloth to avoid scratching surfaces.

If an item is particularly fragile, I may opt for a gentle brush instead. When cleaning intricate areas, cotton swabs can be useful.

For heavier cleaning, I use mild soaps and warm water sparingly, ensuring the item dries completely afterwards to prevent moisture damage.

I also take care not to expose these items to extreme temperatures or direct sunlight which could cause fading or cracking. It’s all about being meticulous and respectful of the value these items hold.”

11. How proficient are you in using modern cleaning equipment and tools?

Cleaning has come a long way from just brooms and mops. Today’s maid service might require knowledge in using advanced cleaning equipment such as steam cleaners, vacuum cleaners, power washers, and more. The use of such tools not only enhances the efficiency of cleaning but also improves the quality. Therefore, employers want to know your familiarity and proficiency with these tools to ensure you can deliver the best possible service.

Example: “I am highly proficient in using modern cleaning equipment and tools. I have hands-on experience with various devices such as vacuum cleaners, floor polishers, steam cleaners, and carpet shampooers. I also know how to use microfiber cloths, scrub brushes, and squeegees effectively for different surfaces. Understanding the correct usage of cleaning agents is crucial too, and I am well-versed in this area. My skills ensure a thorough clean without causing damage to property.”

12. Can you cook? If yes, what types of cuisine are you familiar with?

The heart of the home is often the kitchen. As a housemaid, your ability to prepare meals can be a valuable asset, especially in households where the residents are too busy or unable to cook for themselves. The cuisine question, on the other hand, gives potential employers an idea of your culinary range and whether you can cater to specific dietary preferences, allergies, or cultural traditions.

Example: “Yes, I can cook. My skills span a variety of cuisines including American comfort food, Mexican dishes, and some Italian classics like pasta and lasagna. I also have experience with vegetarian and vegan cooking. I am always open to learning new recipes or adapting my cooking style to suit dietary needs and preferences.”

13. How do you ensure that all areas of the house are kept clean and hygienic?

This question is aimed at understanding your proficiency in housekeeping and your attention to detail. As a maid, keeping a house clean and hygienic is your core responsibility. Potential employers want to be sure that you have the skills, knowledge, and work ethic to maintain their homes to a high standard. They’re interested in your cleaning techniques, your understanding of hygiene standards, and your ability to organize your tasks to ensure all areas are well maintained.

Example: “To ensure all areas of the house are kept clean and hygienic, I follow a systematic cleaning schedule. This includes daily tasks like dusting, sweeping, mopping, and tidying up common areas. Weekly tasks involve deep-cleaning bathrooms, kitchens, and other high-traffic areas.

I pay special attention to germ hotspots such as doorknobs, light switches, and remote controls. For hygiene purposes, I use appropriate cleaning products, ensuring they’re safe for household members and pets.

Periodically, I also focus on less-frequented areas like basements or attics. By adhering to this routine, I can maintain cleanliness and hygiene throughout the house.”

14. What steps do you take to maintain the confidentiality of household matters?

As a house maid, you often become privy to private aspects of your employer’s life. This question is designed to assess your understanding of professional boundaries and discretion. Maintaining confidentiality is a critical part of the job, and potential employers want to ensure you can be trusted with sensitive information.

Example: “Maintaining confidentiality in a household is crucial. I ensure this by not discussing personal matters outside the home, even with close friends or family. Any documents or sensitive information I come across during my duties are treated with utmost discretion. If I’m uncertain about something, I always ask for clarification rather than making assumptions. Furthermore, I respect boundaries and private spaces within the house, only entering rooms where my services are needed. Lastly, if any visitors arrive, I do not disclose any personal information unless instructed to do so by the homeowner.”

15. Can you describe a time when you had to adapt to a change in routine or household requirements?

Flexibility is a key characteristic in any domestic role. Homes and families are dynamic, with situations and routines that can change suddenly. Your potential employer might want to know if you can handle these changes smoothly, whether it’s a last-minute dinner party, a new pet, or a family member moving in. This question is designed to explore your adaptability, problem-solving skills, and how well you handle unexpected situations.

Example: “In one instance, a family I worked for decided to start a new diet and needed meals prepared according to specific dietary guidelines. It was quite different from what I was accustomed to but I took it as an opportunity to learn.

I researched the diet extensively, learned new recipes, and adapted my shopping list accordingly. Within a week, I was able to adjust to this change and prepare meals that not only met their dietary requirements but were also tasty and enjoyable. This experience taught me the importance of being adaptable and open-minded in my work.”

16. How do you handle situations when you are asked to perform tasks outside of your job description?

The essence of this question lies in understanding your flexibility and adaptability. As a housemaid, there might be situations where you are asked to take on additional responsibilities. Employers want to know how you react in such situations, whether you are open to learning new tasks or if you strictly adhere to the predefined job role. This helps them assess your overall suitability for the role and the household you will be working in.

Example: “In my understanding, flexibility and adaptability are key in a housemaid role. If asked to perform tasks outside of my job description, I would consider the request’s relevance and urgency.

If it is within my capacity and doesn’t interfere with my primary duties, I am more than willing to assist. However, if the task requires skills beyond my expertise, I believe it’s crucial to communicate this honestly while offering possible solutions or alternatives. This approach ensures efficiency while maintaining open communication and respect for boundaries.”

17. What methods do you use to handle and manage household pets?

Pets are an integral part of many households, and their care and management is often a part of a housemaid’s responsibilities. Knowing how comfortable and capable you are with pets can help employers gauge if you’re a good fit for their home, especially if they have pets that require specific care or handling. Your answer to this question will provide insight into your experience and comfort level with animals.

Example: “To manage household pets, I use a combination of discipline, care, and understanding. It’s essential to establish boundaries for the pet, such as not allowing them on certain furniture or in specific rooms. Regular feeding schedules and exercise routines are also important.

Understanding each pet’s unique needs is crucial. For instance, some dogs may require more physical activity than others, while cats often need their own space.

I also ensure that all pets have regular vet check-ups to maintain good health. In case of any behavioral issues, I believe in seeking professional advice rather than attempting to resolve it myself.”

18. How do you ensure that you maintain a professional relationship with the household members?

Maintaining a professional relationship in such a personal setting like a home can be challenging. However, it’s essential for preserving boundaries and ensuring a healthy work environment. Interviewers want to know how you balance the unique demands of the job – being helpful and accessible, but also respecting the family’s privacy and maintaining appropriate professional distance.

Example: “To maintain a professional relationship with household members, I believe in clear communication and setting boundaries. Understanding their expectations helps me perform my tasks efficiently while respecting their privacy. I also ensure to keep personal matters separate from work-related issues. My focus is always on providing the best service possible, which includes being respectful, reliable, and maintaining a positive attitude at all times.”

19. What is your approach to managing and organizing household supplies?

This question is posed to evaluate your organizational skills and attention to detail. As a housemaid, you’re expected to manage household supplies efficiently, keep track of what’s in stock, and what needs to be reordered. Your ability to keep everything tidy and well-organized is a key factor in maintaining a smooth-running household.

Example: “My approach to managing household supplies involves a systematic process. I start by taking an inventory of all items, noting what’s available and what needs replenishing. This ensures that we never run out of essential supplies.

Next, I categorize items based on their usage frequency. Items used daily are placed in easily accessible areas while less frequently used ones are stored away but still within reach.

For organization, I believe in keeping similar items together. Cleaning products go under the sink, food items in the pantry, toiletries in the bathroom, etc.

Lastly, cleanliness is key. Regular cleaning of storage areas prevents clutter buildup and makes it easier to find items when needed.”

20. How do you handle situations where you are required to work extra hours or on holidays?

As a house maid, your job often requires you to be flexible and adaptable. Homes don’t stop needing care just because it’s a holiday or after normal working hours. Employers ask this question to gauge your understanding of the role’s demands and whether you can meet those expectations. They want to ensure that you are committed and can be relied upon even during non-traditional working hours.

Example: “Understanding the nature of a house maid job, I’m aware that there might be instances where extra hours or working on holidays could be required. In such situations, my approach is to plan and organize my tasks effectively so as not to compromise the quality of service provided. Communication is key, therefore, if informed in advance about any changes in schedule, it would help me adjust better. Flexibility and adaptability are important aspects of this role which I am comfortable with.”

21. Can you describe your experience with handling household emergencies?

Being a house maid isn’t just about keeping a house clean. It’s also about being prepared to handle unforeseen situations that may occur in the household. Whether it’s a burst pipe, a power failure, or a security issue, employers want to know that you have the skills and the level-headedness to respond appropriately and efficiently. Your ability to manage such emergencies could potentially save the household a lot of trouble and expense.

Example: “In my experience, handling household emergencies requires calmness and quick thinking. For instance, once when a pipe burst in the kitchen, I quickly turned off the main water supply to prevent flooding. In another incident where there was a small fire due to an electrical fault, I used the appropriate fire extinguisher to put it out before calling professionals for further help.

I believe that being well-prepared is key. Knowing the location of emergency equipment like first aid kits, fire extinguishers, and understanding how to use them can make a significant difference. It’s also crucial to know who to call during specific emergencies, such as plumbers or electricians.

Moreover, maintaining regular checks on potential hazards can help prevent many emergencies. This includes checking smoke detectors, keeping appliances in good condition, and ensuring all safety measures are in place.”

22. How do you ensure that you are up to date with the latest cleaning techniques and products?

The heart of this question lies in your capacity for continuous improvement and learning. Cleaning, like any other field, evolves over time with the introduction of new products, tools, and techniques. Employers want to know that you’re proactive in staying informed and are dedicated to providing the best service possible by using the most effective and efficient methods.

Example: “I regularly attend workshops and webinars that focus on the latest cleaning techniques and products. I also subscribe to professional cleaning magazines and online forums where new methods and tools are often discussed. Moreover, I follow relevant social media pages of leading cleaning product manufacturers as they frequently update their followers about their latest offerings. This continuous learning approach helps me stay updated in my field.”

23. What is your approach to managing laundry and ironing tasks?

This question is designed to assess your organizational skills and attention to detail. Managing laundry and ironing for an entire household is a task that requires careful planning and a systematic approach. It’s not just about getting the laundry done, but also about ensuring that the right items are cleaned and pressed at the right time, and that everything is returned to its proper place.

Example: “Managing laundry and ironing tasks requires a systematic approach. I believe in sorting the clothes first, separating them by color, fabric type, and washing instructions to avoid damage or color bleeding.

For washing, I use appropriate detergents based on fabric requirements. Post-washing, I ensure all garments are properly dried before moving onto ironing.

When it comes to ironing, each garment is handled according to its fabric type and care label instructions. To prevent creases, clothes are immediately hanged or folded after ironing. This method ensures that all items of clothing maintain their quality and longevity.”

24. How do you handle disagreements or conflicts with household members?

Peaceful and respectful communication is key in a private household setting. If a disagreement arises, it’s important that you can handle it professionally and diplomatically. It’s all about conflict resolution and maintaining a harmonious environment. This question gives employers insight into your interpersonal skills and your ability to navigate challenging situations while maintaining composure and respect for all parties involved.

Example: “In a household setting, disagreements or conflicts are inevitable. My approach is to maintain open communication and understand the other person’s perspective. I believe in discussing issues calmly and respectfully without letting emotions take over.

If I’m at fault, I accept my mistake and apologize sincerely. If it’s a misunderstanding, I clarify things politely. In situations where we can’t reach an agreement, I would respect their decision as they’re the employer.

Overall, my goal is to ensure harmony in the household by being professional, respectful, and understanding.”

25. Can you describe a time when you had to use your initiative to solve a problem in your previous job?

As a housemaid, you’re often working independently and may encounter unexpected issues or problems that need immediate attention. Employers need to know that you’re capable of thinking on your feet, making good decisions, and taking action without direct supervision. Your ability to show initiative in these situations can give them the confidence that their home will be well cared for and that you can handle any situation that comes your way.

Example: “In my previous job, I once encountered a situation where the washing machine broke down with a load of laundry inside. The repair service couldn’t come until the next day. Understanding the importance of clean clothes for the family, I decided to wash the important items by hand. I separated the delicates and heavier fabrics, used appropriate detergent, and ensured they were properly rinsed and dried. This initiative not only solved the immediate problem but also demonstrated my ability to adapt quickly in unexpected situations.”

26. How do you handle situations when you are required to care for sick household members?

This question is all about assessing your ability to adapt to unexpected scenarios and show empathy. In a household, situations can change rapidly and as a housemaid, you may be required to step in and provide care in the event of sickness. Your ability to handle these situations demonstrates your flexibility, compassion, and commitment to the well-being of the people you work with.

Example: “In caring for sick household members, I prioritize hygiene and comfort. I ensure the environment is clean to prevent further infection, regularly disinfecting surfaces and washing linens.

I assist them with their basic needs like meals, medication, and rest. If necessary, I can liaise with healthcare professionals on their behalf.

Understanding the importance of emotional support during illness, I also provide companionship while respecting their need for rest and privacy. My aim is always to facilitate a quick recovery in a safe, comfortable setting.”

27. What steps do you take to ensure that you maintain high energy levels throughout the day?

Maintaining high energy levels is critical for housemaids, who often have physically demanding tasks to complete throughout the day. Employers want to ensure that you have strategies in place to take care of your health and wellbeing and can sustain a good pace of work. By asking this question, they are trying to understand your self-management skills and ability to maintain productivity.

Example: “Maintaining high energy levels is crucial for my role. I start by ensuring that I get a good night’s sleep, as it helps me to stay alert and focused throughout the day.

I also pay attention to my diet; eating balanced meals with plenty of fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins provides me with sustained energy. Staying hydrated is equally important, so I drink lots of water.

Regular breaks are essential too. Short pauses for stretching or a quick walk can refresh both body and mind.

Finally, staying positive and enjoying what I do makes tasks less draining and keeps my energy levels up.”

28. Can you describe a time when you received constructive criticism and how you handled it?

This question is a way for potential employers to measure your humility and willingness to grow. As a housemaid, receiving feedback is a significant part of the job. Whether it’s about how you clean, organize, or perform other tasks, it’s important to show that you can accept constructive criticism professionally and use it as a tool for improvement.

Example: “In a previous cleaning job, my supervisor pointed out that I was using too much detergent while washing dishes. Initially, I felt defensive but then realized it was an opportunity to learn and improve. So, I thanked her for the feedback and asked for tips on how to measure the right amount of soap. This not only helped me become more efficient but also saved resources. From this experience, I learned the importance of being open to constructive criticism as it aids in personal growth and professional development.”

29. How do you ensure that you maintain a positive and cheerful demeanor while performing your duties?

Being a housemaid often involves long hours and physically demanding work, yet a positive and cheerful demeanor can make a world of difference to the homeowners. It can make the environment more pleasant and the job more enjoyable. Moreover, it demonstrates your ability to maintain a professional attitude and high-quality service even during challenging situations. This question allows interviewers to gauge your resilience, your attitude towards work, and your ability to maintain a positive outlook.

Example: “Maintaining a positive demeanor is essential in my line of work. I achieve this by staying organized and managing my time effectively, which reduces stress. Also, I find joy in the tasks that I do, as I view them not only as chores but also as ways to create comfort for those I serve.

Moreover, I practice self-care during off-hours to ensure I’m physically and mentally fit. This includes eating healthy, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep.

Lastly, maintaining open communication with my employer helps me understand their expectations better, allowing me to perform my duties efficiently and happily.”

30. Can you describe a time when you went above and beyond your regular duties to ensure the satisfaction of the household members?

Being a house maid is not just about performing the assigned tasks, it’s about providing exceptional service that ensures the happiness and comfort of the household members. Employers want to know if you are proactive, dedicated, and attentive to the needs and wants of the household. They want to see if you have the initiative to go the extra mile to ensure the satisfaction and contentment of the people you serve.

Example: “In one instance, a family I worked for was hosting an important event. They were expecting more guests than usual and the preparation was overwhelming. Without being asked, I took on extra tasks such as polishing silverware, arranging flowers, and even assisting with some of the cooking.

On the day of the event, I ensured that every guest felt comfortable and well-attended to. The family appreciated my initiative and the event went smoothly. This experience showed me how going beyond regular duties can significantly contribute to household satisfaction.”

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The House Maid by William McGregor Paxton

The House Maid by William McGregor Paxton was created in 1910. The painting is in National Gallery of Art Washington D.C. The size of the work is 76,5 x 64 cm and is made of oil on canvas.

A young woman with pale skin, dressed in a black and white servant’s uniform, stands reading a book behind a collection of urns, a figurine, and a stationary box arrayed on a tabletop in this vertical painting. Seen from about the hips up, the woman faces our left in profile as she gazes down at the open book in her hands. She has a turned up nose, smooth skin, and her lips are slightly parted over a rounded chin. Her blond hair is pulled up in a bun, and she wears a black dress with a wide, white collar and a white apron tied around her waist. A feather duster with a black handle is tucked under her left arm, closer to us, so the dark feathers fan out behind her. Read more in National Gallery of Art Washington D.C.

About the Artist : American painter William McGregor Paxton was born in Baltimore. Paxton attended Cowles Art School on a scholarship he attained at the age of 18. He studied with Dennis Miller Bunker and Cowles and then went to Paris to study under Jean-Léon Gérôme, at École des Beaux-Arts. Paxton taught from 1906 to 1913 at the Museum of Fine Arts School and painted briefly at Fenway Studios in Boston. He worked at the Harcourt Street Studios in Boston and when it burned in 1904 he lost close to 100 paintings… Read more

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