TW: This article mentions both themes and experiences of domestic abuse. Resources are listed at the end of this article.
I’m late to BuzzFeed’s article calling out just “17 critical details of modern poverty” that Netflix’s adaptation of Maid “overlooks,” but this should come as no surprise. The first time I watched Maid, I didn’t even realize that the violence I had just experienced at home was domestic abuse. It was my first semester at CU. Over Thanksgiving break, I admitted that I was thinking of dropping out, and my dad’s response was to scream and drag me across my bedroom floor. In the two weeks before the semester ended and I knew that there was no option but to return home, I sat up one night on one of the communal couches in Smith North watching episode after episode of a new show advertised across the entirety of my Netflix home page. This is how Maid found me, with an image of a disassociated Margaret Qualley at a time when I didn’t even know I needed it. I didn’t grow tired that night. Something important was happening, I just didn’t know what. All I knew was that I had this urge to keep watching, and I did.
I stayed up all night until I watched Alex drive off to college with the hope of making a better life through writing, and only then could I walk away from my laptop, satisfied, with the idea that her hold over me was only temporary. She wasn’t yet a reflection, let alone a projection, of my own abuse. She wasn’t yet a way of processing what had happened to me. At the time, I didn’t realize that this was what I was really doing.
I walked away with the lessons of the domestic violence shelter, only thinking that I would be better prepared against intimate partner violence. I wasn’t. For all of this shortsightedness, it’s really Alex’s story of getting out that’s stuck with me. Despite all of the obstacles affordable housing and government assistance programs saddled her with, she was able to crawl her way out, and her getting out, over the years, has certainly helped me to believe that I could in the moments when I really didn’t know how to start. It’s only now, on my third watch-through, that I’ve learned that her story is largely fictional, but I don’t mind this fact, not as much as BuzzFeed does, which takes the time to correct us that Alex isn’t really Alex. She’s Stephanie Land, and her story was far from easy.
BuzzFeed takes care to point out that “the biggest differences between the Netflix series and the memoir” have more to do with the kind of narratives we like to tell ourselves about poverty and independence, but I feel like this kind of fact-checking overlooks all that these changes, like Alex’s going to a domestic violence instead of a homeless shelter, do get right. In this case, Maid’s fictionality feels warranted, and it is because it gives domestic violence victims like me some of the language and the tools to be able to escape it. To counteract BuzzFeed’s overlooked details, what follows is a list of the details that have stuck out to me in my most recent re-watch to defend its more fictional stance. I have to ask: if a series like Maid doesn’t let us see a better fiction for ourselves, how the h*ll are we supposed to imagine one? As the series comments, abuse makes us forget the most basic things about ourselves, let alone that we can resist it.
1) What does real abuse look like? “Intimidation? Threats? Control?”
Last October, I had the same hesitation about going to the Office of Victim Assistance as Alex does when she tells her social worker that what she experienced wasn’t “real abuse.” When faced with the possibility of having to go to a domestic violence shelter, Alex explains that she wouldn’t want to take a space away from someone who really needed it. I thought that OVA would dismiss me, or that I needed some concrete wound, not just a story, because I had spent most of my life trying to prove myself at home. The problem with emotional abuse is that it teaches you to doubt what you really know, making you believe that you deserved what was done to you.
2) “It takes women seven tries before they finally leave.”
I don’t know how many times it took me, but I spent a lot of time crying at the top of the library last year because I didn’t want to catch the bus home after class. It’s only in watching stories like Danielle’s, though, that do away with all the shame I’ve had in feeling like there was nothing to do most of the time but return home.
When Alex arrives at the domestic violence shelter, she meets a Hispanic woman, Danielle, who introduces herself by dropping off a box of pink, plastic ponies that the last woman to have her room must have left behind. While she acts like a personal motivator, giving a pep talk in the aftermath of Alex’s daughter being taken from her to try to pull her off the floor, Danielle ultimately becomes a model of what so often goes wrong in an escape attempt. Danielle starts off strong. She’s trying to get Alex mad at her ex, and, in turn, all she ever does is refer to her own as an “a**h*le.”
Still, for all of that, the next time we see Danielle, she is back with the man who strangled her. Someone on Reddit commented that her boyfriend doesn’t allow her to have a history that doesn’t revolve around him, and this is certainly the case when Alex approaches her on the street and she pretends not to know her for fear of setting him off. There are subtle tells leading up to this moment that she’s going to return to her abuser. When her boyfriend calls her for the umpteenth time, Danielle gives in and answers, and this is the last time that we see her at the shelter. All it takes is an ounce of hope, and we’re back.
3) That abuse follows a generational cycle
Stephanie’s real-world mom may not have been the hippie and often wonderfully bipolar Paula that Andie McDowell plays so memorably in the Netflix adaptation. That said, Alex’s reckoning with her mother’s own struggles to leave and get roped into a series of successive abusive relationships shows us how hard it is to break generational cycles unless we work towards consciously doing so.
As I’m panicking with trying to apply to grad programs (which, if I get in, would make me the first in my family to do so—let alone one of the few women on my dad’s side to have graduated high school), the line that keeps echoing back to me when I start to doubt myself is that I have to get the h*ll out of Dodge. This is the town that Paula and Alex’s stories are set in, the town that Paula, although she accepts her daughter’s invitation to come with her and her own daughter to the new family housing she’s fleeing to in Montana, refuses to leave. Dodge, for Paula, is her mother and her grandmother’s land. Dodge is the town they grew up in, lived in, died in. Because it’s framed within a generational scale, it is hard not to see Paula’s choosing to stay with a new boyfriend as her becoming trapped in a cycle that she cannot break for herself.
Paula, unfortunately, reminds me of my own mom. Being a fine artist herself, she would hate me for comparing her to a painter who works with largely mystical and sexual themes. What I see of my mother in Paula, however, is this inability to escape from the same cycle that resulted not just in my dad’s abusing her, myself, and my sister, but her own mother’s abusing her. Although I’m frustrated with her, I pity her, and this is the same feeling I believe Alex feels when she watches Paula fall back into a reliance on a boyfriend who is framed by all of the awful things that her past boyfriends have done, like pocketing her mortgage checks. We can’t save our mothers, but stories like Maid help us to better understand them. As so many of Maid’s storytelling aspects are exaggerated in the Netflix adaptation to get us to these realizations, I want to argue that these features are ultimately targeted at getting abuse victims like myself to recognize the patterns in our own far-from-normal, exaggerated family histories, that we don’t necessarily have to adopt for ourselves.
4) That you don’t have to do it all alone
BuzzFeed makes a good point: in most stories, there isn’t a Regina, one of the wealthy women whose house Alex cleans, to save you. Stephanie Land’s story was much harder, much more realistic. When she leaves for Montana, it is in pursuit of her first financial safety net. Alex is given so much more help in the Netflix adaptation, and it is the kind of movie-magic help that Stephanie, in trying to free her and her daughter from an abusive relationship in the midst of the 2008 economic crash, never found.
Still, Netflix’s focus on community and support, albeit magical, makes the point that, sometimes, all you have to do is ask for help. It’s the first step, making it the hardest one, but it’s the most important in that this simple ask is tied to our breaking down the narratives that what we endure is normal, deserved, or something that we have to deal with all on our own. The people at the grocery store judging Alex for using food stamps remain an obstacle in her navigating the aftermath of leaving in order to truly free herself. Still, all it takes is one good social worker to point you to a domestic violence shelter or to instruct you that all you really have to say is “Help.”
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Every episode of Maid ends with a notice pointing viewers who have themselves experienced or know someone who has experienced domestic violence to turn towards resources, like www.wannatalkabitit.com, for support. In this vein (and per my amazing editor, Amanda Mitry’s, suggestion), I would like to end this article with some of my own. I will include those available both nationwide and for readers here in Boulder.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached by calling 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), texting START to 88788, or by chatting with either a chat representative or AI chatbot on the hotline’s website (www.thehotline.org). In addition, the Survivor Resources page of Violence Free Colorado’s website includes hotlines and websites for specifically targeted groups, like Native, African, Asian, and Latin Americans, to receive support from someone who really understands. (For example: Esperanza United, 651-646-5553; National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, 406-477-3896; Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence, 415-568-3315; and Ujima: The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community, 844-778-5462).
VFC’s Find Help page, however, may be more helpful for those living in Colorado. The page lists resources like the Colorado Office of Victim Assistance (COVA), legal services, and state-wide housing resources. What I like about VFC is that the first page on their site, like Maid, is educational, pointing out the signs that a relationship may be abusive before providing visitors with more general resources to get out.
There are, however, few housing options available here in Boulder. While only one program, the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence (835 North St., 303-444-2424), offers sheltering services from domestic violence, most of what Boulder has to offer comes in the form of general homeless shelters, which, in turn, usually only offer overnight shelter. In the aftermath of the government’s shutdown and the shutting down of programs like SNAP and Medicaid, these services, which are already being overwhelmed, are only going to become more inaccessible.
If you are a CU student, you can access the Office of Victim Assistance. They’re located in Suite N450 of the C4C, in the offices above the dining hall. If you miss their walk-in hours (Monday and Thursday, 11am-3pm), you can also give them a call at 303-494-8855 to schedule an appointment. You will have to give a brief description of why you are dropping by, but, I promise you, the people are friendly. OVA helped me to access emergency housing, funding, and counseling. You can, however, also access these services through the Basic Needs Center and CU’s Counseling and Psychiatric Services.