Maid, Domestic Violence, & Generational Abuse

During their visit, the presenters from Courage Connection mentioned Maid, a show that depicts a mother’s struggle with leaving a domestic violence situation. I remember watching this show earlier this year and its depictions of domestic abuse really stuck with me. In this show, Alex leaves her abusive boyfriend and takes their daughter with her, but quickly runs into issues obtaining housing and maintaining custody of her daughter. This series attempts to tackle many of the various issues that survivors of domestic abuse run into when trying to flee from abuse. There is so much to talk about when it comes to this show, but I want to focus on one specific issue that was brought up in Maid, generational abuse.

For more info about the show you can check out this link, also spoilers for the show Maid in the rest of this post. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maid_(miniseries)    

Throughout the show, one person who Alex turns to for help is her mother, Paula. They seem to have a bit of a rough relationship and Paula is repeatedly shown to be an unreliable character, who Alex has a hard time trusting. During her childhood, Alex moved around a lot with her mother and over the years they lived together with Paula’s various boyfriends. As a result, Alex didn’t see much of her birth father in her childhood, and her mother never fully explained why she left him. Over the course of the show, Alex reluctantly reconnects with her father and gets to know his new family, but their relationship comes to an abrupt end when Alex regains memories from her childhood and realizes that her father used to abuse her mother, which is what pushed her to leave him. 

The revelation of the abuse Alex’s mother endured is a major moment in the plot of Maid because it brings to light an additional factor that contributed to the path of Alex’s life. The housing instability Alex experienced as a child was linked to the abuse her mother experienced at the hands of her father and the lack of familial support systems that Alex has is also linked to his abuse. In her childhood, she never had healthy long-term relationships modeled for her, so in many ways, she was set up to fail. Alex is not only trying to flee her current abuse, she’s trying to break free from a generational history of domestic violence. Her struggle with domestic abuse has been a lifelong struggle and did not start with her ex-boyfriend, but rather with her father. I felt that this aspect of the plot highlighted the long-term and generational effects that domestic violence can have on a person and their family. 

Overall, the show Maid does a good job of showing the various factors that can contribute to a survivor's struggle with domestic violence and that’s in part because it's based on Stephanie Land’s memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive. The show has gotten a lot of positive responses and I encourage you to check it out as well as Stephanie Land's memoir if you get the chance!