Through Rose Colored Glasses

Edwidgen Danticat's personal narrative, Between the Pool and the Gardenias (1996), explores a young women's hardship infertility, a cheating husband, and falling in love with a baby that she found on the street. The author develops the story by telling her life story and events to the baby that she found. The author was trying to convince some people cope with the negatives in their life and how some can't always handle what happens to them. The intended audience would be people have ever lost a baby or a cheating husband. It's also intended for people who has ever had anything bad repeatedly happen to them.

Though entertaining and attention keeping, the passage was sad. It leaves you with many unanswered question. What happened to the baby? Why did the gardener think she kill the baby? Did she go to jail for something she didn't do? In the beginning, the story did confuse me. For example, why didn't anyone else notice the baby or why didn't the baby cry like other babies? She explains in the stories to the baby recent events of her life though not in any order. She explains that she got married at an early age and she was a virgin when married. She explains that she tried to get pregnant many times but all ended in a miscarriage. She then explains that her husband had many affairs with many different women and  had 10 other children outside their marriage. She left the village that they lived in and became a maid. She had made love with a man that she didn't know. I feel that we all go through things horrible and all don't handle it as people expect us to. When so many things bad things happen to you at once people sometimes make an alternative look on life. To her, this was normal  but by the end of the story, I thought she was crazy.

The author, even though being of a different culture, wasn't in her right mind. She did many things that in any culture wouldn't be acceptable. An example, at the end of the story as she was awaiting to be arrested for killing the baby by the man that she had the affair with, she says "we made a pretty picture standing there. Rose, me and him. Between the pool and the Gardenias. Waiting on the law". The way the author writes is that everything in her eyes are perfect. With all the darkness and bad around her she still sees the light and beauty around her.