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<title> TAKING CONTROL OF HAPPINESS </title>
What is happiness and how do you find it? When you are happy, how can you make it last? Can you deserve your happiness and does God decide which people should be happy or punished? Of course happiness is different for different people. To some people happiness lies in a perfect family life with love and many children. This is the old traditional way of living. Many people in our modern society want money and think that money is the same as happiness. In Doris Lessing's novel "The Fifth Child" the matter about happiness is discussed by describing a man and a woman's fight for happiness; in this case a traditional family life with many children. Something goes wrong, but why does it?
	The couple David and Harriet have decided how their lives together should be and how they can obtain pure happiness. Although their friends and relatives protest, they buy a big house in a small town outside London and start having children. They get three children and arrange big family parties each holiday. People seem to enjoy staying in their home and David and Harriet feel that they had done the right thing after all; being persistent. In one section in the novel, this fact is described: "Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved. (...) It had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves. And look, they had been right to insist on guarding that stubborn individuality of theirs, which had chosen, and so obstinately - this." This quotation also highlights the setting and how these people differ from others in the way of seeing things in that time; the sixties. In the beginning of the novel, when they meet for the first time, the reader is informed that David and Harriet do not believe in selfishness and free sex with anyone, as everybody else in that time. They are oddballs in their society, old-fashioned.
	As time goes by, the little town they live in changes, there are much more crimes such as burglaries and vandalism. Harriet does not feel safe going out anymore. "The young Lovatts made themselves read the papers, and watch the News on television, though their instinct was to do neither. At least they ought to know what went on outside their fortress, their kingdom, in which three precious children were nurtured, and where so many people came to immerse themselves in safety, comfort, kindness." So the family's house is the sacred fortress of happiness in a society which is growing more depraved. The little world that David and Harriet have created now feels even more important to them.
	Everything goes almost as the couple had planned, until Harriet gets pregnant again, too soon after her fourth child. She senses that something is wrong with this baby, and when it is born she realises that she had been right. Ben is very different from other children, he acts like some kind of prehistoric human, and his appearance differs from his brothers and sisters. He has no empathy; in fact he kills the family cat and tries to kill his older brother Paul. Harriet is forced to protect Ben just as her sister Sarah is forced to protect her daughter who is Down's syndrome. Before having Ben, Harriet commented on this to David: "Sarah joked dolefully that she and William attracted all the ill luck in the clan. Harriet said to David, privately, that she did not believe it was bad luck: Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child..." Why did Harriet give birth to this monster? Was it a sort of punishment or was it bad luck? This has to do with the balance of good and bad in life, and whether you believe in God, fate or neither. Harriet is convinced it was for punishment: "We are being punished, that's all. (...) For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided to be." David does not agree, thinking it was just bad luck things did not turn out the way they wanted. 
	The characters in this novel tried to control their lives and their happiness, but they failed. They were driven by their belief in old-fashioned family life, despite the comments from their friends and relatives, and despite the society they were living in. Nobody knows for sure what makes things happen in our lives, but we know that we cannot control everything. There is never pure happiness for all time, but a balance between good and bad, joy and pain. This is a lesson the characters in the novel have learnt and also a lesson to the reader; try to seize happiness, but when you have it, you cannot force it to stay.
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