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<title> Happiness, love, and having everything you want, is it possible? The fifth child by Doris Lessing </title>
This is a story about being different and accepting those who are. The Lovatts - Harriet and David - believe that they are different from the rest of the world, having old-fashioned values and wanting to live in a happy relationship with each other and their family. The problem in this equation is that true happiness is not something that you get for free. You have to work and pay by taking the consequences. The Lovatt family lives a happy life. They have everything they ever wanted and more. Harriet and David has succeeded to form the kind of life they have always wanted, in the kind of place they have always wanted. Their own private garden of Eden, or as they call it them selves, "their fortress, their kingdom" (p30). One day a snake enters their perfect world. The countryside in England in the late sixties and early seventies is the setting for this story, but the story could take place anywhere during this period in time. 
Forming their own kind of life, is something that is very important for Harriet and David. They want to have a large family and a genuine home for them self where they can have and raise all their children in a safe, warm environment. They create a big family and lots of children, they collect their relatives for holidays for this they need a large house in a quiet place. David's father and Harriet's mother are the ones paying for this dream. David's father in a more concrete way, helping with the money. Harriet's mother - Dorothy - takes care of the children when Harriet is to tired - by pregnancies and childbirth - to do it herself. 
The first suggestion that everything is not what its cut out to be is when Harriet's sister Sarah's fourth daughter is born with "Downs syndrome", accepting this child puts strains on the Lovatts marriage When bad times come David and Harriet's life turns with the arrival of the fifth child. It is then the troubles starts in Paradise. The values of the family and the Lovatts are put up on a test. Non of them has anything left over for what is not common.
All is not well with Harriet's last pregnancy, her body is soar and she gets prescription painkillers for the pain the baby and the pregnancy is causing her. When Ben is born, Harriet immediately finds him odd, he is surprisingly strong, extremely hungry and behaves different from how the other children behaved as infants. In the end this results in the expulsion of the Lovatts from all family events, they are thrust out of Eden. Their family starts falling apart and so is the community around them. This is what happened in England during this period of time. Dorothy leaves and suddenly Harriet is in charge of the domestic scene for the first time since she married. She finds that she can not handle the children by herself.
I feel like the book is filled with naiveté concerning both the descriptions people and incidents. This makes it very evident -when you read it - that the book is purely fictional. There are too many things that is out of the ordinary, Ben, the baby with Downs syndrome, and first and foremost the Lovatts. In an age where selfishness and greed rules persons the Lovatts fits in perfect, they only think about them self and what they want, they use their family to accomplish that goal. The difference between them and others is that they are oblivious about their own selfishness. They build their own garden of Eden and when they get thrown out they do not even try to work at their family life but just let it fall apart. I have some trouble sticking with the subject in this essay, there are so many things I want to discuss.
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