Reflection on "Marie Micheline" by Edwidge Danticat

I really liked the story “Marie Micheline”. This story is a personal history story and it is a very interesting one to read and learn. It is a story that can teach you things about these people and how they lived. It does not, however, teach it to you like it would in a history book; it teaches it like a story. It is a good story to read and I liked it because it taught me a little about these people. After I finished reading I thought to myself, do all these people have lives like Marie Micheline? Do they all have this relationship with there family? Do they all act this way against pregnancies? I think that these questions could be answered with another story like this about these people. By reading another story about these people, I would have been able to read about two different families, not one.

Marie Micheline’s life was a very hard one. She went through many complications in her short life and I think that this happened because of the family she lived with. I think that your life changes if you do not live with your real parents. She called her uncle her dad but this was not true. Her real mother and father did not raise her and they passed away a long time ago. Because of this, she was raised by a family that wasn’t really hers and she wasn’t loved like a daughter; she was loved like a niece. The difference in these two is how you are treated. The parents would always love there daughter more without knowing it. I think that if she had living parents, then she would have made better decisions and been able to have gotten more help.

This story really shocked me. What shocked me were all of the decisions that Marie had to take and what she was going through. Her experiences where harsh and they made me think about other people that might have gone through the same decisions. Marie Micheline was a girl that always tried to think about other people before herself. She put other people before her. She mainly thought about her children first though. For example, when she was hurt and her uncle came to help her, the first thing she thought about was her little girl. Also she died thinking of her children. When she was going to close the door to hide away from the solders and be able to live, she thought about her children wanting to come in and finding the door locked. When she thought of them she got so scared that she was frightened to death. She died trying to save her children when she could have saved herself. Her intentions towards the situation really astonished me because it showed how the most important thing in her life, her children, was more important to her than her life itself.