The Dew Breaker

by: Edeidge Danticat

      I read about 4 of these short stories and surprising myself I found many things that I could relate to on a personal level. For instance the way the woman in the first story was so worried about ther father who had gone missing. I felt the same way when my father left my family. Only it would be another fourteen years before I would see him again. 

     In the second short story a Haitian man comes to America to save up money and send for his wife, although it takes 7 years to happen, and he left Haiti the day after they were married. My first wife and I we separated in a similar fashion, where straight off of us both living on the street we both went to Job Corps in Astoria Oregon at the same time and got pregnant while we were there. She completed before I did and went to live with her parents in central Oregon until I was done (about 3 months). After I completed the program they got me a job in Massachusetts of all places, 3000 miles all the way across the country working for an Interior Plaster company. I got a very small apartment while there and had to work much longer than expected to make enough money to bring her and our six month old Daughter out there. when they did arrive I was living with the same guy that I had been since I got there, another Job Corp Graduate from Baltimore, I don't recall his name, but I am sure he experienced quite a shock when they actually got there. Going from living with just another dude to having a full fledged family in the apartment with him. Needless to say it all didn't really pan out and we were all 3 back in Oregon within a year.

     The last one that I read was about woman who was grieving about a child she had lost in the womb, and the broken relationships that followed with her then lover and her mother and father. I do not know of the monumental loss that she experienced, but I do know about not wanting to call home for extended periods of time because I was feeling inadequate. The woman in the story was puropsely neglecting to call her parents, and I did the same thing while I was on my own at the start. I kew my mom worried for me because I was a seventeen year old out on the streets, but I just did not want to hear about it all the time, so I barely called. I have matured much since those days and have a much better relationship with my mother.