T-Ray is an Abuser

I remember feeling like I had the worst parents on this planet.  That they didn’t care about me, that they didn’t want me there in life.  I felt like no one had worse parents than me, but people do.  There are kids that live with bruises from the time that their father threw them down the stairs, or marks from the time that their mother, the one who gave birth to them, hit them with a book. Lily, from The Secret Life of Bees, is a victim of this.  Her dad, T-Ray, is abusive.  He has been acting this way since the death of his wife almost 10 years ago.  I think that T-Ray has felt these emotions of abusing before she died, but after that his emotions overflowed and taken control.

We don’t hear much about T-Ray’s past.  We don’t know if he has had any previous marriages that would have ended badly, we don’t know if he had abusive parents when he was a child; we don’t know why he abuses his daughter Lily. But he does. For all we know, he could have been abused when he was a child, and that’s his parent’s style. As we read on page 8 we see that it says “He didn’t believe in slumber parties or sock hops, which wasn’t a big concern as I never got invited to them anyway.” This tells us that T-Ray didn’t let Lily go places or do things that she wanted. His actions probably followed the ones of his own parents.  I believe that one of the main reasons he abuses his daughter is because of his past.

T-Ray isn’t an abuser just because he might have had a bad past, the emotions of his abusing started around the time his wife died. It wasn’t a great marriage, and she was going to leave.  I think that he was stressed with the emotion of her leaving, that he took it out physically on his daughter.  In the beginning of the book, it talks about the day that her mom dies. On page 7 it says, “Get in your room!” he shouted, and shoved me.  I leaned against the wall, then fell forward onto my hands and knees. Lifting my head, looking past him, I saw her running across the room. Running at him, yelling. Leave. Her. Alone.” This is the first account in the book of T-Ray ever hitting his child, and it happened because of his wife.  She was trying to leave him, and he took his anger out by hitting his daughter. As showed, T-Ray abuses because of his anger with his wife.

Not only does the abusing come from his past and the stress of his marriage, but it also comes from what Lily did to her mother. As their parents were fighting, Lily had gotten a hold of the gun and shot her mother to death.  Whenever Lily does something wrong, T-Ray always has the excuse of that she killed her mom to blame her. On page 24, we are given a look at some of the things that T-Ray does to his daughter: “I’d been kneeling on grits since I was six, but I still never got used to that powdered-glass feeling beneath my skin.” Kneeling on small pieces of glass from age six.  She was a baby, making mistakes was normal for her.  There is no reason to make your kids kneel on glass, it disgusting and disturbing.  T-Ray is not a good father to his daughter, since he abuses her weekly.

T-Ray has been feeling the emotions of hurting his daughter for many years, but they have finally shown since the death of his wife. Lily didn’t only feel like she had the worst parents in the world, she did.  She had a dad that abused her.  A dad that physically hits her, a dad that doesn’t want her there, a dad that doesn’t care about her. But she has the courage and strength to leave this life of pain.