Do you ever feel like you are holding someone back if they always have to worry about you? You may feel ashamed or you may not care if they worry for you. In the story, The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd indicates that the character, May, feels like she is holding everyone back. April’s death is a blow to May who starts acting like an immature child. The rest of her sisters, August and June, lived with May in the pink house due to their worry of her sensitivity and empathy towards others in pain. Since May is a sensitive person, all who know her are concerned about her constantly, including her two sisters, who was not able to move on with their lives.
May was holding everyone back.May is a loving, sensitive, and open person to everyone. When she sees someone in pain, she immediately feels their pain it’s as if it is happening to her. For example, when April got a toothache, May’s gums started feeling swollen just like April’s. Whenever April is in trouble or gets injured, May could feel her pain. August mentioned that, “When April died, something in May died, too.
She never was normal after that. It seemed like the world itself became May’s twin sister” (97). To May the world is like her twin sister whose pain she can feel when something happens out there. For instance, when a man named Mr. Raines was killed by a shotgun, May becomes upset tearing her blouse open and starts slapping her arms and scratching her face as she cries. Sometimes when May tries to hold the pain in she sings “Oh! Susanna,” but most of the time it never works.
However, June comes up with an idea to create a wailing wall for May. This wall helped May immensely when she needs to release her anger and pain. May can write anyone’s name on a piece of paper. .s incorrect because when they help May, she feels ashamed of being a helpless person who cannot take care of her own problems. May does love being loved back, but not in a way where everyone has to worry about her and make sure she is not depressed.
May wants everyone to worry about their own lives and future. She did not want everyone to change their life plans just to protect her and make her happy.In conclusion, the reader should see that May’s actions were holding them back. She could put herself in other’s positions and could not hold her feelings in. This made everyone worry for her, especially August and June. They could not move on and make life decisions for themselves.
From this, the reader should realize that when a person is in the same position as May, they would feel ashamed for making everyone hold back and unable to worry about their own future lives.
