The Sensitive One is a braided memoir alternating between Morris’ high-stress, high-responsibility childhood and her adulthood, which before her cancer diagnosis was trauma-free, complete with a rewarding nursing career and a loving husband. After undergoing treatment and learning about the potential long-term effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences—which according to RecognizeTrauma.org, 60% of U.S. adults have experienced—Morris penned her story of redemption.
This memoir will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including cancer patients and their support communities, those who have suffered from Adverse Childhood Experiences, domestic violence survivors, adult children of alcoholics, and many more.
Discover an excerpt from Chapter Two of Susan Frances Morris’s The Sensitive One, which is available to purchase now.
EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TWO
It was the middle of the night when I was awakened by a high- pitched whistle followed by an insistent authoritative voice coming from the bottom of the stairs. It was the voice of my inebriated father. The shrill sound of the whistle blew again, and his voice got louder and closer. He flipped the switch to my overhead bedroom light, and my eyes blinked open.
Was there a fire or something? His bugged-out, bloodshot eyes sent a shiver down my spine. I cringed in fear, and was afraid I was going to pee my pants.
My father’s breath sent the smell of beer and cigarettes into the room as he chanted:
“Up and at ’em!
“Rise and shine!
“Let’s go downstairs. “Everybody up, pronto. “March!”
He stumbled over to my bed, abruptly pulled off my warm, yel- low blanket, and threw it on the floor, exposing my bare, trembling, thirteen-year-old legs. Dazed and sleepy, I sat up and pulled the
nightie over my wobbly knees, my eyes blinking from the bright light. What’s the matter with my dad? Did someone put a devil spell on him? Why is he screaming?
Dad’s half-lit cigarette dangled from his bottom lip, and I hoped the gray ashes wouldn’t fall on me. I looked over at my twin sister, Sheila, in her bed. Her eyes were also wide open, both of us startled and speechless as he yanked the covers from her bed, too. He continued on into the bedroom across the hall to awaken Marie and the younger twins, who were five years old.
He barked:
“Time to get up!
“Let’s go!
“Everybody downstairs.
“Time to put your thinking caps on!”
Although my dad had served a short term in the Air National
Guard, he was not a military man. He was an attorney. But I imagined that this must have been what it was like to be an army soldier. He used words like “attention,” “stand tall,” and “march.” We obeyed his, “March two, three, march two, three,” down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he ordered us to sit single-file on the floor. Charles and Joan shared a downstairs room and were already sitting on the floor. Charles’s frightened stare made me shiver as I took my place in line. We were powerless.
The seven of us sat sleepy-eyed on the kitchen floor, lined up in a straight row. As we did annually for Easter and Christmas photo shoots, we automatically lined up according to our ages. There we sat: Marie, age fifteen; Sheila and I, thirteen; Joan, eleven and a half; Charles, eight; and Mary and Margaret, only five years old. We were a clan. My back was straight against the eagle-printed wallpaper, and I was flanked by Marie and Sheila. A silver cross and gold-colored rotary phone hung above my head.
What’s a thinking cap? I wondered. I looked down the row of
my siblings, and every one of them looked terrified. I wondered if anyone else was also angry that our own father had woken us in the middle of the night like this. If they were, nobody said a word. They just kept their heads down.
“There are items missing from this house, and we need to find them. Now! Scissors, tweezers, and black combs!” my dad barked. The man with the silver whistle in his hand, screaming at us, looked like my father but was not acting like him. When he yelled like that, his face turned red, and sometimes spit flew out of his mouth.
The night before had been pretty uneventful. Mom, an RN, had been on the three-to-eleven second shift in the labor and delivery unit of the local hospital where she worked part time. Dad was re- sponsible for cooking us dinner those nights. He had opened up his first bottle of beer while he cooked us hot dogs and beans for supper. I hated hot dogs and beans, especially the way he made them. He always burned the hot dogs, just like he burned bacon and eggs. We all ate on the picnic table in the backyard, each leaving the table after we finished. Then, my siblings and I watched TV until it was time for bed. Then, after we’d all gone to sleep, he had drunk more and became crazier and crazier.
“Where are the scissors, the black combs, and the goddamn tweezers? Why can’t I find anything in this goddamn house?” he yelled louder. “How am I going to comb my hair in the morning?”
I didn’t understand why my dad was obsessed with black combs, tweezers, and scissors. I thought all of these items naturally disappeared in a large family, kind of like white socks.
We whispered to each other, “Do you know where the combs are? Have you seen the tweezers anywhere?” We spread about the house barefoot, in our pajamas, pretending to search for the items. We took the sofa cushions off and looked all around and underneath the sofa. We searched the bathroom, the kitchen, and inside the trash basket. We pleaded with each other to find something so we could go back to sleep. My father had told me once when I’d lost something that I’d find it if I prayed to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. So, I prayed, “Please, St. Anthony, let somebody find some- thing so I can go back to my warm bed.”
Well into our search, my mother emerged annoyed from her bedroom. “Bob, what do you think you’re doing, waking the kids in the middle of the night?” she asked. “The kids need their sleep. Let them go back to bed.” She told us all to go back to bed and said we could look for the items in the morning. I wondered what had taken her so long.
My father chanted the phrase, “Scissors—comb—tweezers” so many times that, after coming up empty-handed and being allowed to go back to bed, I still heard the chanting in my head. My bed was cold. I prayed again, “Please, God, let me sleep the rest of the night and not hear any more of my dad yelling.” Mary and Margaret, still scared, tiptoed into my room and curled up next to me for the rest of the night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Frances Morris was raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, the second-oldest of seven siblings with two sets of twins. She was a practicing nurse from 1989 to 2011, primarily in women’s health. The highlight of her career was the time she spent at Yale New Haven Hospital working in nursing management alongside international experts in the field of women’s health. She met her current husband, Bruce, in 1989. Her passions are walking and bike riding in nature, yoga, traveling, photography, and jewelry design. She has three grown children and four grandchildren. Susan lives with her husband and two dogs in Clifton Park, New York. Learn more at her website.
Elise,
Thanks for sharing my memoir THE SENSITIVE ONE with your readers 🙂