by Shania Twain
One of my favorites to sing along with was “Rainy Days and Mondays.” I liked to double Karen’s voice, but on a different note, pretending to be her backup singer. I couldn’t resist singing along to the beauty of her voice, but I wanted to hear her, not sing over her notes. I tried to follow Karen’s lead part by following the melody line like a shadow. The blend felt so satisfying to me. My mother, however, was taken aback.
“Eilleen!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
“This part’s more interesting,” I explained. I loved to harmonize, and couldn’t get enough of listening to pristine and sometimes complex vocal arrangements executed ingeniously by artists such as the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, Bread, and the Bee Gees, to name a few. Later, in my teens, I would study other groups known for their multipart harmonies: the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, the Doobie Brothers, Earth, Wind & Fire, ABBA. And more Bee Gees—it’s hard to top the three brothers’ combination of talent and the similar voice quality that comes from sharing DNA.
Although my preference was to always take the harmony part, my mother encouraged me to sing lead. “You’re my little singer, not my little backup singer,” was her reasoning. The urge I felt to go straight to the harmony parts so often, I believe, was probably a true reflection of my personality. An aspect of my nature that preferred being in the company of others to enjoy my singing. I appreciated the concept of group singing, the team spirit and group effort, especially once I learned to play guitar at eight years old.
I became more influenced by singer-songwriter-type artists who accompanied themselves on acoustic guitar. This allowed for a more intimate group sound that I would say has made the biggest impression on my acoustic-style songwriting. When I plunk out songs on the piano, as I don’t actually play piano but use it as a songwriting tool, my melodies and feel are very different from when I use the guitar. Guitarist-songwriters such as Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Gordon Lightfoot, and Jim Croce impacted my writing, but I think the group artists did even more. Bands such as the Poppy Family and Crosby, Stills and Nash drove me crazy with creative inspiration, like the sky was the limit, and I loved their songwriting and the three individual voices they put together to create a cluster of sound. I just couldn’t believe it, I was so amazed.
This was really where my heart was, singing words and melodies that sit with ease in my throat. I strive for this again now. I got away from the more organic way of using my voice when I began singing live, commercial rock in my late teens and am only getting back to the folkish, acoustic artist style of singing I enjoy singing the most. I will always be a great fan of the voice that expresses itself with no inhibition of imperfection. The concern to vocalize emotion without flaw, I believe, only obstructs the flow of honesty and integrity in the expression. I have a great appreciation for classical music, which in my experience, through the bit of exposure I’ve had on and off over the years through vocal lessons and having dated a classical orchestra conductor, has made me realize that there is little room for improvisation or personal adaptation. I admire the complexity in the compositions of classical music and also the incredible discipline it requires to execute a high standard of performance, but my favorite piece of music written by a classical musician is the film score from The Mission. I don’t believe it’s considered “classical,” but rather a soundtrack for a Hollywood movie. Nevertheless, it’s a symphony of masterfully combined sounds that appeals to me in the same vein as classical music. The creative and unique approach Ennio Morricone took with The Mission soundtrack was what I consider “contemporary classical,” but I don’t believe it is actually called that, technically.
Although my taste in music was broad from the beginning, my own personal style continued to develop more in the vein of an acoustic singer-songwriter. The song I chose to sing to my first-grade class was called “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The response wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Some of the kids started snickering and giggling. I was so embarrassed that I came this close to stopping midsong and bolting out of the room in tears. But it seemed too late to give up, so I finished, much to my relief, although I distinctly remember feeling that I never wanted to sing in front of my peers again! However, the children’s cruelty didn’t end there. On the playground that afternoon, some of them ridiculed me, calling me a show-off. I couldn’t understand it. My family always enjoyed it when I sang and never gave me the impression that I was “showing off.” In fact, they wanted me to sing for them.
My traumatic public debut at show-and-tell was pretty disheartening, to tell you the truth, but I loved music too much to let it discourage me from singing. The same year during first grade, I joined the school choir, figuring that singing as part of a group probably couldn’t be too bad. Plus, there’d be a lot of harmonizing; I liked that. Without my mother’s pushing me, though, I might not have tried out. She accompanied me to school for the evening audition in front of the music teacher who directed the choir. First, I had to sing solo, then with the full ensemble. I didn’t know anything about singing in a choir. I didn’t understand how to not improvise the notes. It was awkward being told exactly what part to sing and being expected to remain strictly in unison with the several other voices on my same part: melody. Despite my obvious lack of experience, the director was visibly impressed by my voice and accepted me, even though I was one year below the minimum-age cutoff. That made some kids jealous and their parents annoyed. Once again, I heard calls of “show-off!” and accusations that I craved attention. The last thing I wanted was to stand out from the group of singers. I wanted to blend in like everyone else. I also wanted to explain that I sang simply because I enjoyed it, just like they might have played soccer or taken riding lessons. By this point, I felt targeted and bullied for being good at something. Being the “little singer” wasn’t so fun. Not a good start to a career that would dominate the next few decades of my life.
• • •
I’m looking at a photo of me, my dad, Carrie, and our dog Peppi posing on the front steps of the house on Bannerman. It’s my little sister’s first day of kindergarten. The one-bedroom home, a tiny, wood-framed box shape with wood plank siding, sat behind the landlord’s larger house. Perhaps our little house was originally the garage or storage shed of the main house. It was small enough for me to assume that it had possibly been a secondary building of that sort, converted into a rental dwelling. Regardless of what its original use may have been, this small, wood-framed square house was now the Twain home to a family of six. In the two years that we lived there, it served as the stage for plenty of Twain Gang drama, including poverty, violence, and the arrival of my baby brother Mark, my mother’s fourth child.
This little house shook when there was a physical ruckus going on inside. There wasn’t much space, so during a struggle, there was lots of banging into things and no room to avoid tumbling into furniture and corners. My parents once had an argument during a birthday celebration for my dad. My mom had surprised him by baking a spice cake. I loved her spice cake! It had an apple-cinnamon flavor with vanilla icing. But this day, they began fighting, and it soon became a physical struggle. At the sound of their yelling, I poked my head around the corner and saw this peculiar brownish stuff on my mother’s head and face and I immediately thought of a scary movie I’d seen once, where a knife thrower, as part of a circus stunt, threw knives at a spinning wheel that had a woman strapped to it. He hit the woman right in the neck, cutting her throat open. It was an old movie with cheap visual effects, and in that scene, a brownish, mince-type stuffing came out of her wound. Although it wasn’t very convincing as real bodily insides coming out, the texture I now saw caked on my mother reminded me of it. I panicked. Her brains are coming out! She’s going to die! He’s killed her! I was convinced that my mother was dead. But what I saw wasn’t the minced insides; six-year-old me had jumped to conclusions. It was the birthday cake she’d baked for him, which he’d thrown in her face. I felt conflicting emotions: relief that my mom
was okay, but sadness, too. How could he be so mean and humiliate her like that after she’d done something so nice for him and gone to the trouble of baking him this delicious cake?
But the Bannerman Street house saw far worse fights than that. During my mother’s pregnancy on Bannerman, far into her last term, as I remember her tummy being well pronounced already, they got into an angry spat, and Jerry tossed her around the room like a rag doll, banged her head against the wall, and then kicked her while she was on the floor and curled up, trying to protect her stomach. I didn’t know anything about pregnancy, but it was instinctively obvious to me that if you beat the shit out of a woman with a baby in her belly, you could hurt—or kill—the baby. Thankfully, both of them lived.
Between the beatings from my dad, living in a cramped house with four kids, one of them an infant, and money being tight as usual, my mother was increasingly edgy. Adding to the stress, Grandma Eileen was in the hospital dying. I don’t remember why my grandmother no longer lived with us by the time I was six. I do remember my mother being very stressed after coming home from hospital visits to my grandmother, very emotional about how helpless she felt not being able to stay with her through the night, and deeply distressed that the nurses couldn’t give my grandmother water when she was so parched and desperate to drink. Apparently with her heart condition, angina, and the treatment she was under, a very limited liquid intake was necessary, as my mother explained. It hurt her so much to see her own mother suffering.
My grandmother died while we were still living on Bannerman, the same time period my mother delivered the first boy in the family. My grandmother specifically asked my mother that if the baby was a boy, to name him Mark, and she did.
One of my sister Carrie’s most vivid memories from the Bannerman house was her routine of waiting for my dad to get home from work. He always saved his lunch dessert for Carrie; she had a real sweet tooth and sat on the front step each afternoon, waiting for him to return so she could rush his lunch box. She’ll never forget the time she clipped open the aluminum hinged box to find a plastic bag filled with water and two goldfish swimming about. She named her new pets Goldie and Silvy. They sat on display at the top of the fridge of our tiny kitchen in a round glass bowl. In her memory, it was the sweetest gift he ever gave her. We both remember our father as a kind, thoughtful man, and because the contrast between his two sides was complicated for us small children to comprehend, we tended to hold on to the sunny side rather than the darker side.
The Bannerman house certainly saw its share of personal hardships, and it showed in my mother’s behavior. She would spend hours putting together our Halloween costumes, like the ones shown in the photo included in this book, with me as a fairy princess with a tinfoil wand and crown, Carrie in her clown suit, and Jill in a “squaw outfit,” as my dad called it. She pulled herself into the spirit of life for us kids, and I realize now how much courage that must have taken for her to keep us happy and feeling as if we had some normalcy in our lives. Yet on the other hand, there could be a hurricane of domestic instability, sometimes all in the same day. But she was only so strong, and she inevitably took it out on us sometimes. One time I had the stomach flu and woke up in the middle of the night feeling nauseous. I called for her as I stumbled out of bed and staggered across the kitchen on my way to the washroom. I didn’t make it, vomiting all over the floor. It was the first time in my seven-year life I’d ever thrown up. I didn’t understand what was happening to me, and I was scared. With my mother now at my side, I vomited again, this time on myself as well as on her.
I was crying and weak and wanted only to be held while I tried to catch my breath. To my shock, my mom grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. “I can’t believe what a mess you made!” she scolded furiously. “Now I have to clean all this up. It’s the middle of the night, for Christ’s sake!” Aside from the odd slap across the head or tight grip on my arm when I got on her nerves, either by talking too much or not paying attention, I’d never felt my mother being so angry with me before.
Looking back on it now, and being a mother myself, I understand her lack of patience that night. She had three other kids to wake up for in a few hours, and now, in the middle of the night, I’d given her a big mess to clean. I wish I’d had the maturity then to comfort her and tell her I understood. But being seven years old, I didn’t understand. How could I? The idea that adults can live challenging lives full of struggles and suffering is beyond a child’s comprehension. All I knew was that her behavior upset me, making me feel worse than I already did.
How can four children and two adults sleep in a tiny one-bedroom house? The only bedroom was on the second floor, and that was where my parents slept, while my two sisters and I slept in single bunk beds wedged into the corner of the stairwell at the base of the steps leading down from their room. Our baby brother’s crib was tucked under the stairs, across from our bunk beds.
Jill’s “seniority” earned her the luxury of sleeping alone in the top bunk; Carrie and I shared the bottom bed. Not only was it pretty cramped, especially as we grew—this arrangement continued until I was twelve—but my little sister was a bed wetter until about the age of ten. Boy, did I used to get pissed (sorry, Carrie!) at her when I’d feel something warm and wet soaking my pajamas in the middle of the night. Sometimes I was able to avoid it by jamming myself up against the wall or shifting to the foot of the bed; I’d throw a coat over myself and leave her in the puddle of pee with a grunt and try to get back to the business of sleeping. But other times there was no dry spot to take refuge in, and so I’d have to go through the whole process of waking up Carrie-Ann, changing her pajamas, placing a towel over the wet spot, and putting on fresh bedding. Much to my astonishment, and my annoyance, if I didn’t shake her awake, she’d just carry on sleeping peacefully as if nothing had happened!
• • •
We girls had unusual amounts of independence and responsibility for children our ages. With Carrie in tow, Jill and I used to walk over an hour to the public swimming pool in the neighboring town of Schumacher. It was a long distance for six- and eight-year-old kids, let alone for a tiny four-year-old. In 2010 Carrie and I went back to Timmins and took that exact walk again, from our old front door on Bannerman to where the pool used to be, just to step back through the distance of time. What took us over an hour nearly forty years ago was still a forty-five-minute walk for us as adults. We were impressed at how our little legs were able to take us so far from home as well as all the way back again. Sometimes when we look back at the scale of things from when we were little, we often find them so much smaller and shorter than we remembered them. Not in this case! But more than the distance, we marveled at how we ever managed, at such young ages, to make our way back and forth without supervision, especially when you consider that there were no sidewalks along the busy highway with traffic whizzing past. It was dangerous. My sisters and I didn’t think twice about it at the time, but in retrospect—and being a mom myself—it does strike me as rather eyebrow raising, as nowadays most parents don’t even let their kids walk down to the corner alone before they reach their teens.
Jill, being the oldest, naturally shouldered most of the responsibility. She was incredibly mature and conscientious, always taking good care of Carrie and me. My parents often gave her the task of paying utility bills while the three of us were on our way to the pool, or to Hollinger Park, or to the local bowling alley—bowling being one of our favorite activities. My dad worked long hours at the local mine at this point, and my mother had a part-time job at a department store called Marshalls. We took care of ourselves a lot and did many of the errands while they worked.
Even at age seven, I was painfully aware that our family was dysfunctional compared to most. Other families seemed to behave more like the families I saw on TV: sibling squabbles over taking too much time in the bathroom, parents disagreeing over whether to have the in-laws over during the holidays, how to tell the kids the dog ran away, things l
ike that. The television series I used to watch in the late sixties and early seventies included Bonanza, The Flintstones, The Addams Family, Gilligan’s Island, and one of my favorites, The Brady Bunch. These families—even the animated Flintstones of Bedrock—always worked out their problems reasonably, learning important life lessons and morals in the process.
In contrast, something was seriously wrong in our home, so whenever I encountered another dysfunctional family, the signs were all too familiar to me, and I’d feel compassion for them, silently recognizing what we had in common. I could relate to the likely struggles in their home life. I was sensitive to others who showed signs of neglect or abuse such as poor hygiene, bad teeth, regular absenteeism from school, overly introverted or extroverted behavior, parents you never saw, even when they were invited to participate in school functions, and unexplained injuries. I believe suffering children recognize one another. I personally never talked openly to anyone, even other kids I felt sorry for or related to, about my own inner struggle with my childhood. Many kids don’t because children naturally care for their parents and families and feel protective of them, not wanting to expose any dysfunction in the family for fear of the family breaking up or someone getting in trouble. Exposing a parent or someone a child loves can make him or her feel guilty or disloyal, which is how I would have felt. Kids might hide painful feelings also because they are embarrassed by their situation, feeling they might be criticized, and are afraid of being exposed and humiliated. My personal experience was that if I were ever to have shared a violent scene between my parents with a teacher or a friend who then told her parents, I knew my father could be arrested, and I was afraid of being alone with my mother not being able to provide for us. I felt that if anyone knew about certain situations in our home, everything would fall apart. Fear and guilt were primarily what kept me quiet.
