by Shania Twain
The King Street basement bedroom was quite dark and stuffy, tucked down in a far corner and isolated enough from the rest of the house that you could barely hear the sound coming from my room. I sang out loud to mid-1970s records such as Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room,” Jim Stafford’s “Spiders & Snakes,” and “Rock the Boat” by Hues Corporation. My hand-me-down red-and-white plastic K-tel record player spun for hours as I played the few vinyl records I had over and over again, as loud as the toylike turntable would go.
Our apartment house was in a fairly crowded residential area called the Flour Mill, which was within walking distance of the Sudbury city center. The neighbors behind our building were a French-Canadian family with two kids, a boy and a girl both around my age. The mom was a good caretaker to her family, I thought. I could tell she was a great cook just from the delicious aromas of homemade food that drifted over to our apartment from their little house. The fresh, comforting scent of laundry detergent blew out of their dryer vent and gave me the impression that she kept her family clean and their home tidy. There were freshly washed clothes hanging on her line every day. This family lived in a very small space that seemed as if it had been converted from a one-story garage. The entrance was flush with the ground level and had a low, flat roof. They couldn’t have been much better off than we were, if at all, but they seemed to function better somehow. In the evening, you could hear their quiet conversations broken occasionally by boisterous laughter as they sat around a table playing cards together. I envied the fact that the neighbor kids’ laundry was done while they were at school, so they didn’t have to worry whether or not they’d have something clean to wear to school the next day or if they could expect dinner on the table each night. I was jealous of their reliable, consistent life. What I could see from this family was that you could be poor without being dysfunctional. That regardless of how modest your means, kids should still be clean and fed. I felt sorry for myself. I was humiliated that someone else’s mother had to be the one to show me how to floss my teeth, to point out that I wasn’t brushing properly or regularly enough.
Over the next few years, I noticed my mother withdrawing from her family and friends, going in and out of what I can now see was depression. Sometimes she was up and around, participating in family life; other times she was in bed for long periods of the day, leaving us kids to fend for ourselves. It was hard to predict when she would be in a state of attentive motherhood or in bed with the covers over her head, but I came home late from playing one afternoon after school to find her waiting for me like any worried mother would be when her child is late getting home. Except that she met me at the door with an extension cord in hand and proceeded to whip me with it, scolding, “Where the hell have you been?! I was worried sick about you. Never do that again!” I don’t recall ever doing that again; the welts I developed from that beating instilled enough fear in me that I was very mindful of the time from that day on.
My mother didn’t often lose her temper with me, but when she did, it was impactful. I can’t say my mother was violent by nature, but the way she expressed herself when she was angry was excessive, like whipping me with an extension cord, for example, or giving me a sharp slap across the face. Like I said, it didn’t happen often, but if I were to dare talk back, smack!
My dad, on the other hand, wasn’t as temperamental. His discipline of us kids was more deliberate and controlled, unlike his arguments with my mother. At bedtime he’d give us three girls warnings to be quiet and go to sleep. If we pushed it too far, he’d line us up and give us the belt on the bum: three for Jill, two for me, and one for Carrie. Other offenses called for more severe consequences, but I never remember getting the belt just for getting on his nerves or even for talking back. That usually got a kick in the ass, but at least not a slap in the face, which to me is the more degrading of the two. For the most part, I considered my dad to be a fair disciplinarian with me. I could tell that he didn’t feel good about it: in fact, he used to explain why he had to discipline me, and I accepted it as something a responsible father felt he had to do, like he had no choice but was doing what good parents do, which is to keep their kids in line. But then there was that other side to my dad, where he almost seemed to become a different person: violent and out of control, especially toward my mother.
I don’t think you need a psychology degree to attribute my mother’s depression at least partly to years of physical abuse, and not just from Jerry. When I was ten years old or so, she confided that she had a history of being beaten by men. My mother explained that one time, my grandmother Eileen was at home and heard a moaning in the alley behind her house. When she went out to investigate, she found an unrecognizable, battered woman, her face swollen and bloody, lying on the ground wincing in pain, in and out of consciousness. She got her to the hospital, and only once the young woman was cleaned up did my grandmother realize that it was her own daughter. I was horrified by this story. She went on to tell me that her marriage to my biological father had also been violent. Clarence was the jealous type, is how my mother put it, and when he lost his temper he became physically explosive. Although I didn’t personally know my father, the fact that he would do this to my mother really affected me. In fact, it made me afraid of him. Carrie and I talk now about how we forgive him and hold nothing against him, no matter what the truth was. I personally wish him peace, as I now have peace and understanding that those early years were turbulent for reasons I don’t feel entitled to judge.
My mother’s face told the story of an abused woman. She’d obviously been bruised so many times that her skin coloring was now permanently uneven, with thumbprint-sized patches of bluish-purple and tiny red broken blood vessels, speckled in blotches here and there. There were several periods when for months at a time, my mother would hardly leave the house, even to walk up to the corner store. She would send us kids for the essentials: Export “A” cigarettes, instant coffee, a can of Carnation evaporated milk, and if there was enough change left over, a Hershey Cherry Blossom. My mother’s favorite, it was a small egg–sized chocolate shell with a maraschino cherry in the center. A sweet syrup would pour out when you broke through the chocolate. The Cherry Blossom was my dad’s frequent makeup offering to my mom after a fight, as well as the no-fail pleaser on Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
My mother often didn’t feel good about the way she looked and didn’t want other people to see her. Christmastime got her out more, though, and with a bit of sprucing up, she’d gather up her courage, and we’d go to my uncle Don’s for a visit or hop around to some of my dad’s relatives in town. When I had performances, she got herself together to come with me. She never missed those, yet it was hard to get her to meet my teachers or other parents. I feel she was too insecure about herself to feel comfortable in normal family environments such as schools or neighborhood events. She did like the odd night out at bingo, though. Any outing where she had to meet people, she’d ask me to apply foundation to her face to cover the blotchy patches, and I’d style her hair with a curling iron and Final Net spray. As I dabbed on the foundation, it seemed as though it should have still been as painful as the day she was beaten, as her skin appeared bruised in places. Certainly the memories of how she got them would have been.
When my mother spoke of Clarence, my biological father, she never sounded bitter or hateful, even when describing the violence between them. “We just rubbed each other the wrong way,” she’d say with a shrug. Although my mother spoke of Clarence as someone who hurt her, she never did so with malice or anger. Any resentment she may have felt toward him never transferred to me, and she explained that they fell in love but just weren’t meant for each other. She never blamed him or disrespected him in her tone. She only sounded sad and disappointed that things turned out the way they did. Given my age, I don’t know that she should have been so graphic with me in describing the violence, but then, if she had waited until I’d reached a more appropriate age, perhaps t
he past would have died with her in the car accident. Her explanations of my biological father’s violent behavior, although disturbing, helped answer why he wasn’t part of our lives.
It did leave me confused, though, as to why she would fall in love and marry back into a violent relationship. As an adult, however, I’m more sympathetic regarding why my mother remained in this abusive cycle. Psychologists explain many reasons why this happens, and in my mother’s case, I believe at least a few of them clearly applied, like the reality of economic struggle, the responsibility of children, low self-esteem, and not enough family or social support; the fact that I believe she entered her relationships out of love, and even abuse, doesn’t make those feelings just disappear. What I got out of my own observations of my mother is that leaving is easier said than done. Make no mistake: trying to break free from an abusive relationship, especially with the responsibility of children in tow, takes extreme courage.
4
Roast Beef Families
Jerry may have had his problems, on the one hand, but he was also a man of high principles on the other. As I describe the scary side of my dad through these pages, it’s important to me that the reader keep in mind the context of the situation: he was just twenty years old when he married my mom—who was two years his senior—so young to have taken on the responsibility of raising three little girls with the type of dedication and sincerity that he did. I find that very admirable and tremendously brave, as he didn’t have any children of his own when they married, so he had no parenting experience. How many young men would have done what he did: claiming us as his very own and, later, adopting his nephew Darryl? Jerry adamantly banned the words stepfather, stepbrother, and half sister from our household. He insisted that the Twain Gang of five children was united. I was all for simplifying the reconstructed family language terms, accepting it as something that made me feel as if I belonged all the way and not just partway. It mattered to me that once my dad took me on as his own daughter, I was treated like his daughter. It was a commitment that felt more real because he insisted the terms we used to identify our roles in the family be all or nothing. No half this or half that. It would have insulted my dad if I’d ever referred to him as my stepfather, for example, or to my brothers as my half brothers. Because I was so young when he assumed the father role in my life, I hadn’t established that role with my biological father, and there was no confusion for me. Perhaps had I been older, it would have been more complicated, and, of course, in some circumstances, step terms are appropriate.
My dad always struggled to find steady work that paid enough to support all of us. When I was ten, he landed a job at the Sudbury Bureau of Indian Affairs. It didn’t pay well, or certainly not enough to support our family, but as a Native Canadian with minimal education, he was proud to work there. I remember my dad coming home from his job quite emotionally drained. One of his responsibilities required that he visit various Ontario Indian reservations, assess the conditions in which the people were living, and comment on any of the grants for community improvements such as road repairs, community safety services, and various other things that might be necessary for the quality of life on the reservation.
He’d say things to us like, “You know, kids, we don’t have much, but we’re so lucky. I visited a reserve this week to review a request for a basketball net to be installed in the school gym along with a supply of balls. I randomly stopped in at a private home on my way out and saw that the house had no floor, only dirt, and there was a toddler crawling around with a shitty diaper so weighed down from not being changed for so long, it was dragging along the ground. The mother was drunk, sprawled out on the couch, slurring at me with her tongue against her toothless gums. I was so depressed by this, how can I support the recommendations to install sporting equipment for kids on this reservation, when there were issues in the community like this not being dealt with?” He’d say this with his head in his hands. He felt that the money was going in all the wrong places and that his job was futile.
Although our family saw some rough times, some of the stories my dad would tell about what he saw during his time with Indian Affairs showed us that we were actually doing pretty well in comparison. My father would tell me about how some Native communities in Canada had alarmingly high rates of suicide, rape, incest, child abuse and neglect, alcohol and drug abuse, and other social problems—all at a higher rate than most non-Native populations in Canada. Still, living outside the reservation in the white world, when we were kicked out on the street because my dad couldn’t afford the rent, I remember vividly asking my parents, “Why don’t we just go live on a reserve so we don’t have to worry about where we’re going to live all the time?” Although my father was bringing home these depressing stories about life on some reservations, from my perception of things, though the relatives on our family reserve in Temagami lived modest lives, they didn’t seem to suffer from the extreme scenarios my father witnessed through his work in Indian Affairs. In fact, they seemed to be doing better than we were, for the most part.
I had fond memories of summer stays on the Temagami Reserve as a kid, and I assumed that life on all reservations would be as fun as it was there, with plenty of food to go around, roofs over everyone’s heads, always lots of music and dancing, and the kids running around with much more freedom than in town. Dad’s relatives had no prejudice toward us girls and treated us like their own. We felt welcome there, but my father just didn’t want to live on a reservation, and that was it. Even as a child I could see the irony of the social and domestic struggles of our own family and my father’s job with Indian Affairs, as he tried to improve the quality of life for other Native families. My father was disheartened with the statistics he saw firsthand in certain Native communities, and by the fact that his job didn’t do anything to help the neediest of his own people, especially since he could only report the social problems he witnessed; he couldn’t follow up on them, as he didn’t work for the Social Services Department. I believe my father felt ultimately that in order to break the cycle of poverty, you had to be able to help yourself, because in his opinion, if you were Indian, the government certainly wouldn’t. I wonder if he felt that moving onto a reserve and allowing the government to support us was like giving in to the very system he resented for the Native people: taking the handout in exchange for remaining under the thumb. I can see how he may have felt, that being poor but integrated was better than being comfortable but segregated.
He was also caught up in a cycle of his own that he was trying to break. His parents were heavy drinkers, yet my father veered away from that path, and I saw him drink only occasionally. He also broke the cycle by not relying on welfare. He was the only one of his immediate family to successfully remain independent of welfare. He took pride in that, and it was important to him to be able to set a good example.
To qualify for the position my father had at Indian Affairs, he’d taken some college courses in night school while working a day job. I admire him so much for bettering himself in order to give us a better life. There’s more irony here: a Native man (a minority) trying to give his adopted white (majority) children a better future and doing everything he could to avoid handouts from the government. My mother also believed in him and encouraged him to strive to reach his potential—although nagging was probably more like what she did. But her heart was in the right place, and my dad appreciated her support. My mother stood behind him, and Jerry always worked hard at everything he did.
Probably because he now had a government job with an impressive-sounding title, my dad managed to swing a mortgage so that we could buy our very first house, on a cul-de-sac in the neighboring working-class community of Hanmer. It was in an area people referred to as “the Sticks,” I suppose because the houses were built up against the bush line of the Sudbury outskirts. This wasn’t really forest, but more like low-growing bush—sort of brush, hence the term sticks? For the first time in my young life, we enjoyed a semblance of stabili
ty, staying there into my high school years. I finished grade school at Redwood Acres, went on to Pinecrest Junior High, and then transferred to Capreol High School, all in the Hanmer area.
I liked our house on Proulx Court, with its light green siding and faux brick panels at the base. Though it was just a simple bungalow, it was bigger than any of the other places we’d lived. (Carrie and I still had to share the same single bottom bunk bed, however.) How great was it to have more space? Sometimes, when my parents were out and I was bored, I would move the bedroom furniture all over the house, just for something to do. A friend would be over, and the two of us would pull beds apart and drag them into the living room, then switch sets of belongings from one bedroom to the other. Looking back now, I find it strange that my mom and my dad were so cool about it, as it’s kind of odd for a ten-year-old to orchestrate a home renovation, so to speak, with little reaction from the parents. I think it was my way of superficially changing things in an environment I had so little control to actually change.
We had our own backyard for the first time, and I spent many hours there playing with grass. Not just picking it; I loved to take tall-stemmed grass with long, wide blades draping down in a swoop that I’d split with my fingernail to create the effect of hairlike strands. Each grass had its own name and character, like a Barbie doll. Then I’d put on little plays, giving each of them different accents and personalities, like the mean one, the mother, and so on. I loved acting out roles through them and found making up stories to be a great escape that whisked me to another place. I was very private about this make-believe play, as I felt embarrassed to share it with anyone else my own age. Although my little sister, Carrie, understood, and she joined in sometimes, I remember telling her quite seriously to never tell anyone that I played with grass.
