by Shania Twain
The stories were always complete fantasy and never about reality or drawn from my own life. This was an escape. I enjoyed pretending that my grass people were from far away, like England or somewhere exotic like Egypt, for example. I’ve often thought that maybe I should have become an actress, since I enjoyed being in someone else’s skin so much, but I think it’s more that I enjoyed being out of my own skin. I can’t say that I would have been any good at real acting, but it sure would have suited my need to be someone else for a while, molding the characters and stories as I desired.
This also held true for my songwriting, which started the same year I began playing with grass. I was ten when I wrote my first songs, and the backyard was a great place to hide and write. When I escaped into my creative world of “putting” stories to music, like when I played with my grass dolls, I lost myself in a world of fiction.
Usually after some solitary time in the backyard, I’d hear my mother calling out for me. I wouldn’t answer. What a terrible thing to do to your own mother, but I didn’t want to be disturbed. I wanted to preserve this state of escape for as long as I could and pretend I wasn’t there. I needed someplace with a secret door that I could enter and close behind me so no one could follow. My backyard spot was actually inside a patch of brush that sat in the center of the one-acre lot behind the house. I trimmed a path through the branches and made a cavity on the inside as my hiding place. I could make small twig fires in there without being seen. This branchy cave was a place where I could forget about the piles of laundry I would spend the coming Saturday hand washing and hanging on the line, or if it was raining, the hours from midafternoon to eleven at night in the Laundromat. Instead it was necessary for my mental health to be able to experience, even if just in my imagination, an existence without worries of what we would eat this week without money for groceries.
My mother loved to hear my new song ideas, and I’d play them for her occasionally, after much coaxing. I kept my songwriting to myself during my childhood as much as I could, since I didn’t see the point in sharing it. It was my personal thing, like a diary I kept with no intention of ever sharing it with anyone. It pleased my mother when I included her in my music, though I often needed time alone with music. To really ensure privacy with my thoughts and creativity beyond the backyard hideout, I’d put my guitar in its case, some matches in my pocket, and walk up the road about twenty minutes, then go off into the bush to have my fire. No one would find me there. I was safe to sing and talk to grass to my heart’s content.
Our house had a basement with a dirt floor. We kept chickens down there for a while, as my dad figured it would save money to raise our own and have free eggs. We had a few hens and a banty rooster. At the same time, we planted potatoes in the backyard along with a few other root vegetables. We also started scavenging nearby fields for potatoes left over from the fall harvest. You could pick them for free, so why not? If you dug and kicked the dirt enough, you could go home with a decent yield. My dad was being innovative with these hobby-farming, potato-scavenging ideas, and I thought they were clever ways of helping to keep us fed through periods when money was scarce.
That said, I hated picking potatoes. Not so much because of the physical work of bending and digging on your knees, but because every once in a while I’d thrust my hands into the loosened, tilled soil and pull up a muck-like slime of putrid, rotted potato. The stench is almost impossible to wash off your hands once it gets in the pores and up into the fingernails. Even worse was pulling up a potato and discovering that it doubled as a condo for potato worms. Ever see one? They are large, fat, white, and so disgusting. I used to gag at the mere sight of them, and coming face-to-face with one of these gooey creatures dangling from my potential dinner was enough to make me swear off spuds for life. But potatoes were a staple in our house, especially during picking season. I was turned off of potatoes for a while, but beggars can’t be choosers, so down the hatch they went—even if sometimes I had to choke them down.
As for the chickens, I was my dad’s head-chopping assistant. I didn’t like the idea of this and was a little nervous about the whole thing, but he talked me through each step, and off we went with being off with their heads. My father warned me that once the head fell away and he let the chicken go, it would run around for a minute or so before finally falling over dead. That idea freaked me out. But I had to suppress my girlish squeamishness and be the tomboy I wanted to prove to my father I could be. I felt he was relying on me to help him, as Carrie and the boys were too young, and I’m not sure that Jill would have been up for doing it. Although I was on the verge of adolescence, I felt obligated to fulfill my role as his son-slash-daughter for a while longer.
My job was to hold the chicken’s head in my hand, pressing its beak firmly against the brick that served as the chopping block. While my dad held its body still with one hand cupped over it, he brought down the axe on the bird’s neck with his other hand. The instant the blade made contact, I let go and ran as fast and as far away as I could, as I was sure that the decapitated chicken would chase me. You know the expression “run around like a chicken with its head cut off”? That’s exactly what it did: running frantically, senselessly, and directionless. There was little blood, though, and it was all over very quickly. Phew! Boy, was I glad when the raising-chickens phase came to an end.
My dad had a playful sense of humor. One night, after everyone had gone to bed, we heard my mother give out a high-pitched shriek. I was alarmed, thinking maybe they were fighting again, but when I went to their bedroom door, she was laughing. My mom had gone to bed and turned out the lights. My dad waited until she was settled in, then he quietly joined her in the dark, with his feet up on his pillow beside her and a lit cigarette between his toes. All she could see next to her was the orange tip of the cigarette in the black and leaned over to kiss him on the face. That’s when she let out the screech. I thought that was a clever one.
Reflecting back as I write my life story, nothing feels better and cozier than my bare feet on my clean kitchen floor, and with dinner already on at five in the afternoon. The air is filled with the aroma of onions, garlic, thyme, rosemary, and slowly stewing potatoes (I love potatoes now), the sun is shining, my son is playing happily with a school friend, I snuck in a ten-minute nap this afternoon, my first spring roses on my deck are up, the birds are singing, and I feel all warm and fuzzy. Content. This is what’s really happening to me today: order, comfort, not just on TV or in my imagination, but in my real life in my own home. I savor these days and remind myself not to take them for granted, as I realize it’s not every day that you have the chance to enjoy the simple things.
I’ve already run around straightening every curtain, vase, carpet, and chair, opened all the right windows, lit a fragrant candle, poured myself a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and sat down in my chair, which is perfectly positioned at just the right angle to take in the most of the view over Lake Geneva and the Swiss Alps, to write. Nature is my favorite painting. I like nesting and enjoying a perfect home setting. With everything in place, I can relax and enjoy the picture-perfect moment. Freeze-frame it for as long as it will last. Then my son runs in with a bloody knee and smudges his muddy fingers on the sliding glass doors; the dogs trot along behind him, wet, and proceed to shake themselves dry all over the floor. Yup, these are the components that complete the scene of a truly perfect day. The peace may be broken in my quiet setting, but by something that makes me smile, like the warm, humorous scenes of one of my favorite Norman Rockwell paintings, No Swimming, depicting everyday, real-life perfection where something goes wrong but still makes you smile.
When I was a kid, I longed to have moments alone to myself, just so I could dream about how ideal life could be. I always imagined other homes having dinner on the stove, and I fantasized about the great food they would be getting ready to eat. Their lawns the perfect green and manicured, car just washed and polished, and parked very straight in the driveway, a couple of k
ids playing basketball at the net mounted up above the garage door, their golden retriever sprawled out in the sun, and me watching, dreaming, wishing things could be as ideal for us as they were on the other side of the street. I wanted us to be like them. I called them “roast beef families” because their dinners often smelled of roast beef. To me, if you could eat roast beef so often, then you must have been rich. By contrast, the Twains were pretty much a “ground beef family,” off the reduced-price rack, and that’s when we were lucky. For the most part, it was soups, stews, or other dishes where the meat could be spread out over several meals. Often, though, we didn’t have enough for even that.
All my senses would sharpen as I’d sit and observe this roast beef family basking in its perfectly pleasant life. We had one such family across the street from us on Proulx Court, which was a horseshoe-shaped “court” with a string of bungalows on either side. Roast beef families frequently barbecued on summer weekends, and the smell of their steak sizzling would almost kill me. I was dying with envy knowing they could eat so deliciously all the time. It didn’t seem fair, and I felt sorry for myself and perpetually hungry when I smelled something I couldn’t have.
In our house, when the cupboards were otherwise empty, we ate what we called goulash, which in reality consisted of boiled milk poured over broken pieces of dry white bread and topped with brown sugar. Very hard to feel satisfied no matter how much goulash you fill up your belly with when you have a neighbor who is sitting down to his juicy, barbecued steak for Saturday lunch and his roast beef dinner that evening. Now it’s strikingly ironic to me how, as a vegetarian, I no longer yearn to eat any sort of animal, yet my childhood envy was to eat the rich man’s food: meat.
For us, goulash became a staple; there were times when we would eat it for every meal for days. Funny enough, I really liked it and still do, but it was hard to swallow when my taste buds were begging for something more savory and succulent. I recently rediscovered goulash in the Middle East, to my surprise. I went to Dubai for a recreational weekend trip in 2009, and one of the desserts offered in a very nice restaurant I was eating at was goulash! Although it’s also made with bread, sugar, and milk, the sugar is different and not like our Canadian brown sugar, which I think makes it taste best. This Middle Eastern version was good, though, and it brought me back to the days when this was my meal two to three times a day. Ironically, I was eating this poor man’s dish at a luxury five-star hotel in the desert, worlds away. Whoa, I thought, it really is a small world after all.
I spent a lot of my youth jealous of what other people ate. When our cupboards were empty, my school lunch was likely to contain a “poor man’s sandwich,” as my dad used to call it, given that it included only two ingredients—mustard or mayonnaise spread on two slices of white bread. A poor man’s lunch box for a poor man’s lunch was an empty plastic bread bag. That was a bit embarrassing, as most kids had a proper container for carrying their lunch, or at least a brown paper lunch bag. On days when we had no bread left, I lied about why I had no lunch and told the teachers and my classmates that I forgot it at home or that I wasn’t hungry—anything to deflect attention or prying questions.
Leave it to my dad to make lemonade out of lemons, or in this case, a poor man’s sandwich. Its origin goes back to one morning when I went to make myself lunch for school, only to discover that we had nothing to put between the bread. “Of course there’s something to make sandwiches with!” he piped up cheerily. He opened a jar of mustard, grabbed a butter knife, and gave me a demonstration. “Voilà!” he exclaimed, wearing a wide grin. Then he took a giant bite of this meager sandwich, as if to say, “You see? Problem solved. Nothing to worry about. All is good in the world.” I was grateful for his solution and so relieved that I wouldn’t have to go to school empty-handed once again. My father lived by the optimistic outlook “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” He was not easily discouraged, and I was encouraged by his positive attitude, although I didn’t like mustard sandwiches or the fact that that was all I had to look forward to in my lunch at school. But he was right that it was better than nothing.
At lunchtime, I’d sit at my desk with a lunch that did not satisfy my hunger and wish that the girl next to me would share hers with me. She always had twice as much food in her lunch bag than she could possibly eat, like that apple she’d take one bite out of, then put aside. I would have happily finished it, but I never would have humiliated myself enough to ask for her leftovers. What a waste, I used to think. Most of the time, she didn’t even finish her cookies. Imagine that! How could anyone bring cookies to school and not lick up every last crumb?
Most of the other kids’ lunches were on a par with hers, including the one boy whose family was poorer than we were. I used to feel sorry for him because he’d come to school with dirty hair more often than I did, wearing stained pants full of holes and ripped in the arse so badly that you could see he didn’t have on any underwear. But even he had a decent lunch.
Carrie remembers bringing glazed buns to school one picnic day to share with the class. Dad had pulled them up from the depths of our freezer, as she was embarrassed to be the only one not able to bring anything in and didn’t bother asking my mother to bake or buy anything because she knew it wasn’t possible. The problem was that these glazed buns were bought off the sale rack and were way past the sell-by date; they had tiny black bugs sitting under the plastic wrap, snuggled into the icing. Carrie, determined to contribute to the class picnic, picked the bugs off one by one and brought the buns to school.
On mornings when there was no breakfast to be had, I’d be especially famished come lunchtime. But so as not to draw attention to myself, I’d eat my sandwich as s-l-o-w-l-y as possible—I didn’t want to finish way ahead of everybody else. There were times when I felt sorry for myself, as well as jealous of the other children. To me, they seemed spoiled, which was probably unfair of me, as it wasn’t any fault of theirs that they had something proper to eat for lunch. But I think it’s safe to say that they were certainly fortunate.
One thing about not having much in the way of luxuries: you learn to become very frugal. I became skilled at rationing and appreciating every last morsel of food. For instance, I often took charge of pouring the milk in our cereal in the mornings to make sure it went around equally. One time I had a friend sleep over, which was allowed only when we had enough food to eat; during lean times, we wouldn’t even invite children over to play, let alone sleep over. The girl was used to helping herself to as much milk as she wanted at home and was shocked when I almost slapped her hand away from the milk jug at breakfast. “I’ll pour the milk in your cereal,” I scolded, “to make sure we all get some.” The possibility that there might not be enough was foreign to her. She was more accustomed to leaving a third of the bowl with milk in it after the cereal was eaten and couldn’t imagine having to ration such a basic staple.
Even when we had enough to eat, we were conditioned to make it last. Even today, I am still very good at making just enough to go around with nothing left over. My ex-husband wasn’t crazy about this, as he liked my cooking and loved leftovers, so I’ll admit that my habit of always making just enough—nothing wasted, nothing left over—might have been a bit annoying. I developed a knack for judging quantity just right. The way I see it, why buy more than you need or make more than you need? Old habits die hard, I guess. I’ve remained resourceful, but I think it’s fair to say that I learned these skills the hard way. I don’t like being wasteful in the kitchen.
I became pretty good at hiding our financial struggles from other people, but it required a lot of thinking on my feet. To have to explain to my friends that I couldn’t have them sleep over until we could afford to go grocery shopping would have been embarrassing. When we were outside during recess in twenty-five-below-zero temperatures, I insisted to my schoolteacher that I wasn’t cold, despite my wearing worn rubber boots with plastic bags over my socks to keep my feet dry. Better to shiver in the cold tha
n to have to explain that we couldn’t afford winter boots, and my parents were too proud to get secondhand ones at the Salvation Army. I think my parents would have responded to our complaints if, for example, I cried to them about my cold feet or told them it was embarrassing to not have the proper winter clothing in front of my school friends, but I refrained from whining about things I didn’t believe they could do anything about. I understood there was no point in putting pressure on them for things they couldn’t change, and which would only make them feel worse. I just learned to manage with what I had.
Once you start getting into below-zero temperatures and all you are wearing are rubber boots, you are in trouble if you are outside for any length of time, as your feet will simply start to freeze. Of course, when we’d get back inside the building from the playground, my feet were aching. And once they started warming up, I’d be in agony, because thawing is very painful, believe me. But at least the plastic bags kept me dry and free from serious frostbite. (In fact, they were the same plastic bread bags I used to carry my lunch to school.) Most Northern Ontarians know this well, and it was my father’s poor man’s solution to not having proper winter footwear.
I seem to have inherited his resourcefulness. Friends of mine are always marveling at how I’m usually able to make things just … work somehow. I think to myself, If you grew up the way I did, you’d learn how to make something out of nothing, too.
