by Shania Twain
One thing that baffles me today is that I sometimes meet families living below the poverty line who are overweight. After all, wouldn’t you be skinny if you were hungry, not overweight? I naturally associated being poor with being hungry. Fattening, synthetic, refined foods were too expensive for our grocery list, so there was no risk of us getting fat, because we simply couldn’t afford it.
Many of our cheapest foods today, however, are the packaged junk foods. Fast food is also very affordable, so many poor families are able to get their fill on empty calories while loading up on preservatives, colorings, saturated fats, chemicals, and “pounds” while remaining malnourished. They’re full but nutritionally starving at the same time. In contrast, when I was growing up, the poor ate overripe bananas instead of packaged cookies, or drank a glass of water instead of a glass of soda. Nutritionally, we ate the better choices; we just didn’t realize it then.
From as young as I can remember, I had big dreams regarding success in life. However, my definition of financial success was far more modest: I just wanted to earn enough money to live comfortably so that I never had to struggle through the humiliation of having less or not enough of the necessities in life. I would later find it difficult to adjust to the wealth that would come my way. How to manage it, how to share it responsibly, and how to enjoy it without guilt. Having more money than I needed was not something I was prepared for, since having more of anything than what I needed was just not my way of thinking. “Making it,” to me, wasn’t measured by having as much as possible but simply by having enough.
The feelings of anxiety and insecurity that not having enough money to eat or stay warm brought me growing up are painfully vivid, although from where I stand now looking back, they also feel incredibly distant, as though they might have happened in another lifetime or to another person altogether. So much has changed since then that it’s hard to imagine it really happened. Time has allowed me the ability to talk about it with some acceptance and even amazement that we survived some of the more extreme situations. Most of all, I feel sadness for my parents for enduring the struggles and not living to see life get easier. I wish they could see that it all turned out okay. I wish I had the chance to share my life now with them. I’d spoil them with a nice house, a new car, vacations to places they’ve always wanted to go; take my mother shopping for fancy clothes; and sit with them in the audience during a Grammy night. I would certainly make sure they never had to worry about financial security ever again.
On Christmas 1977, when I was twelve, the best gift came from some relatives on the reservation who sent us a box packed with precooked game, including rabbit, moose, fish, and partridge. It provided a welcome change from meager soups, bannock (similar to an American biscuit), and, of course, goulash. Despite our circumstances, Christmas felt festive after all. It was comforting to know that this food had been prepared by concerned extended family members who wished to share it in a spirit of goodwill and who knew what Christmas should be all about.
On the other hand, it brought home to me how bad off we must have been, because my parents rarely ever asked anybody for anything, so we didn’t often receive anything. And this particular Christmas, the closest family with anything to spare was a four-hour drive away. Even during times when we didn’t have enough, it seemed my mother always found it in her to bake for us at Christmas. Butter, sugar, flour, shortening, and a few other inexpensive basics allowed my mom to make something delicious and festive out of nothing. She made the best pumpkin pies, butter tarts, and shortbread cookies. I admired how she mustered enough cheer to put her heart into these small pleasures for us, and I am proud of her as I think of this; how she found the strength for our sake. This is a mother’s love.
Another Christmas, my little sister asked for a Baby Alive doll. It was battery operated and could drink and eat baby food; it even needed its diaper changed. My dad was able to get one on sale, but it was an African American doll with curly black hair. Carrie, of course, had white skin and straight blond hair. He worried that she’d find it odd that her “baby” didn’t resemble her at all and told her it was the last one on the shelf. But my sister was grateful just to get the doll she’d wished for and didn’t seem to notice the color of its skin. I remember thinking, And this is how the world should be: no prejudice, no judging who we love and care for based on the color of their skin. Being raised in a racially mixed family, I was sensitive to this, and I said it to myself with conviction. Carrie’s brown baby doll and her innocent blindness to color was beautiful to me, and I appreciated it. It made me feel good, and it made me feel like something was right about our poor, patchwork family.
That had been one of our happier Christmases. Getting back to the year 1977, we kids were all abuzz about what Santa was going to bring us. For my parents, however, who naturally wanted to give their children a postcard image of Christmas, the holidays often delivered serious stress, with advertising campaigns hard-selling the picture-perfect Christmas, with mounds of gifts under the tree, a feast on the table, and a healthy helping of milk and cookies to leave for Santa. This extravagance was simply out of reach most Christmases in our home. One afternoon I walked into the kitchen to find my mother sitting at the table crying. She’d just come back from town.
“Leeny,” she said to me, sniffling, “pass me the lighter. I need a cigarette.” I took a chair across the table to face her. My mother and I often sat at the kitchen table to talk about life, troubles, and music. She befriended me there; it was like our place to connect as companions, confidantes, friends. Sometimes the things she told me were beyond my level of comprehension, but I knew that my job was to listen and comfort her. With my heart breaking for her woes, feeling her fragility, I would often gently cup her face in my hands and say, “Mom, you are my angel.” Not so much because she was guiding me but because she seemed too innocent for this world. A good person put in a bad place.
Sitting there, her face wet with tears and the tip of her nose red and sniffly, my mother began to tell me about her trip downtown. In a strained, halting voice, she proceeded to confess that she had gone Christmas shopping for us. When she got to the car in the parking lot, her shopping cart overflowing with gifts, “a policeman walked up behind me and said I’d have to bring everything back.” I didn’t understand at first. Then I realized what she was saying: she’d shoplifted everything in the cart. The officer was kind and didn’t arrest or charge her; he just took the cart away and let her go. How pathetic she must have felt.
I had mixed emotions. Part of me was humiliated that my mother would do such a thing, yet another part of me appreciated her intentions; she didn’t want her children to wake up on Christmas morning with nothing under the tree. Carrie and the boys were still young enough to maybe believe that they had been “bad,” and that’s why Santa skipped our house. But I think she was more likely to have thought we felt we weren’t worthy of parents good enough to give us a proper Christmas. This weighed heavy on me, and I felt the guilt she carried of feeling like a failure to her children. It’s no wonder Christmastime has such a high suicide rate. So much cheer that only reminds the unlucky of what doesn’t belong to them, and that some parents have to explain to their children why Santa couldn’t come to their house. The pressure parents feel to live up to giving a Merry Christmas they simply cannot afford.
Listening to her confess was painful for me. I didn’t cry, though; I had to be strong for her. Another member of the family might have been in the kitchen with us; I really don’t remember. All I know is that I felt alone with her, with her pain, and that she needed me to help make her feel better. I was relieved that the officer had let her go. Imagine if he’d arrested her: I would have considered the world officially cruel and callous if he had. That kind and sensible policeman did the right thing.
I thanked her in my heart for trying to do the right thing, even if she went about it the wrong way, and I honestly didn’t believe that she should feel ashamed over the incident. But I
know she did, both for having done something dishonest as well as for, in her mind, having let down her children. I looked at my mother with her knees curled up to her chest, shins pressed against the edge of the table, and her feet resting on the seat of the chair. This is how she always sat at the table. My tiny, skinny, sad, ashamed mother, helpless in her despair. And I, in turn, felt so sad for her.
My mother sat in this position at the table even when she wasn’t in need of a role-reversal conversation with me. Sometimes she was laughing, scooping in her triple teaspoon of sugar and long pour of Carnation canned milk in her coffee, carrying on about what songs I should add to the song list of my performance repertoire, flicking her fingers up in the air, demanding a light for her cigarette. She needed anything to keep her happy and not focused on what there was for her to complain about. Anything to keep her from rightfully picking an argument with my dad about what was wrong.
The house on Proulx Court saw all extremes of the roller-coaster ride our family was on. Laughter, love, violence, fear, a family united, and a family divided. This house would be the last place in my youth where I would see such severe dynamics of dysfunction and violence in my childhood home life. The end of the days of watching my dad drag my mother along the slippery, linoleum floor by the hair and throw her down the stairs to the dirt basement, where the chickens ran around free, was drawing near.
Up the street lived a girl about a year older than me named Sue, who befriended us and had a heart of gold. Sue’s kindness made these few intensely difficult years somewhat bearable through her generosity. When we were out of the basics, she’d sneak us sugar, milk, and bread from her mother’s cupboard. Sue, a very athletic girl and a horse lover, enjoyed my mom’s company and liked hanging around with us. She took care of some horses on the other side of the court, among them a pretty palomino mare named Angel. She had a golden coat, a platinum mane, and a striking white blaze down her face; to me, she looked like the kind of horse that Barbie would have ridden. I wanted to ride her, even though I’d never been on a horse before.
Sue taught me a few basics and let me give it a try. I had a hard time getting Angel to move any faster than a slow walk. About a half mile from the barn, I decided I’d better turn back, and as soon as we were heading home, the horse sped up and ran full tilt all the way back to her barn. I had no control at all, but I at least learned how to stay on and to enjoy the smell of horses. The horn on the Western-style saddle was a big help, as it gave me something to hold on to as she bolted for home. I grew to love being around horses even when I wasn’t riding. In the winter, the roads were icy, and often we’d just barely make the corners without Angel’s legs sliding out from under her. One time she took a shortcut and ran us straight into a deep ditch, sinking right up to her belly. She couldn’t move with her legs stuck in the snow like pegs in four holes, so Sue and I had to dig her out by hand. Angel wasn’t the easiest or kindest horse I got to know, but she taught me to like horses anyway. I took on the chore of feeding the horses in the morning before the bus arrived and would go to school with smelly mitts. I was embarrassed for anyone to smell them but didn’t mind it myself at all. I liked sniffing them, since it took me out of school and back to the barn, which was where I really wanted to be. Besides, I was more embarrassed about going to school with no lunch than I was of smelling like horse manure.
One night my parents got into a spat, and once again, it got violent. As usual, money woes precipitated the argument. This fight was different, however, in a big way.
They started pushing each other around, and when things snowballed to where it became clear that my mother was about to really get it, I ran up behind my dad with a chair in both hands and smashed it across his back. I knew I was really going to get it for that one. I’d jumped on him before during fights between him and my mother in an attempt to pull him away, but he never did more than shake me off and warn me to stay back, which I did, as I was too afraid to do anything else. But I was getting a bit bolder around the age of eleven, and for the first time, I struck my dad. Before I could get away, he punched me in the jaw. Adrenaline pumping, I punched him back! It was purely a reflex action. He didn’t put much force behind his punch, as if it was more of a warning tap for me to back off.
If my father was shocked, he wasn’t half as stunned as I was at the fact that I’d punched him back. I didn’t know where I hit him because I had closed my eyes, punched, and ran. Too afraid to face him after I hit back, I bolted to my room, hopped out the window, and raced down the street to the barn. I stayed with Angel and the other horses that night. No one came looking for me, but I worried about how things ended up at the house. Did the fighting stop after I left? Was my mother okay? And what about the other kids? I was too afraid to go back until the next morning to find out, and by then, things were calm. No one brought up the events of the night before, and we all carried on with just another day in the Twain house.
Part of growing up in Canada involves putting up with Old Man Winter year after year. The conditions can be extreme. At the end of our driveway on Proulx Court, the snowplow would leave us fifteen-foot-high piles of chunked ice and snow scraped from the street surface. Every night after the plow finished, my two sisters and I would head outside for about an hour to shovel the snow from our driveway so our dad could pull his car in when he got home from work.
Winter walks are beautiful, but when you’re ten years old and walking miles in treacherous subzero temperatures just to get home from a late afternoon at school, it’s not so fun. The town bus ran only on the main road, so the nearest bus stop was forty minutes away by foot. One cold evening, I was walking home wearing a cheap waist-length bomber jacket, running shoes, no mitts or hat, and only jeans on my legs. I would have pulled my hood up over my head for some protection from the biting cold, but it was too open and lightweight to give any warmth. As a preteen up North, it was cool to walk around underdressed in winter, despite the freezing temperatures, and it was common to see teens wearing running shoes to school even through the coldest months, as a fashion statement. They wouldn’t play outside without proper clothing, but going from home to the bus, to school and back, it was better to look good than to feel comfortable.
The temperature can drop quite low once the sun goes down, and in my case this particular night, I was getting home later than expected, and the temperature had dropped lower than what I was dressed for. When the temperature gets down to where even five minutes of exposure begins to literally freeze your skin, fashion becomes the last thing on your mind. About fifteen minutes from my house, I just couldn’t go on; the pain from freezing was unbearable. The joints in my knees and hands cramped and ached. My hands and feet were totally numb, and I started to cry, which is not wise when you’re freezing, as your tears can literally freeze on your face. I hesitated for a long time, questioning whether to knock on a stranger’s door for help. I wanted to make it all the way home and was so close, but I was too cold to carry on. Very few houses still had lights on, as it was getting pretty late in the evening. But I finally saw a house where it seemed someone was still up. I asked if I could come inside to warm up for a while, and the family was very understanding and let me sit long enough to thaw out before I set off again.
I finally made it home, but I can tell you, there were many close calls like that growing up in such extreme weather conditions. My youngest brother, Darryl, once came home from a night of playing hockey with both his earlobes severely frostbitten. He’d been wearing just a tuque on his head, which angles down over the ear but leaves the lobes exposed. Over the next few days, his earlobes turned red to blue, then a purple-black, and they drooped unnaturally low. The skin peeled away in layers until the dead, frozen lobe fell away. I worried that Darryl might end up like our grandpa Twain, who had only a jagged edge left to his lobes, as if they’d been chewed off by Jack Frost himself. My grandpa’s earlobes had frozen and fallen off so many times that eventually they never came back. Fortunately for Darryl, his l
obes did.
My two sisters and I loved going public skating during the winter months, and the rink was about a forty-five-minute walk from our house on Proulx Court. We were fine on the way there, but on the way back, the temperature had dropped quite a bit. Yet in true Canadian spirit, we stepped outside the arena, took a deep breath, probably muttered something like “It’s cold!,” and carried on toward home.
Just recently, my sister emailed me a slightly rawer version of that same sentiment that made me laugh hard. It’s quite a typical thing Canadians would share between friends to help get one another through the long, cold winter with a good sense of humor. I get this poem every winter, and every winter I love rereading it. It’s beautiful—very well written—and I thought it might be a comfort to you on a cold day, as it was to me:
“Winter in Canada”
So appropriate and heartwarming!!
Fuck!
It’s cold!
The end.
The trail between the arena and the house block where we lived was a thirty-minute stretch of walk, wasn’t lit, and there were no houses along the way. Just bush and field. Two brothers of about twelve and thirteen years old who lived in our same direction were making the walk home with us. Jill would have been eleven, me nine, and Carrie seven. Halfway down the trail, Carrie started to cry that she was too cold to go on. One of the boys generously offered to carry her on his shoulders. I looked her in the eyes and told her she had to be brave and that we were going to make it. As I spoke to her, I could see the tears in her eyes were actually crusting into ice. She was literally crying ice flakes. I know it’s hard to picture, but believe me, her eyes were glazing over with ice, and I yelled at her to stop crying. I was panicking and felt that we were really in trouble.
Winter wasn’t all a near-death experience, though; it was fun, too. Sometimes the snow would pile up so high that we could climb up it onto the roof of the house and jump off into a sea of clean, white snow. We used to knock off icicles from the roof to see who could get the longest one intact. Icicle harvesting tip: the poorer the insulation of the roof, the longer the icicles you get. Ours, it goes without saying, had plenty of great icicles.
