by Shania Twain
So I would take satisfaction in rolling “a good one,” but I’d add it to the pile of joints on the coffee table. I was more interested in what record we were going to put on next, which song we were going to jam to—stuff like that. I had a one-track mind, and the only destination was music. Boys? Drugs? Not a distraction for me even as a preteen, a time when girls are usually developing their first crushes and getting all goofy in the company of boys. I was intent on developing myself as a singer-songwriter. My mother’s passion was the music career, while mine remained creating the music, but she had been grooming me to be the performer since I was three years old. Now, ten years later, as if crossing a threshold of acceptance, I resigned myself to being what she wanted me to be, the whole package. I became determined to be the best I could be at that, and actually grew impatient to join the world of music entertainment professionals, and just get on with it.
Kelly decided I needed a stage name, so he renamed me Elly—without the Twain, I believe. But before anyone ever knew me by that one name, our professional relationship was over. To this day, I’m not sure if he lost interest or if my mother had the sense to get me out of an unsavory situation. But my description of the fur coat–clad manager and my education in joint rolling would have fit several of the adults in my world. I’m not sure whether my mother didn’t understand the music world outside our little Northern town scene to any realistic degree and was just too naïve to know what she was sending me to, or whether she figured that I could handle myself and kept her fingers crossed that it would all turn out okay. Probably a bit of both.
This being the mid-1970s, drug use was omnipresent. Mostly, I saw people smoking pot and hashish; some were taking acid. I never saw cocaine or heroin around me, and pill use probably would have been too discreet for me to really notice, I suppose. Of course, alcohol flowed freely in the places I played. But in a private area where the manager and entourage would gather, there was usually a table designated for joint production. Those who wanted to indulge would gather around to twist and roll cigarette papers with a thin layer of hash oil spread across them, then a sprinkling of weed, tobacco, or small hash chunks crumbled onto the paper as well. Twelve-year-old me would join the assembly line of joint rollers. But, again, I never smoked with these adults. In fact, I puffed a joint only once several years later, at a girlfriend’s house. After a few choking puffs, I decided it wasn’t worth all the fuss everyone made over it. I mean, it did make me dizzy and giddy, but at that age, so did having a good laugh over an unexpected, loud fart.
I was afraid of drugs more than alcohol at this age mainly because they were illegal and because I really didn’t understand the effects all the different drugs had on the mind. I wasn’t interested in experimenting to find out. Life had enough highs for me in my youth, without me relying on either drugs or alcohol. I can’t say I feel I missed out on anything by not using drugs, especially as a teen. It was entertaining enough watching everyone else getting high and just letting the music take me away. Thank goodness I felt that way, because with all the independence my parents afforded me at such a young age, I easily could have gotten into the drug scene without them noticing until it was too late.
Now that Mr. Kramer had unceremoniously departed, my mother picked up the reins again as my manager. I felt a bit as though I’d gone one step forward and two steps back by no longer having a professional manager. Now, I’d never consciously set out to become rich and famous; my goal in music was to please myself by loving the music I sang and wrote, and if I should ever make it, I hoped to be respected as an artist and worthy of a place among the greats. I didn’t yearn to be famous just for the sake of achieving celebrity. Performing wasn’t even so much the main interest for me, as I was still painfully shy onstage. If I had to be up there, I’d have preferred to be a backup singer, not out in front. For instance, my debut on The Tommy Hunter Show, while a very positive experience, brought home the reality that I preferred huddling with the band and singers rather than standing in the bright, hot spotlight alone. I wanted to write songs and sing them to myself and around the campfire with my friends and family; the dream was not to be the “star.” The star would perform my songs, and I would sing background vocals. This was my genuine childhood dream: to be behind the scenes, which was clearly where I felt more comfortable, creative, and happy.
My mother, however, insisted that the only way I was going to make it was to be the singer and to get out there and sing anywhere that would have me. Talent contests, local bars, music festivals, telethons, senior citizen homes, community centers—you name it, she set up the gigs, plugging away toward the next opportunity.
7
The Worst Year of My Life and the pursuit of happiness
I declared 1978, the year I turned thirteen, the worst year of my life. At night, before I went to sleep, I would tell myself, “You will never have another year as miserable as this one. From here, things will get better.” They had to, because they sure couldn’t have gotten any worse, from my adolescent point of view. I had the feeling that a mix of emotions were fighting for air, stuck in the neck of a bottle that wouldn’t give. If there could have been a message in that bottle, it would have read “Heeeeeeelp!” It was as if life had welled up in my gut and gotten clogged on its way up through the narrow of my throat, wanting to explode out the top of my head, but instead it was blocked and choked from moving up and out. I wanted out. I wanted to be free of my family life, the fatigue and stress of our dysfunctional home. I was mentally tired and my spirits low. Sometimes as an adult looking back on experiences of our youth, we can see with more clarity and perspective that our feelings about certain moments were dramatic, that we made more of them than was perhaps necessary, that the situation was not as bad as it seemed at the time. However, looking back on that period of age thirteen, I realize I wasn’t being dramatic but realistic about how hopeless my position genuinely was at that point in my life.
Even the enjoyment my mother derived from handling my career was no longer enough to offset her more chronic state of depression from too much fighting with my father and our Twain family’s never-ending financial struggle. She stayed in bed more than ever, and I was just tired of being left to run the house. It was a lot of responsibility for an adult, let alone a child.
I’d get home from school to the exact same mess that we’d left from the morning rush. Mom, too, was exactly how we’d left her: in bed. I saw my mother much like a bird in a cage: she was fragile and delicate, easy to break, and she sat at the bottom of her cage with her eyes closed, defeated. She’d abandoned her dream of one day flying to her potential. A bright, passionate, energetic but broken bird. My white, anglophone mother was unusually open-minded for a woman of her generation, coming from a small Ontario mining community but still speaking French and having had the courage to marry interracially to a Native. The French and English didn’t fare well socially then, and mixed marriages between whites and Natives, especially when the woman was white, were very rare and openly were considered unacceptable by most. It took brave souls to face the criticism that came with it.
I made my mother coffee and lit her a cigarette in an attempt to get her up and moving before my dad got home from work, because if she was still in bed when he walked in the door, he’d get upset, and from there the tension would build and possibly end in another night of fighting. It was not unusual for him to physically drag her out of bed by whatever he could grab—an arm, an ankle, her hair—or he would just clutch the sheet in both fists and yank off the bedding with her still wrapped up in it. I knew this was coming when he’d tell me to shoo the boys outside to play. My dad would proceed to drag my mother along the floor from the bed to the kitchen as she kicked and screamed, cursing him to hell: “Let me go, you fucker! I hate you, let me go!” My father let her go once they got to the kitchen; then he’d scold her to get up and take care of her family. My mother was in a bad state, half dressed, not showered, pale and frail. My heart broke to see her
like this. Sometimes her reaction to this assault was one of submission, and she would sit at the table in her usual position with her knees curled up to her chest and just cry. I would comfort her by placing my hand on her back and saying, “Don’t cry, Mom, it’s going to be okay.” Then I’d make her a coffee and hand her a smoke. “Dad’s right,” I’d say firmly. “You need to get up, Mom, and take care of us. You can’t just sleep all the time. We need you. We have nothing to eat.”
If all of this commotion went on for too long, an alarmed neighbor might call the police, who appeared at our door regularly. Most of the time, my mother would calmly tell the officers that, yes, there had been an “argument,” but now everything was fine—when in reality, she’d probably be pretty bruised and battered from the spat, especially those times when she decided to fight back and not retreat to the table. At least the police’s presence served to subdue her and my father, putting an end to the conflict.
I hated my life. I went to sleep feeling helpless at night and woke up angry in the morning. What amazed me most about the new day was the fact that not only one but both my parents were still alive and hadn’t managed to kill each other during the night. This was a period when we were living the farthest distance from both of my parents’ families. Hanmer was several hours’ drive from Timmins, where most of our relatives lived. Consequently, we got to see them only on special occasions such as Christmas, about two or three times a year.
Extreme poverty and marital violence marked our years on Proulx Court, and I’m not sure why no one offered to help—at least not that I was aware of. It wasn’t a mystery to those who knew us that my parents had a troubled relationship and that we had financial woes, but I really don’t think anyone understood the degree of crisis we experienced at times. Ultimately, and somewhat remarkably to me, we would survive these especially turbulent four years, but in the summer of 1979, something had to give.
One particular morning after another long year had gone by, I was more convinced than ever that this was it. It was now or never. My mother had attempted to break up the marriage several times over the years, packing us up and going off to a friend’s for shelter. It was never the same friend, for some reason; and sometimes it was someone we hardly knew that my mother would call on. I don’t know the logic behind who she chose for refuge, but my sense is that my mother wanted to make sure we went someplace where my father wouldn’t look, in order to avoid more drama should he find us. These attempts to leave never lasted more than a few days, however. She did get serious about leaving him once, going so far as renting us an apartment in a nearby town, but that lasted about a week. Then we were right back home with the same cursed cycle of ups and downs spinning us all dizzy. I couldn’t count on my mother to make definitive decisions for our family or herself, for that matter; by this time, I couldn’t even coax her out of bed at the end of my school day. So I made my own plan to break free of this cursed cycle we were all in. This was a defining moment for me. The “now or never” feeling is exactly how I said it to myself internally at the time.
School had just let out at the end of grade nine for the summer. One morning I simply made up my mind: today is the day. The minute my dad was out the door for work, I zipped around the house, packing a few clothes for us kids. Meanwhile, I tended to my mother as if it were just another day: coffee and a cigarette in bed. Next I herded Carrie, Mark, and Darryl into the car and told them to wait. There was a time when my dad took turns driving to and from work with a coworker to save on gas, which explains why the car was at home. In any case, we had a car that day, and I took advantage of the opportunity. I crammed it with as much of our belongings as I could. Whatever didn’t fit, we left behind. The one possession I would not leave without, however, was our grandmother Eileen’s grandfather clock. After everything else had been packed, I carried it out by myself, despite it being about three feet high and made of heavy wood and metal internal mechanics. I knew my mother would find comfort knowing her mother’s clock had come with us. She was still very attached to the memory of my grandmother, and this clock meant something to her. I laid the heavy piece across the kids’ laps in the backseat, along with my grandmother’s crucifix, which my mom had hung above the entrance door of each place we’d lived since my grandmother died. This was obviously something that my mother would not want to leave behind, either.
Finally, after I’d spent the morning organizing the kids, packing the car, and rolling around in my head how I was going to break the news to my mother that we were leaving, I pulled her out of bed. “Mom,” I said with some urgency, “you need to get dressed. We’re in the car, all ready to go. All you need to do is drive.” The usual routine of luring her to the kitchen table with now a second cup of coffee, and a light for her cigarette waiting, did get her up, but I felt I needed to pressure her for time, for fear that she might overthink what was happening and just go straight back to bed feeling overwhelmed by my plan for our escape. With her depression, spending most of the last four years in bed, it was as if she was disconnected from the rest of the world. I wasn’t really surprised that she didn’t argue; she merely asked, “Where are we going?”
“Toronto.” Her only response was to nod numbly, understanding that what was happening was somehow inevitable and out of her control. She went through the motions like someone defeated, hopeless, under command, and I remember the feeling of guilt coming over me, knowing I was taking advantage of her in this vulnerable state of mind. She displayed no resistance to what I knew was a radical situation. I didn’t feel good about it and resented the pressure of having no alternative.
Just as she was about to back out of the driveway, my mother paused. “I have to go back inside,” she said. “I forgot something.” I was so afraid that she’d lose her courage and wouldn’t come back out, but, much to my relief, she returned in a couple of minutes, climbed back into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and off we drove to Toronto.
I asked her what she forgot, and she said, “Oh, nothing. I just wanted to leave him a note.”
“What did you say in it?” I worried that she’d be absentminded enough to tell him where we were going, but no. “I wrote him a note saying that I’m sorry things didn’t work out.” I was sad for her and still feel sad today that she felt so defeated at that moment; that she was so discouraged and empty of hope. And yet she still had the compassion to apologize to the man who had abused her. She truly loved him, and I could feel her heartbreak in letting him go, as well as her acknowledgment that it had been a two-way street: that life had been unfair to both of them, to their relationship, making it too difficult to live together in peace. She was taking responsibility for her part, by apologizing to him in the good-bye note. At the same time, though, I thought to myself, Man, Mother, what do you mean you went back in there to write him a note of apology? Your four kids are sitting in the car feeling afraid, confused, and insecure about what’s next, waiting for you to take them somewhere away from this hell so they can feel safe and secure for a change, be fed and protected, and you’re moaning over the end of your relationship with the man who beats you? I didn’t get it at that moment, being fourteen, but now I see it quite differently. I didn’t understand how excusing a man for violence could be acceptable under any circumstance. But she loved my father and appreciated his devotion to four out of five children that weren’t his own. There were other things to love about Jerry, too, like the way he did his best to provide for us and how he always retained his sense of humor, even in the bleakest of times. He lost his temper under the pressure, but she surely saw this as forgivable, since it was a lot for anyone to take.
She must also have recognized her role in provoking him when she was upset. She had a way of carrying on, not knowing when to quit, when to shut up and let the mood settle so things wouldn’t get so out of control. She was a passionate, fiery woman who would not stand down once she got going. This high-strung behavior fueled the fire between them, and I believe she knew it and regrett
ed that she had contributed to the chaos. I saw all of this as well and felt compassion for my father, recognizing that, of course, it was not all his fault. I believed he’d done his best, but things had gone too far, and I’d reached my limit and desperately needed to flee. We were all dying in our individual ways, and the only way to survive was to run.
We drove in silence for a long while after pulling away from the drive of the green bungalow on Proulx Court. I glanced over at my poor mother. How deflated and disappointed she seemed when she got back behind the wheel. Life had let her down so badly, kicked the shit out of her, and left her to fend for herself and four children, with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. I shouldered some of the emotional burden of guilt myself. After all, it was my idea for us to leave. I was the one who walked my zombie mother through the steps of leaving the man she loved, to save herself and her kids. In a way, I guess I blamed myself that she was going through this torture. But we both knew there was no other choice; what’s more, we couldn’t turn back.
Imagine being a thirty-three-year-old woman in a beat-up old car, driving toward a big city where you barely know a soul, and with four kids in tow. She had no plan, no address there, and no money. She was in a daze, following the instructions of her adolescent daughter to get in the car and drive off to a new life. Who knew what kind of life? None of us did. But she knew that at least there would be a shelter or a YWCA for refuge and that I could continue with music there more easily than anywhere else in Ontario.
