PopGoesTheNews.com >> Canadian pop-country superstar Shania Twain went for a brisk walk in downtown Toronto on Thursday morning with her Swiss beau Frederic Thiebaud (pictured). The two were all smiles and Twain, dressed down in sweatpants and holding on tight to her man, flashed her ring – even though the couple of more than a year has denied they are married.
Earlier, Twain poured her heart out during an interview on CBC Radio's The Current to promote her new charity for underprivileged children, Shania Kids Can. This morning, she was guest host of the program.
The 44-year-old mother of son Eja (with ex-husband Robert “Mutt” Lange) said she can relate to children growing up disadvantaged. Raised by her mother Sharon and stepfather Jerry in rugged Timmins, Ont., Twain admitted that the worst part of growing up poor was the embarrassment. “You were humiliated by the fact that you went to school and maybe your clothes weren’t clean,” she said. “Definitely going to school without a lunch or [going with] a makeshift lunch just to save face – you know, stale bread or whatever you could put in your bag just to say that you had a bag. You instinctively tried to protect yourself from being identified as somebody who’s poor or who has less.”
One of five children, Twain recalled that her family was trying to get by all the time “and live in a society of the haves.” During the cold winter months she was deprived of basics like warm boots and outerwear. “I wore rubber boots to school sometimes in the winter with plastic bread bag linings so that my feet wouldn’t get wet,” Twain recalled, as Thiebaud looked on.
When the family couldn’t pay their heating bill, “we would huddle around the stove in the morning to get warm and go to bed with our clothes on and stuff like that at night.”
Things got worse when Twain was around six years old. “My grandmother died and things changed a lot then because she helped my mother out a lot. She contributed a bit financially to the household and she was there to help and my mother could work more,” the singer recalled. “Ever since my grandmother died it really did get a lot harder after that.”
But Twain confessed that she now wonders if the family had to struggle as much as it did. “This is a bit of mystery that I’m trying to unravel at this point now in my life, looking back and peeling back the layers and saying, OK what happened? Was it really necessary for us to go through all these lows growing up?”
Twain believes her parents were too proud to seek the aid of social service agencies. “My father was native and he didn’t want to become a statistic. He was very proud. He refused welfare. He didn’t want that. As a native he was hypersensitive to it. He said, ‘No, I’m breaking that chain, I’m not going to be another native on welfare.’ He refused to go backward. He wanted to move forward. He was a very bright man very capable and talented and he just wouldn’t do it,” she explained. “We would be living on bread and sugar and water for a whole week before he would go to welfare. I’m not sure that he ever did go to welfare. I know that the [native] reserve would send us food every once in awhile which was very helpful, especially after hunting season when they’d have a box of all kinds of things – moose and fish and rabbit – and that would help out.”
But Twain insisted she doesn’t fault her parents. “I had very loving parents. My parents were good parents. They loved me, they supported me. They were my biggest cheerleaders. They taught me right from wrong,” she shared with CBC listeners. “It’s a bit of a contrast growing up in the house that I grew up in because they weren’t always able to be the parents that I would say was the type of parent I wanted to be when I grew up. Surely I want to be able to make sure I can feed my kids and send them to school clean and not stressed.
“There are so many things to consider that it’s impossible to ever point my finger at my parents,” continued Twain, who lost them in a car accident in 1987. “I think they absolutely did their best with lots of heart and lots of love. There’s nobody to blame. It’s just about unraveling how to prevent it happening to other kids. I don’t think it’s necessary.”
The superstar was emotional when she talked about her late mother. “She loved music and she loved listening to me sing. She got lost in it emotionally. She was very supportive and followed everything that I did,” Twain reflected, describing her as “kind of the hockey mom for singing.”
Twain admitted that her difficult childhood taught her to be patient, resilient and aware that life has its highs and lows. “It taught me a lot of things. It gave me strength,” she said. “I have no regrets about growing up that way. I wouldn’t want to live it again, I wouldn’t want to do it again… and I don’t want to see anyone else have to go through it either.”
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