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For a young Shania Twain, home wasn’t always a safe place.
Long before she became a global country music superstar, the Man! I Feel Like a Woman! singer, 60, says she spent her childhood in Timmins, Ont., growing up in what she describes as a “very violent” home, caught up in a chaotic cycle fuelled by her mother and stepfather’s “volatile relationship.”
“They loved each other. They went through so many ups and downs together, but they fought a lot, and they got violent often,” Twain revealed on Thursday’s episode of NPR’s Wild Card with Rachel Martin.
When Martin asked whether she ever got caught in the crossfire of that violence, the five-time Grammy winner replied, “Yeah, with me, too.”
“If I was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, definitely.”
Twain, who was born Eilleen Edwards, added that both of her parents were “pretty harsh physically” and that she and her sisters, Jill and Carrie Ann, “definitely got smacked around a lot.”
“And kicked around, sometimes literally kicked around.”
Still, Twain said it was her parents, Sharon and Jerry Twain, who “hurt each other the most.”
“My mom, she would lose clumps of hair, she was bruised often in the face and … it was pretty bad sometimes. Our house would shake. Those walls would shake,” Twain recalled, adding that it was “very traumatic.”
“It gets loud and scary, like a really bad thunderstorm.”
WATCH | Shania Twain on her ‘traumatic’ childhood:
Twain’s mother, Sharon Edwards, divorced her biological father, Clarence Edwards, when the future country music icon was two. She later married Jerry Twain who adopted Shania and her sisters.
Twain said the family grew up poor, often rationing food, and surviving on “stale bread.” She says her mother and step father’s financial struggles frequently became the source of their fights.
“They would argue over … ‘Can’t pay the bills. Now we’re gonna run out of heat, and now, who’s fault is that?'” Twain said.
Twain says her mother tried to leave her stepfather several times, particularly when the violence would reach “its peak” and the “neighbours would call the cops.” But they never managed to break completely loose.
“My mother did often try to leave. She did leave — we did leave — but you know, he’d always find us or she’d always give in and go back,” Twain said. “It was a cycle.”
The couple ended up remaining together until they were both killed in a car accident in 1987 when Twain was 22.
It’s not the first time the country singer has spoken publicly about her turbulent upbringing.
The You’re Still the One singer opened up about her childhood in her 2011 memoir From This Moment On, where she shared how her stepfather physically, emotionally and sexually abused her for years while she also witnessed him repeatedly assault her mother.
