Los Angeles, July 31 (IANS) Singer-songwriter Shania Twain has shared that she had a traumatic childhood. The singer has revealed that she got “kicked around a lot” during her childhood.
The singer grew up with her mother Sharon and stepfather Jerry, who “loved each other” but also “fought a lot and got violent often”.
She recently appeared on the ‘Wild Card with Rachel Martin’ podcast, and shared that the violence sometimes extended to her and her sisters Jill and Carrie Ann.
Shania said, “If I was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, definitely. I mean, both my parents were pretty harsh physically. We definitely got smacked around a lot, and kicked around sometimes, literally kicked around”.
She also shared that she and her sisters were sometimes caught in the crossfire of the arguments.
She went on, “It was very violent. So my mom, you know, she would lose clumps of hair. She was bruised often in the face, and it was pretty bad sometimes. I mean, our house would shake. Those walls would shake. It’s very traumatic. It gets loud and scary, like a really bad thunderstorm”.
Shania further mentioned that her mother “did often try to leave”, and was sometimes successful, but their departures were always short-lived.
She said, “My mother did often try to leave. She did leave, we did leave, but he’d always find us, or she’d always give in and go back. It was a cycle”.
Both Sharon and Jerry died in a tragic car accident in 1987. In her 2011 memoir ‘From This Moment On’, the singer shared she was abused both emotionally and physically by Jerry for years at stretch.
She recollected one incident where she tried to stop him after watching him beat up her mother. She wrote, “(I) ran up behind my dad with a chair in both hands and smashed it across his back. Before I could get away, he punched me in the jaw. Adrenaline pumping, I punched him back”.
–IANS
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