Shane Hinton is the anxious “father” of a story collection coming out this month. That anticipation has been nothing however compared to his adventure becoming the dad of twins. Here is their story.
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Around the age of six, I was convinced that a tiny cartoon rain cloud followed me everywhere I went, just above and behind my head, and that it would hide whenever I turned to catch a glimpse of it. I remember crouching below the bathroom counter and jumping up to look in the mirror, hoping to catch the cloud off-guard. I spent a lot of time in bathrooms, washing my hands every twenty minutes. I brought my own soap to school because the industrial soap dispensers were filled with a chemically-scented gel that gave me headaches. Everyone knew that the green bar of Irish Spring on the side of the metal classroom sink was mine. I washed my hands after exposure to anything I thought might be a harmful chemical: whiteout, marker, pencil lead, glue, and after anyone near me sneezed or coughed or picked their nose. No one ever pointed out that this was strange.
I don’t remember when these obsessions stopped. One day they were all I could think of, another day I was on to something else.
*
Early in my wife’s pregnancy, the midwife sent us for an ultrasound because something didn’t feel right. I sat in a hospital room with my wife and stepson as the technician, unspeaking, clicked buttons on a screen in front of us, finally hovering over a dropdown menu labeled “Number of Fetuses” and selecting “2.” All I could think, at that moment, was that our car was too small. I called the dealership on the way home and tried to negotiate a favorable trade. My wife cried because she was so excited for the twins and I just kept talking about our vehicle. At dinner, I ran equations in my head, trying to figure out how much sales tax we would save if we traded the car in versus selling it to an individual buyer. Money was tight.
I was almost finished with my MFA, but was in the process of revising my thesis. Also, a publisher had expressed interest in seeing a story collection, which was an entirely different project. In the weeks leading up to graduation, I barely slept. My wife had trouble breathing. I threw out my thesis and started over. Stories bounced around inside my head. I disappeared to a family cabin in the woods for days at a time while my wife lay at home, growing very pregnant very quickly.
As my wife’s due date approached, my anxieties about fatherhood were compounded by anxieties about writing. If I wasn’t writing, I felt guilty, as though there was a number on a secret ledger somewhere tallying all the days I spent watching bad TV instead of producing new work. If I was writing, I was positive that it would never be good enough to show anyone. I paced nervously around the house when I expected feedback from my thesis advisors to appear in my email. When I was away from the computer, I checked my phone constantly for push notifications. When I was watching TV instead of writing, my eyes drifted too often to the computer screen across the room.
The draft of the story collection was terrible, but the publisher decided to move forward with the project. When we signed the contract, a month before the birth of the twins, six weeks before I would graduate with an MFA, we sat on the front porch of my office in white rocking chairs, looking out over the strawberry fields my family has farmed for more than fifty years. I put my head in my hands. “Some of the stories,” I said, trailing off because I didn’t know how to say how bad I thought they were.
“They’re rough,” the publisher said. “But I see what you’re trying to do.”
*
At some point, I started writing about fatherhood to release anxiety, and real life began to seep into my stories.
A high schooler named Shane died on our block by slamming his motorcycle into the side of a minivan. Someone spray-painted “RIP Shane” on a stone wall next to the road, and he became the first of many fictional Shanes in a story called “All the Shane Hintons.”
My wife’s twin pregnancy became a litter of kids in the story “Pinkies.”
Two doors down from us, a drunk driver blew a stop sign and drove his car through a house. One day, on my way home from work, I noticed the garage door of the house had been replaced by a sheet of plywood with the words “Don’t Drive Drunk” spray-painted in green letters. Another day, the plywood was gone and I could see straight through the house, around the two-by-fours framing walls that no longer existed, into the kitchen where the family was preparing dinner. The owners eventually built a massive steel barricade at the edge of the driveway, with blinking yellow lights and reflective red letters spelling STOP. It was a physical manifestation of fear and obsession. I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like if I had to raise a family in a house like this. What if the cars never stopped coming? What would my kids think about the world? I couldn’t kick these thoughts, so I funneled them into what became the story “Intersection.”
This fusion of anxiety and writing about my fictional family actually helped me focus on the important work of being physically and emotionally available for my actual family, who needed me to be more than someone who looked for tiny clouds and feared that intimacy would only lead to rejection.
*
When someone in my family asks to see pictures from the hospital, or hear about the birth, I get a knot in my stomach. One picture takes up my whole memory of the day. I took it on my cell phone, standing there dumbstruck, moments after the doctor pulled the second baby out of my wife. In the picture, a doctor in the background grips metal forceps while, in the fore, another doctor holds my girl upright, her head hanging limply to the side, her face blue. Her heart had stopped several times during the delivery. She wasn’t breathing as they rushed her away.
I don’t know how close my daughter came to dying. They pushed air into her lungs and then I picked her up and held her to my chest and kissed her forehead and the doctors never mentioned it again. The next day, they told us the forceps might have caused bleeding in her brain and they needed to take an ultrasound because she was anemic and they were afraid that the blood was going somewhere inside her that it wasn’t supposed to. They took pictures of her brain in a small, dark room as I held her in my arms, trying not to cry. I asked the technician over and again what we were looking at, what it meant, if my daughter was okay. She kept saying she wasn’t qualified to make a diagnosis. Later, a doctor finally told us everything was fine. That day began the culminating residency of my MFA program. For the next ten days I’d commute back and forth from school to the hospital, barely sleep, live on caffeine.
One morning, during a workshop, my wife called in a panic because one of the girls needed an echocardiogram to see if she had a hole in her heart. I took off running across campus and sped back to the hospital. I stayed up all night, holding babies on my chest in a hospital bed, and at dawn I left to sit in craft lectures.
*
I schedule an hour every night to spend thinking about things I can’t control so the anxiety doesn’t take up the rest of my day, compartmentalizing my intrusive thoughts so they don’t contaminate the time I should be appreciating the kind words of readers, or the time I should be feeling deep and simple gratitude because I have a supportive, loving family.
The twins are mobile now and have scabs from bumping into coffee tables and falling down at the park. My stepson worries that his friends at school won’t like his haircut. My book is out in the world and there’s nothing I can do to protect it.
The publisher tells me the book is good, but every time I look at it, I see room for improvement. Words repeat on the same page. Sentences don’t vary as much as I’d like. I could go through it a thousand times and change something every time, picking at the words, keeping them from healing.
It turns out, my daughter does have a hole in her heart. The doctor says that it will only be an issue if she decides to be a mountain climber.
But what do we tell her if she decides to be a mountain climber?
Photo: Flickr/NoelleBuske