Going Rogue: An American Life (15 page)

SARAH

PALIN

But it didn’t come. And the sonogtam pictute looked empty. The doctot said coldly, “Thete’s nothing alive in thete.” Her bluntness shocked me. I felt sick and hollow, and
into tears.

“You have a couple of choices about getting rid of it,” she said.

“It.” That’s what she called our baby, whom we’d been calling Tad for three months.

She went on to explain that I could go home and let “it” pass naturally. Or I could have a D&C.

I wasn’t listening. I was praying.
Why, God? Why?

I was stunned and felt so very empty.

It was my first taste of close personal tragedy, the kind that rocks a relatively untested faith. I dressed, then walked numbly rhe waiting room and out to the parking lot and drove myself home. Mom came over to watch Track. A friend stopped by. But I just lay on my bed feeling like the world had stopped spinning.

As my mom had warned me years before, everyone goes through trials. Our friend Mary Ellan called to echo the same thoughts and to pray for me. A miscarriage is often dismissed as something a woman needs to shake off quickly, but it’s impossible to explain
the devastation and unless you’ve experienced it.

Todd flew home ro be with me when I had the D&C. When the doctor’s bill atrived in our mailbox, it came with a typo.
In
the box describing the procedure, someone had typed, ”Abortion.”

Instead of starting ovet with a fresh form, they painted it over with a thin layer of Wite-Out, and retyped, “Miscarriage.” For some reason it just felt like salt in the wound.

I had lost three of my grandparents and a very good friend by then, but my heart ached more for this baby than for anything else. The miscarriage carved a new depth in my heart. I became a

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little less Pollyanna-ish, a little less naive about being invincible and in control. And I became a lot more attuned ro other people’s pam.

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We were more cautious with our next pregnancy but also more thankful that God was again blessing us with new life. The next year a beautiful, healthy baby girl joined our family on Ocrober 18, Alaska Day. Her shock of black hair, chubby cheeks, and dark, lively eyes showed off her Native herirage, and Todd grabbed rhe birth cerrificate before I could get to it, declaring that his first daughter would be named “Bristol.” He proudly rold everyone we’d named her for the Bay he’d loved since childhood. I claimed that the name was the substitute for my plan to become a big-dog sportscaster in Bristol, Connecticut, home of ESPN. With Todd away, I was busy with two active little ones in our first house, which we purchased on Arnold Palmer Drive in a tidy little subdivision called Mission Hills. Track was the clingy one and always needed me in his sight, while Bristol was quite independent. As she grew she manifested her little mama’s heart by nurturing her siblings and cousins and always begging to babysit. One evening just before she turned eight, Bristol was camped out in my bed, as the kids often were when Todd was on the Slope. I was lying next to her reading when she rolled over and screwed her eyes down into a commanding stare.

“You;’ she decreed, “are going to rent me a baby for my birthday.’” She was a neat freak and petfectionist. She potty trained herself at fourteen months. Meanwhile, Track was an adorable and rambunctious fireball who threw temper tantrums whenever I had to leave him, even in front of his cousins in Dillingham the • 57

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SARAH

PALIN

fish were running and I had to ger out on the water. Bristol, on the other hand, would shoot her older brother a look of annoyance and calmly ask what time
I’d
be returning. Kind of an old soul, mature beyond her years, she grew up with an uncommon, work ethic and a great disdain for drama. She didn’t like gossip
or wasting time.

I’d left the TV sports desk when

and Bristol were babies,

pouring my energy into my kids. Like most moms, I also soughr an outlet to prevent stir craziness, and I still craved getting out to sweat. I found both on an exercise floor with a group of future best friends. Our kids would grow up together, and the group of us gals would support each other through tragedy and triumph, divorces and deaths, new births and birthdays. And politics. I love my girlfriends, the “Elite Six” as one of them facetiously dubbed us, because we’re the antithesis of “elite”-a diverse group of two Democrats, two Republicans, one Independent, and one who still won’t tell us what she is. Our friendship has spanned twO decades now. We can talk about everything and we don’t scream at each other about anything, especially not politics.

I also kept my hand in journalism, working a couple of days a week at the
Frontiersman
as a proofreader and submitting a sports column every once in a while. So I didn’t suffer too much guilt over leaving the kids for a few hours.

Track grew into a daredevil who was obsessed with sports. He started playing hockey as soon as he learned to walk, and I’d spend hours with him in the hallway. I’d read the newspaper from beginning to end while firing rolled-up balls of duct tape at him, with him deflecting them like an NHL goalie. He never tired of it.

Obviously, the older he got, the less dependent he was. On his first day of school, with the apron strings fraying a bit, I kicked myselffor ever having been annoyed with his clingy “Mom! Watch

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Going Rogue

me! Watch me, please!” moments. I thought I’d seen every bike trick and skateboard flip ever attempted and sometimes wondered why he needed me to see yet anothet one. Now, if I had it to do over, I’d stop every

he asked me to, give him my full attention, and cheer as if it were the first time. On Good Friday, March 24, 1989, I baked a cake for Dad·s fiftyfirst birthday. It started out a great day, but turned into one of those “where were you when …” moments. When Ronald Reagan was shot, I heard about it over the intercom upstairs in the library at Wasilla High; when the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded, was watching it on TV while standing in my dorm room at VI. On this day, I was in our apartment on Peck Street in Wasilla when the phone rang.

“Sarah, turn on the TV! ,. It was Blanche. The intensity of her voice did not spell good news.

I flipped on the TV and was smacked with live footage so surreal it seemed broadcast from another planet. I listened to a somber voice-over explain the images that were coming from Prince William Sound, America’s northernmost ice-free port, our busy shipping inlet on Alaska’s coast about 260 miles from Wasilla. Growing up, we had driven many times to the fishing community of Valdez and taken the choppy ferry ride across to Cordova. We’d chug rhrough rhe clean, steel gray waters past rocky, tree-sheltered shores that were part of the Chugach National Forest. The waters were full of incredible sea life that is typical and abundant along our coast.

Now, though, on the television screen, the Sound appeared as a vast dark field of heaving sludge. The oil tanker
Exxon Valdez
had run aground on Bligh Reef and some of its cargo of 53 million gallons of North Slope crude

pouring into the water.

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