Going Rogue: An American Life (36 page)

which I still don’t forgive rhem), Willow named her Agia-a pretty name that really stood for the Alaska GasJine Inducement Act, which was the name of our administration’s signature project. Once after school, Willow hid the puppy in her purse and snuck her into my office. The Senate Rules Committee chairman busted her and sent me a letter with kind of official citation

attached. Heaven forbid any lawmaker would catch Willow carrying her furry

puppy into

office in violation

of the new NO DOGS AllOWED sign. (Surely just a small distraction for this senator-he was later busted by the
FBI
and convicted on federal corruption charges.) The kids had another pup too, named Indi.

Juggling car pools is part of raising kids, but as governor I had to be a bit more careful. The mother of one of Willow’s dear friends on the basketball team was a lobbyist, and I had a rule that my staff and I would not hang with lobbyists. Worried about even the whiff of impropriety, I told Willow, “Sorry, honey, you’ll have to find another ride.” Willow set me straight and insisted that the ethics laws for my staff would ruin her life. “That’s not what those laws· mean anyway, Mom’” she

“People aren’t going to pick on you if

you don’t do anything wrong.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said.

I compromised with Willow and let her hang out with her teammate, but in

official state financial disclosure forms I

went so

as to reveal the friendship and noted that when she traveled with her basketball team she received rides from this lobbyist, who was a very nice lady. Still, I told Willow, “You may never even take a Gatorade from the family.”

You haven’t seen teenage eye rolling until you’ve seen Willow roll her eyes.

SARAH

PALIN

The honeymoon lasted a while fot the kids. But when it ended, it ended abruptly, and their perspective changed entirely. In that first year, I was alerted to threats against Willow by students at her Juneau school, one particularly disturbing. Someone posted a note on an Internet site threatening to gang-rape her at school. I never felt as safe for her after that. Later, the same thing happened to Bristol. And during the VP campaign, among so many other threats, a guy from New Jersey wrote rhat he would “shoot her pregnant body from a helicopter.”

Those were the ugly times, but there were precious times too. My fondest memory from the mansion is Piper learning to ride her bike in the yard. A little kid hadn’t lived in the house for decades, so we put in a buoy swing and a trampoline for ours (which I suspect some of the neighbors didn’t think was very stately). Someolle let Piper use an old bike, a blue one for litrle boys, and that’s what she learned to ride on. My happiest day at the mansion was on a sunny weekend afternoon. We were in the yard, and after many unsuccessful tries, she finally managed to ride her bike upright in a great big circle all the way around the trampoline.

Ofcourse, being able to ride doesn’t mean being able to stop, and she crashed headfirst into the bushes bordering the lawn. But for Piper, it was the ride that mattered, and she jumped up from the bushes, pumped her fist in the air and yelled, “Yay, me!” She was victorious! She was proud of herself] And she got to shout it to the world with no one to shush her or to tell her to be humble and quiet. For me, standing there in the sunshine, it was one of those Mom Moments when your heart feels like it just might burst, and I thought,
May every little child have an abundance
moments.