Not Afraid of Life (3 page)

We didn’t love snowmachines just because they’re fun. We also loved them because we wanted to be like Dad. Even though he maintained his jobs, he was in some ways “Mr. Mom” around the house. While Mom was tackling her new job, he kept up the domestic duties he’d begun while she was on the city council. In fact, he’s as good at braiding hair as he is at rebuilding a snowmachine in fifty-mile-per-hour winds. When Mom was away on political trips, he would always help us get ready for school. I remember very distinctly that he put my hair up in three cute little ponytails on the first day of preschool. Dad didn’t really know it looked kind of silly, but he had done it simply because that’s what I wanted. When my mom picked me up and saw those three ponytails—one on the right side of my head, one on the left, and one in the back—she just laughed. Not only was it fun to see him look through our closets, shirt by shirt, he let us wear whatever we wanted . . . including hats. I loved to wear them, but not the cute kind that some parents put on their children for nice photos. No, I wore cowgirl hats, French berets, and ball caps to school. Though I looked absolutely ridiculous, Dad didn’t care. He also let me go to preschool wearing a flower girl dress I’d worn in my aunt and uncle’s wedding. Sounds cute until you realize I wore it with black tights and my pink and white Nike Air Force 1’s.

And speaking of that flower girl dress . . . I got a lot of wear out of that thing.

When I was four years old, Mom came home and asked, “Hey, Bristol, do you want to be in a pageant?” She was friends with the pageant director, who’d talked her into entering me in it.

At only four, I didn’t have enough sense to say no.

Let’s just say we weren’t quite prepared as we journeyed to an enormous theater in Anchorage on pageant day. It was absolutely packed! Mom put me in my old flower girl dress, dropped me off with a kiss, and went to sit in the audience with Grandma and Grandpa. When I walked backstage, it was into a cloud of hair spray and makeup. Crazy pageant moms were running around with huge bags of clothespins and duct tape (for emergencies) as they smudged lipstick and eyeliner on their kids’ little round faces. I sat down and it dawned on me, more with every passing minute, that I was underprepared for this event. I counted the minutes until it was my turn to take a turn on the stage. Though Mom had participated in a pageant before, she had no idea that other moms would take a kids’ pageant so seriously. She sat happily in the audience and smiled as she saw me walk hesitantly onto the stage.

There was just one problem. We were supposed to speak.

Now, I’m not the shyest person in the world, but I was not ready to make my public-speaking debut right then and there.

When Mom realized I was supposed to talk in front of everyone, her face fell. She hadn’t prepared me for that. Her eyes were big with worry as I approached the kid-height microphone.

They didn’t expect me to deliver the Gettysburg Address. All I had to do was walk up and introduce myself—basic stuff. I was supposed to say my name, hometown, age, and where I attended preschool. But when I got to the mic, I opened my mouth, looked out into the crowd, and froze. The only thing that came out was, “I’m . . . B-B-Bristol . . .”

Then I was quickly overcome with embarrassment and walked off the stage.

I walked out of the theater with the smallest trophy possible, and was the only contestant who didn’t get flowers.

The lady who’d given me the trophy smiled—with perfectly applied lipstick—and said, “Thanks for participating.”

The plastic gold(ish) trophy was meant to smooth over my terrible performance. But even though I was four, I knew.

I’d bombed.

Even though I wasn’t the pageant type, my aunt Molly, who had only a son at the time, loved to doll me up. Once I went to stay with her for the weekend so I could play with my cousin Payton, who’s two years younger than I am. Aunt Molly had so much fun spoiling me. She dressed me in sweet dresses and headbands . . . she curled my hair. That one visit, though, she got carried away, threw me in the car seat, and took me to get my ears pierced! I was only two and my mom was a little surprised when Molly dropped me off at our house with pink rhinestone studs in.

“What did you do to my daughter?” she exclaimed.

Aunt Molly, who’s now a pediatric dental hygienist, just laughed. Several years later, she had a girl of her own. McKinley just turned ten . . . and she
still
doesn’t have her ears pierced!

“Hey, McKinley, wanna go get those ears pierced? I’ll take ya!” my mom frequently says jokingly at family functions.

Mom hasn’t convinced her yet.

I had a different kind of fashion mishap at my other aunt’s house. My parents were out of town, so we were being watched by my aunt Heather and uncle Kurt. I was only about seven or eight years old and had really long beautiful dark hair that I was always known for. It hung all the way to my waist.

“Will you cut my hair? I want to look like Lauden,” I said, handing Uncle Kurt a pair of scissors.

(I was always in awe of how beautiful my cousin was—still is!—and I wanted to look just like her!)

Uncle Kurt didn’t hesitate. He just put all of that gorgeous hair into a ponytail—and cut the whole thing off. I loved my new short cut until I realized that it was permanent!

My childhood was full of many funny moments like those with our family.

On Sundays we went to church, which—of course—was less than exciting for a little kid. Mom would let me put my head in her lap, and she’d tuck strands of my hair behind my ear, over and over. I’d listen to the preacher talk about Jesus and forgiveness and love, but eventually his voice would seem to grow distant and I’d succumb to sleep right there in the pew.

Sermon sleep is the best sleep ever.

I always looked forward to communion, because after church they let me go through all of the aisles and pick up the little plastic cups.

As I got older, I’d also volunteer to help in the nursery. Even though there were always a bunch of adults in there, I’d be the one who wanted to fuss over the babies and rock them. I just loved babies—real ones!—like most girls love toys or dolls. I’d even take Willow’s old car seat, stick a doll in it, cover it with a blanket, and walk around at parks pretending I had a real baby inside. (I thought I tricked a few people, but they may have just been polite.) On the morning of my ninth birthday, I even crawled into bed with Mom and demanded—quite rudely—“If you don’t have a baby, you better go rent me one!”

With every year that I grew older, my mom grew more politically prominent. When I was seven, Mom decided to run for mayor, and like everything in the Palin household, it was a family affair. She decided on the theme “Positive-ly Palin,” and I helped her select the rather unusual combination of pink and green for her signs. (No one had ever used those colors!) We put them all over town. I say “we,” but I think I spent more time in the little red wagon with Track while Mom, Dad, and her friends nailed them up. Still, it was a family endeavor, and we were thrilled when she won. And by a pretty good margin!

Soon afterward, in 1999, she was elected by other mayors in Alaska to serve as president of the Conference of Mayors. To outsiders who’d never heard of my mom’s name until she burst out onto the national stage during the 2008 presidential campaign, it seemed that her rise to political fame was sudden and abrupt. Undoubtedly, it was. But as her child, I saw it as a natural, gradual progression, and I never thought anything of being “Sarah Palin’s daughter.”

In Alaska, I was known just as commonly as “Todd Palin’s daughter.” He’s a legend around here. Not only is he an amazing hair braider, he’s a commercial fisherman, had a great job on the North Slope, and was part owner of Valley Polaris. His company sold ATVs, watercraft, and snowmachines and fixed them there in the shop. Willow loved hanging out there so much that Mom said she was raised at the Polaris shop on Dad’s hip. Even when she was young, she was a “motorhead.”

Dad has won the Iron Dog competition four times and placed second four times . . . an impressive feat since it’s the world’s longest snowmachine race through the most remote and rugged terrain in Alaska. Of the six hundred or so teams that have started the race since it first began, less than half have finished. Why? Temperatures frequently fall to fifty degrees below zero—not even factoring in the wind—which means Dad wears duct tape on his face for protection. The two-thousand-mile race takes six days, and the trail carries the racers over tree stumps, cliffs, large mounds of earth, the frozen Bering Sea, and other rivers so destructive to snowmachines that when the machines cross the finish line, they have basically been almost completely rebuilt along the way. The drivers don’t fare too much better. Broken bones are expected, and many riders just quit because their machines get fried or they tire of the relentless, unimaginable cold. But not my dad. When Mom was governor, people called him the “First Dude,” but he was known for being so tough he could withstand wipeouts at one hundred miles per hour and the mechanical breakdowns that would make normal men give up.

My friends may have thought Mom was cool, but they thought Dad was Superman.

Life with my parents was wonderful, though I never really considered their jobs as anything unusual. Maybe Mom had more late-night phone calls and Dad was gone more than some other jobs required. However, our family of five was a fun and great way to grow up. One morning, Mom nudged me from the couch where Willow and I were watching television.

“Come on,” she said. “Go put your shoes on, so you guys can come to my doctor’s appointment with me.”

We piled in the black four-door Bronco, thinking we were running some of our normal errands. We were too young to realize we were in an ob/gyn office. Even if we had noticed the sign on the door, we were too young to know what that even meant.

The nurse came in, put a wand on Mom’s belly, and an image popped up on a screen.

“Can you tell the girls what they are looking at?” She beamed at the nurse.

“This,” she said very sweetly, “is your new little . . . sister.”

It was the first time Mom knew the gender of the baby. And the first time we knew we were getting another sibling.

Finally! I’d wanted a baby in the house to take care of for so long! When my new sister arrived on March 19—exactly on the date she was due—they named her Piper Indi Grace, after the Piper plane my dad flies, the idea of “independence,” and the grace of God. Mom let me decide how to spell “Indi,” whether with a
y
or an
i
. I chose the
i
because it seemed like it’d be a lot more fun writing than the old boring
y
. Plus, I didn’t want people to think of the Indy 500, the big manly Polaris snowmachine that my dad sold at his shop.

Mom’s friends gave her a baby shower at the Grouse Ridge Shooting Range because they knew Mom loved the Second Amendment and because they’d shot clay pigeons at the range when Mom was pregnant. Since she was the mayor, it was a big baby shower. The theme, of course, centered around airplanes. The cake was in the shape of a Piper plane, and there were blankets with Pipers on them. I loved being there with Mom, celebrating my new sister’s arrival. I also loved that there were three babies under the age of three months there. My uncle’s wife had a baby at the end of December, my aunt Molly had a baby at the end of January, and Mom had Piper in the middle of March. I was in heaven!

Though I loved taking care of younger siblings and cousins, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t hang with the boys. I went to Iditarod Elementary School, and I took swimming lessons, ran track and cross-country, and played soccer. I could run so fast I could beat the boys in our mile run in P.E. class! Plus, I was proud of myself for being elected treasurer of our school, though I don’t remember ever handling real money. I also played trumpet in fifth grade, though I was not good! I only chose the trumpet because it had three buttons, but I still complained about having to practice. Mom and Dad would not let me quit, though. I signed up for it, and had to deal with the consequences.

I
was always so close to Aunt Molly that she told me about both of her next pregnancies before she told the rest of the family . . . much to my mother’s chagrin! But her husband, my uncle Mike, was no prize.

Though sometimes Uncle Mike was charming and fun, he was known around town for embellishing facts and telling outright lies. He was a big burly state trooper . . . six foot four and 250 pounds. He was very intimidating and always teased Payton by accusing him of being weak.

I saw it firsthand. One day in 2003, my cousin Payton and I were sitting downstairs at their house with him, while Aunt Molly gave her daughter a bath upstairs. That day started out like any other day, but it would become a part of my consciousness, and—sadly—a part of the national political conversation years later when my mom ran for vice president. And the whole controversy started with this stupid question:

“Hey, Payton, do you want to get shot with a Taser gun?”

Yes, a state trooper—an adult—asked that question of a kid.

I could tell Payton was unsure about it, but he didn’t want to be accused by his stepdad—for the millionth time—of being a “wuss.”

“Okay,” he said, staring at the Taser gun that his stepdad pulled out of his holster. “I guess.”

Uncle Mike prepped the Taser, and Payton started getting more and more nervous. He didn’t let on. I never really thought Uncle Mike would actually go through with it. Perhaps he was just testing him.

But I was wrong. I was standing at the top of the stairs when Uncle Mike took the Taser and shot my cousin. Payton instantly fell back as intense signals were sent through his nervous system. His muscles constricted. In a bit, the pain lessened and he shook his head, as if to get rid of that feeling.

As Payton was recovering, Uncle Mike looked at me and saw that I was crying.

“Bristol, you’re next.”

I was not about to let what I just saw happen to my cousin happen to me, even if he was an adult. Even if he was my uncle.