Not Afraid of Life Read Online Free Page A

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