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writinanon · 6 years

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Country Skies

With the help of @wafflii I have fallen into another AU. Expect another chapter of Reverberations and possibly Covenants soon. I want to find the right creepy atmosphere music for Covenants before I delve deeper into it. Also I’m not very good with timelines and there’s a bit of confusion for FC5′s timeline so I’m just going to wing it.

Stella belongs to me but Tammy belongs to @wafflii she’s a sweet heart.

The tender age of 10 was the last time that Stella saw her Dad. He’d just come home with burns on his face and had trouble adjusting. Her mother couldn’t handle it and filed for divorce. An incident with him having night terrors had been all she needed to gain sole custody of Stella. They talked on the phone for a while, her Dad calling almost every night but it slowed to a week, two weeks, a month, once in a few months, and then finally on her 13th birthday was the last call he made to her. Stella had been crushed, had wondered if something was wrong, he didn’t sound well. Her mother wouldn’t let her go and see him. A small part of her hated her mother for that. Stella would never forgive her for completely cutting her Dad out of her life or for forcing another man into it. She never called James ‘Dad’ or ‘Father’ she always called him James. He never really seemed bothered by it but it bothered her mother and they had many fights about it.

Stella hadn’t thought much of her Dad for a while now, she’d tried to find him, still tried around Father’s Day and his birthday, but she had a life now and couldn’t spend all of it chasing Jacob Seed. She transferred into the Sheriff’s Department of Hope County because they needed a new Anthropologist to figure out if bone remains were human or animal, and once properly identified if they were Native American and for her to go through the proper channels. She was 23 and while she was still working on her master’s degree she had all the necessary skills to identify bones and knew the proper channels to connect to in case it was a disturbed Native American grave site. She was given the title of Junior Deputy Sheriff, which she felt was a little much, Deputy Sheriff would have been fine. She vaguely recalled hearing about a Joseph Seed running a cult but it hadn’t come up in the last few months. Until today. Today a US Marshal had shown up with an arrest warrant for Joseph Seed. And since Stella had no experience running the radio Nancy would be staying back and she would be going with them to arrest him. The Sheriff looked contrite. Stella didn’t really understand why until she walked into the church. Her eyes had scanned over the congregation, looking for weapons, before she skimmed over Joseph Seed. He was shirtless and had many tattoos and what looked like words carved into his skin. But she almost froze in shock. Just behind him to the left was her Dad. His face didn’t hold any recognition.

“Rook.” The Sheriff said and she glanced at him before looking over at Joseph Seed. His face was determined and he didn’t know who she was either. Why would he? They had never met even though she knew all about Joe and Johnny. Her Uncles that her Dad wanted to find again. She placed the handcuffs on him. She was duty bound, it was her job to arrest him.

Jacob couldn’t shake that he knew the young Deputy that had handcuffed Joseph. Her eyes had been on him the whole time and he swore he knew them and her face. John was grumbling about her escape from baptism as he looked through the files.

“Ah here she is. Junior Deputy Stella Jean Rook.” Jacob felt like he had been hit with a brick and he snapped his attention to his youngest brother.

“Jean.” He stressed the French pronunciation. Because he had wanted to name her after little Johnny but didn’t want to name her Jane. John looked up confused. “It’s supposed to be pronounced like it’s French. Her mom had a thing for French.” He lied easily.

“Brother?” Joseph asked carefully, looking between him and the photo of the young Deputy, piecing it together.

“She was born November 15th, 1994. Hell, of a snow storm that day. She was born Stella Jean Seed.” He looked at the picture of her, smiling brightly labeled as Sinner. His daughter was a Deputy Sheriff. His daughter had come to arrest his little brother. His Little Star was Public Enemy Number One against Eden’s Gate. He recalled her eyes back in the church. They hadn’t left him once, until the Sheriff called to her. She looked so shocked and afraid, worried about him.

“I’m a horrible uncle.” John said and looked crushed. Faith patted his back lightly.

“Joseph was going to let her die in the helicopter so I think that makes you even.” Jacob rubbed his face reminding himself that not even he had known exactly who she was. He looked back down at her picture. Ellie was doing well for herself. He’d have to pull any remaining information out of that Deputy that his Hunters had snatched up. Staci Pratt.

Stella huffed and settled into the bushes as she heard a heavy vehicle coming her way. She had stopped a few of the Reaping Trucks now. After checking on Rae-Rae and finding her dead and Boomer alone Dutch had let her think over what she was going to do. She wasn’t sure, she didn’t know what to do. Should she free her companions? Wouldn’t her family think she’s siding with them? Should she side with her Family? She missed her Dad so much. Boomer nudged her side and whined softly. She ran a hand down his back.

“Thanks boy.” She smiled faintly. Now was not the time to get distracted. She took aim and blew out the front tires of the truck. The Peggies scrambled, calling for bliss bullets but she took them down with a few well-placed kneecap shots and shoulder hits. Once she was finished she opened the truck only to find one frightened looking woman there.

“Please I wanna go home!” She cried, tear tracks of makeup down her face.

“Okay. I’ll take you home. Where is home?”

“You aren’t with them?” The shock and suspicion in her eyes made Stella want to cringe but she stepped up and offered her a hand.

“Deputy Stella Rook.” She introduced herself. “I’m with the Sheriff’s department.” The woman blinked before launching herself at Stella and hugging her tightly.

“I thought I was gonna die.” She was rambling about how they would probably have hidden her body and Stella patted her back awkwardly before helping her down out of the truck. The woman was a little over half a foot shorter than her. “Thank you for saving me.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Stella rubbed the back of her neck and smiled a little more genuinely as they headed down the road. Missing the Peggie recording her escorting her latest rescue. “So, it’s a little dangerous to run around on your own, mind if I walk you home?”

“Yes, please.” She clung a bit and Stella nodded, patted her head and slipped free of the warm gentle grasp. “Sorry. Oh, right I’m Tamara Zoey Barnes.” The pair shook hands and headed toward Tamara’s house.

Stella took refuge with Dutch, still afraid to face the people of Hope County knowing her family was causing them so much grief. He shook his head and clicked his tongue at her, treating her small scrapes as she handed over more information and stolen weaponry. Boomer gave a happy bark as she tossed him a scrap of beef jerky.

“Well kid I gotta say you’re makin’ ‘em scared of grabbing people down here that’s for sure.” He looked at the few Reaping movements that had thinned out considerably. Stella smiled a bit and looked at the map. Her eyes stuck to the top of it. The Whitetail Mountains were her Dad’s Domain. So far, she had slunk around on the fringes of Holland Valley and the Henbane River. Dutch knew about her family, he hadn’t turned her over to them because she told him she wasn’t like them. And she wasn’t. She didn’t want to be part of a Doomsday Cult. But she missed her Dad and she remembered all the stories of her Uncles that he would tell. She didn’t remember him ever mentioning an aunt but maybe she came later? She looked younger than John. Her radio crackled to life and both stilled.

“Hello Stella!” John sounded cheerful as ever. “I have that new friend of yours, the raven haired one, and we’re going to baptize her! If you’d like to join us for a do over you know where we’ll be.” Usually John tried to talk to her about sins and about how only family understood the plight of duty. He always tried to coax her out and to try and get her to come and see his ranch. She frowned as she tried to remember anyone that had black hair and then she realized he was talking about the girl she’d rescued a few days prior.

Tammy looked around at the men with guns around her. All she had wanted was to come home from studying, maybe relax for once since she hadn’t been able to afford this trip in a few years. The tall man with intense blue eyes was staring at her with a weird smile on his face. They were standing next to the Henbane and he had been talking about sin and washing things away and honestly Tammy was too freaked out to pay much attention. He had apparently asked her a question though and she blinked at him.

“What?” He chuckled and waved his hand over the river.

“I was asking if you’d like to be baptized and begin atonement? No time like the present to pull out all those nasty pervasive sins.”

“What sins? I don’t have any sins! What are you talking about?”

“Everyone has sins, even my darling Deputy Niece could stand to atone.” He scanned the horizon as he said this, looking for someone. Tammy hoped it wasn’t that girl that had saved her the other day. “I’m sure you aren’t nearly as aggressive in your sins…” A somewhat familiar dog snatched a gun out of one of the men’s hands. Then two of them were taken down with arrows to the chest.

“I don’t have any sins I haven’t even had sex.” She muttered still shocked. This caused the man to turn and look at her sharply and allowed the dog to make off and distract more of the men. The man was suddenly pushed away from Tammy and a hand took hold of hers.

“Run.” It was the girl from the other day and she was half leading half dragging her away while she whistled and the dog came to run along side them. The redhead threw something over her shoulder that caused an explosion and blocked anyone from pursuing them further. They made it to a pick-up truck and the girl shoved her inside, followed by the dog, before climbing into the driver’s seat and peeling out driving off the main road and onto the back roads swiftly. “Gotta get tree coverage, John’s got air support.” She muttered more to herself and Tammy gripped the door handle tightly. To think all she’d wanted to do was come home.

Stella managed to get them to Rae-Rae’s Farm. She had cleaned up most of the blood and herded the woman so she didn’t see the fresh graves. Boomer settled in his bed that she’d dragged into the living room, sleeping on the couch felt more respectful rather than taking over the bedroom. For the most part that girl, Barnes, didn’t look too beat up. A stray bruise or two but mostly unharmed. Her Uncle hadn’t intended to hurt her much she was just the quickest way to get Stella into the open. John and Joseph seemed to think that she was lost because she’d been told lies about them. They urged her to ‘come home’ and be back wither family. She would probably be struggling with it more, if her Dad was the one delivering those messages.

“Thanks for saving me. Again.” Barnes said and Stella shrugged. The woman grabbed her in a hug again. “No, I mean it that guy was so weird, and he kept talking about sins and looked at me funny when I said I couldn’t have sins because I’m a virgin and…” She got lost in a tangent and Stella patted at her shoulders to try and calm her down.

“Don’t mention it.” She said and got her settled on the couch. They’d go see Dutch in the morning. Maybe he could shed some light on things. For both of them.

#Far Cry 5 AU #Jacob would probably have been a decent Dad before the events of the game #At least that's what I'm going with #Timeline? What Timeline?

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thebuckblogimo · 5 years

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The ever-changing face of America and what I make of it after all these years.

July 21, 2019

As a proud member of the gerontocracy, I’ve seen the world evolve in ways I never imagined as a child. Take, for example, the not-so-simple matter of race relations and attitudes toward skin color.

When I started school at St. Alphonsus in 1953, every kid was white. But not really white. My first big box of Crayolas included a color called “Flesh.” I remember staring at it, thinking that it did not look like the color of the skin of anyone I knew. And certainly not like that of the “colored people” (as African-Americans were known in the early ‘50s) in the Detroit neighborhood where my grandparents lived.

Crayola didn’t even try to make a crayon for them.

As I got a little older and started playing youth baseball, my team, the Bullets, occasionally played a team from the south end of Dearborn that everyone called “the Syrians.” They were a bunch of Arabic kids whose parents or grandparents actually came from Lebanon, and I recall thinking that they looked white but that most of them had better tans than the kids on my team.

By the time I was in high school during the early to mid ‘60s, the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., was ascending in national attention. I didn’t watch much nightly news in those days, but I was aware that Walter Cronkite of CBS, and “Huntley-Brinkley” of NBC, covered it every evening on TV. At that point in my life I remember often hearing the words “prejudice,” “discrimination,” “segregation” and “integration,” but I don’t recall ever hearing the word “diversity.”

Actually, in my mostly blue collar neighborhood, there may have been more discussion about “nationality” than skin color during those years. The grandparents of most of my friends had all immigrated to America from somewhere else--Italy, Poland, Germany, Ireland, Scotland and Belgium. Canada, too, although we never thought of Canadians as immigrants. In any case, Dearborn was “all white.” Period. And mayor Orville Hubbard neither said nor did much to refute his separatist reputation.

When I went off to college, one of my biggest surprises was the racial--and geographic--composition of the Michigan State football team. The mid 1960s were the glory years of Spartan football and most of the best players were black and from the South. Such as All-American defensive end Bubba Smith (Beaumont, Texas); All-American wide receiver Gene Washington (LaPorte, Texas); All-American roverback George Webster (Anderson, South Carolina); and Jimmy Raye (Fayetteville, North Carolina) who became the first black quarterback from the South to win a national title. Those great ‘65 and ‘66 teams also included two Hawaiians, placekicker Dick Kenny and All-American fullback Bob Apisa who was born in American Samoa.

If you search for a photo of the 1965 Alabama football team, which shared the national championship with MSU that season, you will find that it does not include a single black face. And if you Google photos of the 1966 Notre Dame team, which shared the next year’s national title with the Spartans, it reveals just one black player--that of All-American defensive tackle Alan Page.

In my estimation, head coach Duffy Daugherty has never received sufficient credit for all the things he did to integrate college football.

By the end of my second year on campus, the civil rights movement, student protests against the war in Vietnam, worries over being drafted into the military, the emerging sexual revolution, drug use and all the cultural changes associated with the ‘60s--in music, literature, hair styles, clothing, etc.--made “crazy” feel routine.

And then on Sunday, July 23, 1967, things got even crazier.

I recall sitting with some pals at “the Canteen” at Camp Dearborn, eating a black cherry ice cream cone in the late afternoon sun, when a St. Al’s girl I had known since first grade walked up to our table and said, “Have you heard about the riot going on in Detroit?”

Riot? Detroit? What? Huh?

The next evening I drove down Warren Avenue into the city with my Dad, and I remember seeing independent business owners sitting on the steps of their stores, with rifles locked and loaded, prepared to defend their properties. The following day at the Detroit paint factory where I worked that summer, I took the staircase to the rooftop of Building 42, looked out toward the Detroit River and could see hundreds of fires dotting the cityscape. Detroit was put under curfew for four days; the National Guard, as well as two divisions of the U.S. Army, were called in to quell the disturbance; and in the end, 43 people died, over 7,000 arrests were made and 2,000 buildings were destroyed. The riot was triggered by an early-hours bust of a blind pig, but black frustration with racial inequities was at the root of it all.

Detroit has never been the same since.

I graduated from college in December of 1969, and about two months later drove across the country with my buddy Joe on an adventure to the West Coast. I was soon able to find a job as a janitor at the uber-exclusive Pacific Union (Men’s) Club at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco. It was my first introduction to people with “yellow skin.”

I was part of a work crew that consisted of a Filipino, a Korean, a Chinese man and three white guys. The three Asians had all come to America in hopes of saving enough money to bring their families to the U.S. All three struggled with English, and I helped my Korean buddy learn the language by reading aloud the comics section of the Sunday paper, while pointing at the illustrations.

Because of the language barrier and my short time on the job, I gained few good insights into those guys and their respective cultures, other than to say I knew them as great workers.

After a couple of months, Joe and I moved on to Los Angeles, but I was feeling like a bit of loser, homesick and hungry. He found a gig as a carpenter; I soon caught a ride back home with some pals who were visiting the coast. In December of 1970 I finally landed my first big boy job as a copywriter for the Automobile Club of Michigan (AAA) at its headquarters in downtown Detroit.

It was the fulfillment of my boyhood dreams. I was writing every day about insurance, travel and auto financing services. I was being taken to lunch several times a week by art studios or the ad agency that created AAA’s radio and TV advertising. And I finally had a couple of bucks in my pocket.

But something was percolating below the surface at work. Word leaked out that the Auto Club would be moving its headquarters from downtown Detroit to Dearborn. And, suddenly, there was a concurrent realization that there was not a single black person or woman who was a department manager at the downtown headquarters or at any of the 56 Michigan AAA branch offices at that time.

Although it still felt like the ‘60s, instead of revolting, disgruntled black employees and a female employee filed separate discriminatory lawsuits against the Auto Club. The suits dragged on for years in the courts, but by the time I left the company in 1979 there were numerous blacks and many women in prominent positions at AAA throughout the state.

Meanwhile, during the early-to-mid ‘70s, the Motor City came to be known as the Murder City. Also, federally imposed school busing accelerated the flight of white people from Detroit. Nevertheless, in December of 1977, I bought my first home in an integrated Detroit neighborhood called North Rosedale Park. Thanks to an active civic association, involved block clubs, a community house for hosting neighborhood events, etc., North Rosedale worked.

However, to the south, the neighborhoods branching out from nearby Evergreen Road, and the ones north of West McNichols, had become virtually all black. I was inside a few homes in those neighborhoods only a handful of times, visiting or partying with black colleagues from work. However, I slow-cruised the streets of Northwest Detroit many times in my car, an admittedly imperfect way to try to understand what it was like to live there. I observed people who were obviously middle class, but I observed many more who appeared to be “underclass.”

For a time I was a member of a North Rosedale Park committee to help prevent neighborhood crime and was privy to a police department map with pinpoints that plotted major crimes in the 16th precinct. Car thefts. B&Es. Shootings. Murders. I could clearly see the extent of the problem throughout the precinct. Like everyone else I read about the crime throughout the city in the daily newspapers. I watched the coverage of it on TV. And I could “feel it” when I drove through the neighborhoods in my car.

I got married in 1979. And by the end of the ‘80s Debbie and I had four small children. It was time to make a big decision. Stay in Detroit and send our kids to Detroit schools, which had become dysfunctional? Drive our kids many miles to private schools in the suburbs? Or move?

In 1989, Ross Roy, the long-time downtown Detroit ad agency that I was then working for, relocated to Bloomfield Hills. And we moved even farther north to Clarkston where the public schools had an excellent reputation.

Once again I was living in a virtually all white community.

We lived in Clarkston for 20 years. As I attended local high school football and basketball games over that time, I began to notice an increasing number of black players on the mostly suburban teams in Clarkston’s league. And I recalled that when we moved out of Detroit, it wasn’t just white families that were leaving the city, many middle class black families left for the suburbs, too.

My children rarely met kids with black, brown or yellow skin in Clarkston. In fact, they rarely met kids with the kinds of last names--ending in “i” or “o” or “ski” or “wicz”--that I took for granted while growing up. But they met many such people in college and continue to do so in their respective careers. And I’m proud that they tend not to be judgmental of people with different skin colors.

After we lost our home due to an electrical fire in 2010, Debbie and I embarked on a new adventure that took us to Grand Haven in West Michigan. Heavy Dutch influence. Politically conservative. Predominantly white. During my first summer here, someone I met at a party referred to Detroit as “Detoilet.” Also, at estate sales and neighborhood functions, I was often asked whether I go to church--something I was not used to on the other side of the state. It’s a whole different vibe in West Michigan, to be sure.

We’re now into our eighth summer in Grand Haven, and even here you can see the changing face of America. There’s a family down the street whose daughter is marrying an African-American man this month. There’s a woman I know at the gym whose son married an African-American woman last month. And one day recently, a neighbor from the next street over stopped to talk while pushing a stroller and introduced me to his son’s twin boys. With their darkish skin color, dark hair and eyes, I assumed that they had an Indian or perhaps Pakistani mother.

Such things were unheard of when I first visited Grand Haven in the early ‘70s.

I was inspired to write about what I’ve observed concerning the ever-changing face of America after shopping one evening at Westborn Market during a visit to Dearborn earlier this summer. When I walked into the store I felt as though I had entered into some sort of international marketplace. White people. Black people. Arabic people. Asian people. Indian people. The place was packed with people of color of all types. It was certainly not the “cake eaters’” market of my youth.

WHERE I COME OUT. I’ve been thinking about attitudes toward skin color since early childhood, when I first realized that there were black people who could speak Polish living on my grandparents’ block. As I look back on the past seven decades, here are five observations and my opinions about them:

Birds of a feather flock together. My grandparents lived in Polish enclaves. The Arab families I knew as a kid clustered in an area of Dearborn called “Salina.” In college, the black kids usually sat together in the grill and cafeteria. And rich people tend to reside in the same zip code. It’s a natural human tendency for people who share a common culture to congregate with their own kind. I get that. Yet I’ve always felt that if Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal desire to build their home next to Mr. and Mrs. Robin, they have every right to do so.

I was in perhaps the sixth grade when I first heard about school “busing” to achieve racial integration. Brilliant idea, thought my 12-year-old mind. But as a young man I reversed my position as I came to understand the vital importance of “neighborhood schools.” When moms and dads, no matter their color, give a serious damn about their kids’ education, they prefer to live close to their children’s schools, facilitating the parental involvement--school open houses; child progress meetings; attendance at plays, concerts and sporting events--that is so important to the successful education of their kids. Also, there were many times I ran into our children’s teachers at the bakery or Damman Hardware in Clarkston--everyday community encounters that enhanced a “connection” with their teachers. The chance of that happening with cross-district busing is far less likely. I would argue that whatever slim chance Detroit had to remain a viable major American city after the riots of ‘67 was killed by forced busing in the early-to-mid ‘70s. It caused the last of Detroit’s white middle class to say, “That’s it...we’re out of here.” Many black middle class families said the same. So, ultimately, the city was left to a population that was mostly poor and black. (Interestingly, Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, was an opponent of busing.)

No matter race, ethnicity, age or income level, most people make little effort to learn anything about the attitudes, interests or culture of the “other guy.” I’m far from being a hundred percent at it, but when I have done so the results have often been astounding. Such as the time I walked into a large Arabic market on Warren Avenue in East Dearborn a few years ago in search of the secret to making authentic Middle Eastern shawarma. When I showed sincere interest to doing so, I was escorted around the store and introduced to four or five different employees who filled my head with knowledge about Arabic spices and marinating techniques. I was the only “white person” in the store that day, but when I walked out the door I got high fives, slaps on the back, wishes of good luck--and big smiles--from every employee I encountered. I’ve had many similar experiences with black people when I’ve shown interest in their music, food, personal histories, etc. It’s amazing what you get back when you attempt to find out what the other guy is really all about. I would also add that being curious about or empathetic with “the other” should be a two-way street. If everyone--white, black, Hispanic, yellow, Arabic, native American, etc.--made small, incremental efforts to knock down the invisible barriers between us, it would be so much easier to coexist on this rapidly shrinking planet.

Diversity is infinitely more interesting than homogeneity. I could cite hundreds of personal experiences that cause me to feel this way. From listening to folk songs while sitting in a circle of Scotch people to eating kimchi with Korean folks in San Francisco. From drinking cherry-juice- infused spirytus with relatives in Poland to attempting to harmonize around the piano in a black family’s home in Toledo. From torching my tastebuds with sauteed jalapeno peppers in an authentic Mexican market in Pontiac to the youthful insights of the black North Carolina teenager who spends a part of every summer in the home across the street from us in Grand Haven. Diversity broadens horizons. Changes perspectives. Expands one’s view of the world. No matter where or with whom one ordinarily flocks, it’s highly beneficial, sez I, to get out and fly with birds of a different color.

We could really use a modern-day Henry Ford, someone with a not-yet-conceived, revolutionary new product--or process--that employs large numbers of ordinary workers and pays them a living wage to build it. That’s what Henry did when he introduced assembly line production to build the Model T and doubled the wage of his workers to $5 a day, putting them on the road to the middle class. Or maybe we need a modern-day Work Projects Administration (WPA) that employs unskilled people--and pays them enough to afford a dignified middle class life--to rebuild our roads, bridges, water lines, public transit systems, the entire U.S. infrastructure. Because I now think that racially segregated poverty persists more due to economic inequality than any other factor. There are available jobs galore in the fast food industry, tourism, hospitality, health care and more. But they’re jobs that don’t pay enough to secure a middle class life. And it is now generally accepted that the single greatest predictor of a student’s achievement and eventual economic success is household income. I used to think that education was the key to lifting up the poverty stricken-- whether black, brown, white, whatever--into the middle class. But while the American population is more educated than ever before, the canyon between rich and poor has only widened over the last 40 years.

Like everyone else, I have opinions. These have been mine about racial issues. I’ve never lived in a ghetto. I haven’t had much interplay with Hispanics. I’ve never been poor. And I claim no special expertise in matters regarding attitudes toward skin color. I’m just one guy who has been watching, thinking about these things for a very long time. I probably won’t be around to see America become a majority-minority country. I only hope that when it inevitably happens that all people of all skin colors will do a better job of negotiating those invisible barriers on that two-way street I spoke of earlier.

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jodyedgarus · 6 years

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What A Badass Olympic Skier Can Teach Us About Work-Life Balance

Team USA has sent 20 fathers to Pyeongchang, but only one mother: Kikkan Randall. A three-time winner of cross-country skiing’s World Cup sprint title, Randall was part of a baby boom that happened after the 2014 Sochi Olympics, when four of the sport’s top athletes took time off from racing to give birth.1

These women didn’t just return to work — they came back to the highest level of a demanding sport, and all four are expected to compete in Pyeongchang. But Randall is doing so without the same safety net that her European colleagues have. And that’s left her facing the same challenge that many other American women experience: how to balance a grueling career with the demands of new motherhood. A job as arduous as being a professional athlete (or, say, director of policy planning at the State Department) has little room for compromise or scaling back, and that means that much of the parenting must fall to a spouse or outside help.

The 2018 Games will be the fifth Olympic appearance for Randall, a 35-year-old cross-country skier from Alaska.2 In 2008, Randall, nicknamed Kikkanimal, made history by becoming the first American woman to win a World Cup in cross-country skiing. And in Pyeongchang, she has a legitimate shot at a medal.

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Mothers-to-be in most professions take time off after childbirth, but Randall’s situation was different: “I was on my maternity leave while I was pregnant,” she said. Because she remained on the U.S. ski team roster, she retained access to her health insurance, and most of her sponsors continued their support, in exchange for appearances, social media plugs and other publicity. She resumed training about three weeks after her son, Breck, was born in April 2016, with the support of her husband, Jeff Ellis, who parented while she trained. Having a husband who is willing to take on parental duties and, most importantly, to do so “unbegrudgingly” has been “a huge piece of the puzzle,” Randall said.

There’s no such thing as a part-time return to work in elite sports, which usually require multiple training sessions each day, along with naps, massages, full nights of sleep and other recovery rituals. Of course, sleepless nights are almost a given for the first years of a child’s life. And Randall said that knowing Ellis will “take care of those night-time wakings before a race really helps.”

She noted that her peers in Scandinavian countries have the benefit of paid time off for fathers as well as mothers. (Of the 35 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. is the only one without paid maternal leave.)

Paid maternal leave policies around the world

Among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2016

Country Length of paid maternity leave, in weeks 1 Greece 43.0

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2 United Kingdom 39.0

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3 Slovakia 34.0

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4 Czech Republic 28.0

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5 Ireland 26.0

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6 Hungary 24.0

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7 Italy 21.7

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8 Estonia 20.0

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9 Poland 20.0

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10 Australia 18.0

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11 Chile 18.0

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12 Denmark 18.0

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13 New Zealand 18.0

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14 Finland 17.5

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15 Canada 17.0

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16 Austria 16.0

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17 France 16.0

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18 Latvia 16.0

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19 Luxembourg 16.0

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20 Netherlands 16.0

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21 Spain 16.0

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22 Turkey 16.0

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23 Belgium 15.0

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24 Slovenia 15.0

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25 Germany 14.0

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26 Israel 14.0

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27 Japan 14.0

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28 Switzerland 14.0

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29 Iceland 13.0

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30 Norway 13.0

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31 South Korea 12.9

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32 Sweden 12.9

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33 Mexico 12.0

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34 Portugal 6.0

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35 United States 0.0

Source: OECD Family Database

Randall’s Finnish peer Aino-Kaisa Saarinen had a child around the same time that Randall did, and she told me that her country has a mandatory four-month paid leave for mothers, which she started a month before her due date. After the baby was born, she and her partner received further benefits, including leave that they could split as they chose between the parents. “In our case, the dad took all that,” Saarinen said. (Not to mention the paid leave that fathers are entitled to.)

Randall has competed in the predominantly Europe-based World Cup without that kind of paid leave but with Breck in tow for the past two seasons. It hasn’t always been easy. Although she emerged from childbirth without any serious complications (not all women do, as tennis star Serena Williams’s story demonstrates), the snap in her muscles didn’t return right away. And during her time off, the U.S. team “had gotten so strong,” Randall said. She sat out the second World Cup weekend after her return because she wasn’t skiing as well as her teammates.

There have been many men who’ve continued competing after adding a child to their family, said Chris Grover, head coach of the U.S. cross-country ski team, but very few women. “Many of these guys are not primary caregivers and tend to come to the races Thursday and head back home on Sunday night or Monday,” Grover said. And while fathers may experience sleepless nights just like mothers do, they don’t need to physically recover after childbirth.

Randall and her husband have built their work and family life around her job. Ellis secured a job as a media coordinator for the ski federation, which allowed him to travel the World Cup circuit with her. “He got the job so that we could see each other in the winter,” Randall said.

Randall breast-fed her son until about a month into the racing season. Realizing that there would be at least four mothers coming to the World Cup with babies, the ski federation worked with the athlete commission, national ski federations and organizing committees to make formal recommendations encouraging race venues to provide a “baby room” with appropriate provisions so that moms can breast-feed and care for their infants as needed. Randall thinks she used these rooms much more than others in her cohort of new mothers. She said that may be because the others live in Europe, where most of the races take place, and can travel back and forth between home and races on a weekly basis.

In Finland, Saarinen benefits from laws that guarantee child care facilities will be available. “The government also pays for most of it,” she said. That’s not all. “We also get child money from the government, which is about 200€ per month, a baby box with 48 items, and free and mandatory monthly health checks for baby and for the mom.”

Things are different in the U.S. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 62 percent of parents of infant or preschool-age children report difficulty finding affordable, high-quality child care in their community, regardless of their income.

Because Randall and Ellis are both working while on the race circuit, their parents and some friends have stepped in to provide child care, but paying travel and accomodations for these helpers isn’t cheap. In part because of the cost, Breck won’t be accompanying his parents to Pyeongchang. After calculating that it would run something like $15,000 to $20,000 for them to bring him and a caretaker along, they decided to send him to his grandparents’ house in Canada instead.

As well as things are working out for her now, Randall acknowledges that her current situation is not sustainable. And it probably wouldn’t be scalable to the whole workplace either. Grover acknowledged that it’s difficult to imagine a ski team traveling around Europe with all the coaching staff’s kids, in addition to the team athletes.

Randall plans to retire from racing after this season but will remain in the sport. She is president of the U.S. branch of Fast and Female, a group that encourages girls to participate in sports, and she’s running for election as an athlete representative on the International Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission. After two decades of competition, it feels right, she said. Success in a career like sports requires giving it your all, and that means family life can’t always come first. For a parent who wants to substantially take part in parenting, eventually something must give.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-badass-olympic-skier-can-teach-us-about-work-life-balance/

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