When Caitlin Gooch was working with elementary school kids as a teacher’s assistant, it was sobering to find that most children were not reading at grade level.
In her native North Carolina, 36 percent of fourth graders are reading at a proficient level, and it’s about the same nationwide, according to The Nation’s Report Card, a congressionally mandated assessment of students nationwide. Adjusting for race, Black fourth graders across the country tied for the lowest average reading score. In North Carolina, White and Asian fourth graders scored more than 20 points above Black, Latinx and Indigenous children on average.
Then, in 2017, Gooch was volunteering at a Scholastic Book Fair with a Western theme and realized not all kids at the fair had enough money to bring books home.
“I know that authors and illustrators have to make money, but it also pains me really bad that books are so expensive,” Gooch said. “Children deserve new books.”
A lightbulb went off for the 28-year-old, who grew up surrounded by horses on her family farm. Gooch established Saddle Up and Read that year with the mission to get more books to kids, using her childhood horse, Goat, as the magnet to draw kids into her book drives.
Gooch fundraised enough money to put down a third of the cost of a trailer to take Goat on the road. A farm in Kentucky sent in money to help offset the cost. Farmers in Maryland donated a truck with 40,000 miles on it.
“I was really happy, because it seemed like at that point people were starting to not only pay attention to Saddle Up and Read, but pay attention to literacy rates, and that’s something that I don’t want people to forget,” Gooch said.
She now travels to towns and neighborhoods in North Carolina, handing out gift bags with books. Gooch has given out at least 200 books this year.
During the pandemic, she hasn’t hosted readings on her farm out of an abundance of caution, so she and Goat are on the road more often. These gifts allowed Gooch and Goat to show up in North Carolina neighborhoods with books and goodie bags.
Over the first weekend in December, she posted a selfie in front of her horse trailer, captioned with a simple request: “See that truck and trailer?” the tweet read. “I drive it to different communities to give books to children in need. Oh and I bring my horse with me. [Retweet] so I can get the word out. I’m in N.C.”
After posting the tweet, Gooch, a mother of three, went to record a podcast interview in her car (it would’ve been impossible inside her noisy house). When she was finished, she looked at her phone and saw a message: “Oprah tweeted you, sis.”
In conversation with The 19th, Gooch talked about bringing together her love of reading with all things equestrian, and her efforts to inspire the next generation of book-lovers.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The 19th: Tell me a little more about Saddle Up and Read. Why did you launch it?
Caitlin Gooch: I started it because I saw that children, Black children, were struggling when it came to literacy, when it came to reading, in general, and even putting together sentences.
In the roles I’ve volunteered in, and my role as an assistant teacher, I get to help kids with their spelling words and their vocabulary. And when they’re struggling to spell three-letter words and four-letter words, I feel like that’s a red flag — especially with some of the children who were in fourth grade and fifth grade.
I took the time to research it and figure out what the literacy rates actually were. I went into a rabbit hole and I found that children of color were far behind their White peers. I looked up reading and writing performance [charts] in every school in my area. When it came to the Black students, the bar was so small and you could barely even see it on the graph. What is really happening? I wanted to get to that part. For me, when I see a need for something, I’m going to work until I can fill it.
I thought, this can’t just be an issue in my area, and it wasn’t. It’s North Carolina and then it’s America, in general. We’re so far behind other countries. What’s the difference here? Why aren’t children reading? What I found is that many children don’t have books at home or they don’t have books with characters who look like them or ones that interest them. Maybe that’s a part of the problem. [Ed note: The 2019 Cooperative Children’s Book Center survey on diversity in young adult and children’s literature found about 12 percent of such books featured a Black main character, nearly 30 percent of books feature animals.]
One: We don’t have a lot of books with representation. Two: The number of those book titles is smaller when it comes to figuring out what children like to read. Of course they’re not all going to be into the same things; they have their own personalities and interests. So with Saddle Up and Read, I said, let’s use horses to get kids excited about reading. Because if they’re excited about reading and they don’t see it as a chore, then just maybe it’ll make it easier for us to nurture that love of reading, and we can use horses to do it. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like horses. I’m pretty sure those people might be out there, but I haven’t met them.
What’s your relationship with horses?
I grew up riding horses. My dad has a horse farm in Wendell, North Carolina. We moved five different times into different houses, but the farm has always been at the same place. When I was a kid, I’d wake up, I’d see horses. I mean, we literally use the horses as our mowing system. When I was 3, [my dad] started me out riding, and we’d do trail rides together. At trail rides I ride Western but also ride bareback. So that is where my love for horses started.
What was your relationship with reading growing up?
I love books. I can’t even tell you what books I used to read, but I love reading. I was really into the “Twilight” series. I think I finished that series in a day or something. Books have always kept me centered and at peace. They’ve just allowed me to imagine even more. So I put books and horses together.
Can you say more about uniting those interests?
When I used to work in a child care center, I was the teacher’s assistant, and I was kind of a floater. I worked with 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. And those children, I love them so much, they were so stinkin’ adorable. I used to show them my horse on my phone to really grasp their attention. But sometimes we would be doing something, or it was like free play or something, and they’d say, “Ms. G, can I see your phone so I can see your horses?” This one boy, he was 3 years old, he used to cry if I didn’t let him see my phone and watch the videos.
I would try to talk to their parents and say, “You should just bring them out to the farm.” I felt like I was incredibly blessed to have grown up with horses. How many people does that happen to? I felt like that happened to me for a reason, and I shouldn’t just be selfish and keep my horses to myself — I have to share them. Sometimes I would just wake up and it was so pretty outside, and I’d make a Facebook post that would say, “It’s so pretty outside, bring your kids to the farm.” Kids deserve to have that exposure.
When you decide to hit the road with your horse, Goat, and your trailer of books, how do you inform people where you will be?
A few weeks ago was one of the first times that I actually went into a neighborhood. With a pandemic I’m trying to make sure that I’m being extremely safe. I went to my aunt’s neighborhood because she’s very supportive of everything I do with Saddle Up and Read. I drove the horse trailer, and I’m not that good at backing up. I had to pull forward and back up, and pull forward and back up, because I was in the middle of the road in this neighborhood. I parked the truck and already people were looking out the window like, “What in the world?”
My husband was with me. We got the books out of the trailer, and got the books set up — that way when the kids came, they could just grab their book and their bag and they could leave. Then I got my horse out. I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna walk down the street and walk back.”
As I started walking back, there was a group of kids, maybe five, at the horse trailer. They started asking me all these questions about my horse, Goat. They were asking me why I was out there, and I said, “It’s really important that you read.” My husband and I gave them their goodie bags that were donated. Some of them got like three or so books. The bags had hats in them, so the kids put on their hats and went down the street to their friend’s houses and neighbors to tell them to come outside.
I know we all wish the pandemic was over. I’m wondering how you feel handing out books now as so many kids struggle with virtual or hybrid learning, or may be among the thousands of kids nationwide who’ve just disappeared from the roster.
I think this is the perfect opportunity to understand something else: Libraries are absolutely fantastic, programs like mine are absolutely fantastic, but there’s an entire population of kids who are missing out because they don’t have transportation. Where I live, there’s no bus route. The kids who can get out [to the library or to the farm] have that luxury of parents who can bring them in a car.
Those kids who are missing out on school right now because they’re not enrolled virtually and they’re not in physical school, I wonder if it’s just linked to a lack of resources. This is another reason why I don’t advertise [on social media] where I’m going, because sometimes people who don’t necessarily need Saddle Up and Read will show up. I really want to get to the kids that need us first. I’m not going to deny any child, I just would rather make sure I go out to those kids who need it first; that’s what I’m doing it for. I hope I can identify where those kids are who aren’t enrolled in anything and maybe go out and spend some time. Even if I have to say stay 6 to 12 feet away, I’ll read a book to you.
I have reading videos up, and other people have read to their horses on behalf of Saddle Up and Read. But there are kids who don’t have a computer. I really have to figure out how to tap into that. Because kids being out of school is going to have a negative impact on the literacy rates. Who knows how far back this is going to push everything.
What else do you want our readers to know?
Reading to kids 20 minutes a day really helps. Even if you don’t have children, maybe there’s some children [you] can read to. Or maybe they just want to donate to Saddle Up and Read. Or, if they don’t like children and they like horses, they can sponsor one of our horses.
On Dec. 26, millions throughout the world’s African community will start weeklong celebrations of Kwanzaa. There will be daily ceremonies with food, decorations and other cultural objects, such as the kinara, which holds seven candles. At many Kwanzaa ceremonies, there is also African drumming and dancing.
It is a time of communal self-affirmation – when famous Black heroes and heroines, as well as late family members – are celebrated.
As a scholar who has written about racially motivated violence against Blacks, directed Black cultural centers on college campuses and sponsored numerous Kwanzaa celebrations, I understand the importance of this holiday.
For the African-American community, Kwanzaa is not just any “Black holiday.” It is a recognition that knowledge of Black history is worthwhile.
History of Kwanzaa
Maulana Karenga, a noted Black American scholar and activist created Kwanzaa in 1966. Its name is derived from the phrase “matunda ya kwanza” which means “first fruits” in Swahili, the most widely spoken African language. However, Kwanzaa, the holiday, did not exist in Africa.
A candle is lit each day to celebrate the seven basic values of African culture. Ailisa via Shutterstock.com
Each day of Kwanzaa is devoted to celebrating the seven basic values of African culture or the “Nguzo Saba” which in Swahili means the seven principles. Translated these are: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics (building Black businesses), purpose, creativity and faith. A candle is lit on each day to celebrate each one of these principles. On the last day, a black candle is lit and gifts are shared.
Today, Kwanzaa is quite popular. It is celebrated widely on college campuses, the U.S. Postal Service issues Kwanzaa stamps, there is at least one municipal park named for it, and there are special Kwanzaa greeting cards.
Kwanzaa’s meaning for black community
Kwanzaa was created by Karenga out of the turbulent times of the 1960’s in Los Angeles, following the 1965 Watts riots, when a young African-American was pulled over on suspicions of drunk driving, resulting in an outbreak of violence.
Subsequently, Karenga founded an organization called Us – meaning, black people – which promoted black culture. The purpose of the organization was to provide a platform, which would help to rebuild the Watts neighborhood through a strong organization rooted in African culture.
Karenga called its creation an act of cultural discovery, which simply meant that he wished to point African-Americans to greater knowledge of their African heritage and past.
Rooted in the struggles and the gains of the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, it was a way of defining a unique black American identity. As Keith A. Mayes, a scholar of African-American history, notes in his book,
“For Black power activists, Kwanzaa was just as important as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Kwanzaa was their answer to what they understood as the ubiquity of white cultural practices that oppressed them as thoroughly as had Jim Crow laws.”
Overturning white definitions
Today, the holiday has come to occupy a central role, not only in the U.S. but also in the global African diaspora.
A 2008 documentary, “The Black Candle” that filmed Kwanzaa observances in the United States and Europe, shows children not only in the United States, but as far away as France, reciting the principles of the Nguzo Saba.
‘The Black Candle’
It brings together the Black community not on the basis of their religious faith, but a shared cultural heritage. Explaining the importance of the holiday for African-Americans today, writer Amiri Baraka, says during an interview in the documentary,
“We looked at Kwanzaa as part of the struggle to overturn white definitions for our lives.”
Indeed, since the early years of the holiday, until today, Kwanzaa has provided many black families with tools for instructing their children about their African heritage.
This spirit of activism and pride in the African heritage is evident on college campus Kwanzaa celebrations – one of which I recently attended. (It was done a few days early so that students going on break could participate.)
The speaker, a veteran of the Nashville civil rights movement, spoke about Kwanzaa as a time of memory and celebration. Wearing an African dashiki, he led those in attendance – blacks and whites and those of other ethnicities – in Kwanzaa songs and recitations. On a table decorated in kente cloth, a traditional African fabric, was a kinara, which contains seven holes, to correspond to the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa. There were three red candles on the left side of the kinara, and three green candles on the right side of the kinara. The center candle was black. The colors of the candles represent the red, black and green of the African Liberation flag.
The auditorium was packed. Those in attendance, young and old, black and white, held hands and chanted slogans celebrating black heroes and heroines, as diverse as the civil rights icons, Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Jamaican musician Bob Marley.
It was a cultural observance that acknowledged solidarity with the struggles of the past and with one another. Like the black power movements, such as today’s Black Lives Matter movement, it is an affirmation of “Black folks’ humanity,” their “contributions to this society” and “resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”
Karenga wanted to “reaffirm the bonds between us” (Black people) and to counter the damage done by the “holocaust of slavery.” Kwanzaa celebrations are a moment of this awareness and reflection.
On Dec. 26, millions throughout the world’s African community will start weeklong celebrations of Kwanzaa. There will be daily ceremonies with food, decorations and other cultural objects, such as the kinara, which holds seven candles. At many Kwanzaa ceremonies, there is also African drumming and dancing.
It is a time of communal self-affirmation – when famous Black heroes and heroines, as well as late family members – are celebrated.
As a scholar who has written about racially motivated violence against Blacks, directed Black cultural centers on college campuses and sponsored numerous Kwanzaa celebrations, I understand the importance of this holiday.
For the African-American community, Kwanzaa is not just any “Black holiday.” It is a recognition that knowledge of Black history is worthwhile.
History of Kwanzaa
Maulana Karenga, a noted Black American scholar and activist created Kwanzaa in 1966. Its name is derived from the phrase “matunda ya kwanza” which means “first fruits” in Swahili, the most widely spoken African language. However, Kwanzaa, the holiday, did not exist in Africa.
A candle is lit each day to celebrate the seven basic values of African culture. Ailisa via Shutterstock.com
Each day of Kwanzaa is devoted to celebrating the seven basic values of African culture or the “Nguzo Saba” which in Swahili means the seven principles. Translated these are: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics (building Black businesses), purpose, creativity and faith. A candle is lit on each day to celebrate each one of these principles. On the last day, a black candle is lit and gifts are shared.
Today, Kwanzaa is quite popular. It is celebrated widely on college campuses, the U.S. Postal Service issues Kwanzaa stamps, there is at least one municipal park named for it, and there are special Kwanzaa greeting cards.
Kwanzaa’s meaning for black community
Kwanzaa was created by Karenga out of the turbulent times of the 1960’s in Los Angeles, following the 1965 Watts riots, when a young African-American was pulled over on suspicions of drunk driving, resulting in an outbreak of violence.
Subsequently, Karenga founded an organization called Us – meaning, black people – which promoted black culture. The purpose of the organization was to provide a platform, which would help to rebuild the Watts neighborhood through a strong organization rooted in African culture.
Karenga called its creation an act of cultural discovery, which simply meant that he wished to point African-Americans to greater knowledge of their African heritage and past.
Rooted in the struggles and the gains of the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, it was a way of defining a unique black American identity. As Keith A. Mayes, a scholar of African-American history, notes in his book,
“For Black power activists, Kwanzaa was just as important as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Kwanzaa was their answer to what they understood as the ubiquity of white cultural practices that oppressed them as thoroughly as had Jim Crow laws.”
Overturning white definitions
Today, the holiday has come to occupy a central role, not only in the U.S. but also in the global African diaspora.
A 2008 documentary, “The Black Candle” that filmed Kwanzaa observances in the United States and Europe, shows children not only in the United States, but as far away as France, reciting the principles of the Nguzo Saba.
‘The Black Candle’
It brings together the Black community not on the basis of their religious faith, but a shared cultural heritage. Explaining the importance of the holiday for African-Americans today, writer Amiri Baraka, says during an interview in the documentary,
“We looked at Kwanzaa as part of the struggle to overturn white definitions for our lives.”
Indeed, since the early years of the holiday, until today, Kwanzaa has provided many black families with tools for instructing their children about their African heritage.
This spirit of activism and pride in the African heritage is evident on college campus Kwanzaa celebrations – one of which I recently attended. (It was done a few days early so that students going on break could participate.)
The speaker, a veteran of the Nashville civil rights movement, spoke about Kwanzaa as a time of memory and celebration. Wearing an African dashiki, he led those in attendance – blacks and whites and those of other ethnicities – in Kwanzaa songs and recitations. On a table decorated in kente cloth, a traditional African fabric, was a kinara, which contains seven holes, to correspond to the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa. There were three red candles on the left side of the kinara, and three green candles on the right side of the kinara. The center candle was black. The colors of the candles represent the red, black and green of the African Liberation flag.
The auditorium was packed. Those in attendance, young and old, black and white, held hands and chanted slogans celebrating black heroes and heroines, as diverse as the civil rights icons, Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Jamaican musician Bob Marley.
It was a cultural observance that acknowledged solidarity with the struggles of the past and with one another. Like the black power movements, such as today’s Black Lives Matter movement, it is an affirmation of “Black folks’ humanity,” their “contributions to this society” and “resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”
Karenga wanted to “reaffirm the bonds between us” (Black people) and to counter the damage done by the “holocaust of slavery.” Kwanzaa celebrations are a moment of this awareness and reflection.
It was the morning after Thanksgiving when her body finally gave out. The layers upon crushing layers of loss — her grandmother two days prior, her job at the start of the year — tethered her to her bed. As did all the little losses, the in-between bits this year where structure dissolved, order vanished and sanity waned.
Amy Kugler had reached the point where the answer to her husband’s question — are you OK? — came out as a resounding “no.”
But Christmas was only 28 days away, and even as she said it, her mind wandered to the tree they were supposed to be picking out with their 3-year-old son and the Christmas lights. My God, she thought, she couldn’t put up the lights.
In her head it was a ping-pong between obligation and exhaustion.
Can I do this? Can I rest? Can I do this? Can I not?
Kugler had to mourn the grandmother’s death, which was not caused by COVID-19, but was still affected by it, through a funeral broadcast on a Facebook Live video. Would she mourn Christmas, too? She wondered whether for the first time, she wouldn’t be able to complete all of the tasks — the work — that needs to happen to conjure up Christmas magic. It’s work that too often falls on moms to perform, the same moms who have already endured an unmooring year that has displaced them from work, tested the reaches of their patience, and still asked them to give more and more and more.
Kugler could already see how Christmas day could play out: She would be the one fielding texts all day about when to Zoom the grandparents and when to FaceTime. She’d be the one cooking dinner, an extra special version that said, “we survived a pandemic this year.” And she would have to make time to play with her son so he has a memory to tuck away about his pandemic Christmas.
“It’s going to be the most stressful holiday, in my opinion,” said Kugler, speaking on Zoom from a Starbucks parking lot in Seattle — the only place she could go to get some quiet.
“I’m not a bare minimum person,” said Kugler, 39. “And that’s where the rub is. I feel more guilt put on myself for not being able to be that person.”
Pressure and guilt, in all their forms, converge around this time every year, when the invisible work women typically do at home gets ratcheted up a few notches for the holidays. Add to that the pandemic, which has claimed more than 300,000 U.S. lives and, at its worst point, 20.8 million jobs. People are burnt out. Women most of all.
And yet, the household work — who keeps track of what groceries to buy, what appointments to make, the outfits needed for the holiday photos — continues to fall on women, as it historically has. In the paid labor force, women continue to make up the majority of caregiving positions. (They’re 95 percent of the child care workforce and 75 percent of the health care workforce.) In the unpaid labor force, gender norms ensure much of that same work was delegated to women in the household, said feminist sociologist Lisa Huebner, a professor of women’s and gender studies at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.
“We’re gendering anything related to care, so the holidays become like, ‘This is how you show your love,’” Huebner said. “We don’t talk about those things in terms of workplace skills, like strategies and being creative and being intelligent. Instead we still frame those as being caring and focusing on family, and then we further attach that in gendered ways.”
Women are still socialized to be the organizers, cleaners and emotional managers — ideas that are further reinforced in the media, advertising, even at school.
“It’s not that men can’t or even don’t want to,” Huebner said. “It’s that they’re not practiced at it.”
All of that was already true before 2020, before the year that changed everything.
For Kugler, now it also feels like every task on the self-regenerating to-do list of the holidays will be mixed with grief and exhaustion.
For some, the pandemic has, somehow, impossibly, added even more pressure — the desire to give something positive to hold onto at the end of a year that has seemingly only taken away.
And for others, it has recalibrated the holidays, unraveling years of thinking less wasn’t enough.
Kristina Aleksander, for instance, is ready to cancel Christmas.
She had the talk with her husband, an attorney who promptly pulled out a yellow legal pad and started making a pros and cons list. It all boiled down to a simple flip: If he really wanted Christmas to happen this year, it would be his job to see it through instead of hers.
Reaching that decision feels like they’ve come miles from the time last year when her daughter was born and Aleksander plunged into postpartum depression. She’d hide away in her room at the end of a day working in communications at the Iowa State Capitol. Her husband once said her mood was affecting the entire house.
That labor, invisible and emotional, was hers alone to bear. Her husband helped with many tasks, but she was the center of the household for them, and that responsibility came with expectations about the work they relied on her to perform.
Not this year.
“There is a lot of forced expectation around Christmas and New Year’s where you just have to enjoy yourself and have fun. At least for my age group, women who are in their 20s to late 20s, it feels like a performance that we are putting up for Instagram,” said Aleksander, 26. “And I am just out of energy this year.
I don’t want to perform for anyone.”
The performative aspect is especially visible on social media, where people are spending so much more time as they stay socially distanced and quarantined.
“We have this very intensive Pinterest culture that backs up against these ridiculous expectations for homemaking,” said Eve Rodsky, who has spent a decade talking and writing about invisible labor. “Women were conditioned to have it all and do it all. And then doing it all is a lot higher level threshold because doing it is inspired by Pinterest and Instagram and a lot of counting and competing.”
But doing it all, especially at the end of the year, requires time — and at the source of the problem is the way we look at how men and women spend it.
“We’ve been guarding men’s time since the beginning of time,” Rodsky said. “Women’s time is infinite.”
Rodsky’s book, “Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live),” draws on her work talking to couples, most of them heterosexual, about the way they approach invisible labor and outlines a road map for addressing it. She usually guides couples through two key points.
First, there has to be buy-in. Most men Rodsky works with tell her the tasks their wives obsess over are unnecessary, and they don’t understand why they’re nagging them to do it or why it’s taking place at all. But, Rodsky said, part of it is men often don’t understand the unseen work: the cognitive load of keeping track of something, organizing it and executing it.
As an example, she told the story of Ed and Julie, a couple at a crossroads over a second grade DIY secret Santa project. Julie had to explain to Ed why it mattered: The girl their son got as his secret Santa had few friends — Julie, as the designated drop-off parent for school, knew this — and their son delivering on the gift would mean a lot. Once Ed understood the stakes, he could get to the second part of the equation: ownership of the task.
Watching Ed go to Michael’s, the craft store, and make popsicle-stick jewelry holder with glitter-covered hands changed their relationship that year. Julie felt Ed was really in it with her.
It started with creating room for a conversation most women don’t know how to start. It’s completely different in many of the same-sex couples Rodsky works with, she said, because many already have the context for starting difficult conversations — about coming out, or introducing partners or making health decisions for their children. “What a lot of same-sex couples will say to me is that the reticence of hetero couples to have these types of conversations because roles are already assigned feels sad to them,” Rodsky said.
I am just out of energy this year. I don’t want to perform for anyone.
Kristina Aleksander
This year, it feels like the pandemic has been the catalyst for some of the conversations to take place, she said. With so many people working from home, the labor that happened in the background is now happening at the fore, with everyone around to see it. And so more and more people are choosing to unburden themselves for the holidays, opting for a slimmed down approach to the festivities.
Laura Mayes, a spokeswoman for the City of San Antonio who has been working on the city’s COVID-19 response, is exhausted after a year that eliminated the concept of a break. That’s why she’s planning a smaller Christmas at home, far from her family and without the opportunity to really start creating memories for her 3-year-old, who won’t sit on Santa’s lap or see her grandparents this year.
But even with abridged plans and being tired from a long, stressful year, Mayes admits there’s a part of her that likes the control of doing most of the holiday work herself.
“When I let go of control, then I get all anxious and I want to know what’s going on,” said Mayes, 33. “Where I’ll accept the extra work, I also know at the end I would have wanted it done in certain ways, too.”
That’s another tension point, one some women whisper almost shamefully. By admitting they like the organization or prefer to do it all themselves, that could absolve their partners of needing to help.
It’s even more complicated for stay-at-home moms. Carly Gibbs stopped practicing law to spend more time with her three kids — a first grader, a preschooler and a three-month-old baby — while her husband kept his job as a doctor in Salt Lake City.
If she’s not going to be an attorney, she tells herself, she has to be an excellent mom.
“I am very bad at feeling OK with not doing everything,” said Gibbs, 37. “My inclination is I need to do everything and if I don’t, usually the consequence I am most fearful of or anticipate is my kids being disappointed in any way.”
It takes some mental fortitude for her to reason out of that sometimes. They won’t really care if they don’t build the gingerbread house this year — right?
The pressure women put on themselves is common, said Celeste Headlee, a journalist and author of two books on communication and overworking. So is the desire to want to take up the task themselves because they’ll do it faster, better — in a more organized fashion with less fuss.
Headlee suggests making a list that makes easily visible all the invisible tasks and then dividing it by strengths. Each person puts their initials next to their task for accountability, and the list goes in a public place.
“We are dealing with centuries of pressure that come from religious forces, political forces and corporate forces that led us to believe we have to be working all the time, and we will never meet the bar,” Headlee said. “Instead, I would approach this like you would a project at work — who is going to do what?
Liza Dube and her two sons are going to celebrate their Christmas on their own timeline, a liberation from the years of big parties and coordinated family Christmas caroling.
“What’s driving all of that is really that emotional labor and that tradition-keeping and magic-making, memory-creating and relationship-maintaining,” said Dube, 42. “So this year I feel like we’ve really been trying to kind of get a little bit closer to what the intent is behind a lot of those things, and figuring out simpler ways to meet that intent.”
She plans to celebrate with the boys on a day of their choosing, and they’ll spend Christmas Day with their dad, where they can bake the cookies and do the traditions without having to be shuttled from house to house in their small Massachusetts town. Dube, meanwhile, plans to spend Christmas Day doing something she’s always wanted to do: volunteer, this year with a crisis hotline.
She wonders if she’ll ever do it the old way again.
“I’ve been saying a lot this year, ‘Everybody has to make choices,’” Dube said. “We are all just making choices and we can’t even compare them with each other’s choices anymore.”
In the era of Covid-19, one thing has become certain to artists who have learned to perform in rooms with little to no people — engaging to the cameras is essential. And when Gospel music legends The Blind Boys of Alabama stepped onto the stage for their Special Christmas Show streamed live Wednesday night on Mandolin, the old familiar spark lit up the stage.
“Well, here we are. The Blind Boys of Alabama. It has been a while, but we’re still here,” said Jimmy Carter, one of the group’s founding members.
Eric “Ricky” McKinnie
Decked in shiny gold and black jackets with sequin bowties, The Blind Boys walked onto the stage as they usually do with one arm on each other’s shoulder. The five-time Grammy-award winning group is still at it after the original members met back in the 1930s as kids at the Alabama School for the Deaf and Blind in Talladega, AL. Carter, the only founding member still alive, opened the set featuring a mix of modernized Christmas classics and traditional Gospel music. Despite their age and the circumstances, they boldly belted out familiar, upbeat favorites, such as “Walking to Jerusalem,” “People Get Ready,” “Silent Night,” and “Higher Ground.” Virtual fans chatting alongside the streaming video were dancing and singing right along with them.
“Blind Boys, you made us dance! The Stevie song there at the end was such a nice, upbeat surprise! We’ve always loved that song. Thank you and Blessings!” said Caroline in Pennsylvania.
And concertgoer Maia said, “Big ups from Colorado! Been coming to your concerts for 35 years!”
Covid-19 has slowed down the group, who have toured for decades through some turbulent times — the Jim Crow era of the ’30s and ’40s and into the Civil Rights Movement. In the ’80s, they endeared a new generation after starring in the Obie Award-winning musical “The Gospel at Colonus.” And over the years, they’ve worked with popular greats Peter Gabriel, Ben Harper, Robert Randolph, Aaron Neville, Mavis Staples, The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Allen Toussaint, and Willie Nelson. But at its core, the group is moved by the people and the church. And even though the unexpected break from traveling has given them time to bond with family and friends, they miss the live audience. Eric “Ricky” McKinnie, who lost his sight to glaucoma as a 23-year-old young man and has been with the group for 32 years, shares how he and the group enjoy ministering to people.
“Without people to come out, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing,” said Ricky. “My favorite place to sing is the church. There is something spiritual that takes place there. We want our songs to make people think and reflect on God. A lot of people get Christmas mixed up. It’s about the birth of Christ, and the life that He brings, which is abundant life.”
Jimmy Carter, the only Blind Boys of Alabama founding member still alive.
