SACRAMENTO, Calif. — After more than a week of silence, California Gov. Gavin Newsom finally revealed the reason he canceled his trip to Scotland for the United Nations climate conference: spending Halloween with his kids.
Newsom and his wife, first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, had planned to attend the conference from Nov. 1-3 in Glasgow, which would have forced them to miss Halloween.
That upset the four Newsom children — ages 5, 8, 10 and 12 — so they staged what Newsom called an “intervention” at dinner.
“Mom and Dad missing Halloween, for them that was worse than missing Christmas,” Newsom told his former economic adviser Lenny Mendonca at a “fireside chat” during the California Forward economic conference in Monterey on Tuesday.
Newsom said he explained to his kids why he and Siebel Newsom needed to go. But the next morning he woke with a knot in his stomach and decided he had to cancel.
Until Newsom told his dinner intervention story Tuesday, his office had refused to provide any details to reporters and residents who had been asking what “family obligations” had forced him to cancel his trip.
While his office deflected requests for details, rumors proliferated online about why Newsom canceled and retreated from the public eye, not holding any public events for more than a week. Some pointed to his absence just after he received a COVID-19 booster as a sign he had a bad reaction. His office didn’t shoot that rumor down until Monday afternoon, when his spokesman released a statement saying the governor had not had a reaction to the vaccine and that wasn’t the reason for the canceled trip.
On Sunday, his wife dropped a hint on Twitter, saying someone who cancels something might be doing something commonplace, like going out to dinner or attending a child’s soccer game. She quickly deleted that tweet, however, and Newsom’s office continued to deflect questions from reporters about why specifically Newsom had canceled.
In his explanation Tuesday, Newsom rattled off the list of crises and obligations he’s dealt with as governor — wildfires, drought, civil unrest, the coronavirus, the recall, bill signings. The last two years have been tough for him, but also for all families, he told Mendonca, who stepped down from his post as Newsom’s top economic adviser in 2020 to focus on his mental health. Mothers, in particular, have shouldered a heavy burden during the pandemic, and fathers need to do a better job balancing the household workload, Newsom said.
“It’s been a hell of a couple years for all of us, for each and every one of you, particularly parents,” he said. “I’ve been on this treadmill. We’ve gone from crisis to crisis.”
Instead of going to Glasgow, where he was expected to tout California’s climate accomplishments, Newsom said he went trick-or-treating and watched his kids’ soccer tournament. He brought his children to work with him at the Capitol, where they took pictures with the so-called Bacteria Bear statue outside his office and stopped by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins’ office for coloring books.
The coloring books were particularly popular, Newsom said. “I was the father of the year for that.”
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