I Promise No More Spoilers. But… yeah.

Technically I thought that. But that is okay. I promise to leave it for the podcast to do the work.

But let us continue for now.

Gaia kindly asked me what sort of Brazilian traditions I am going to pass down to my daughter.

And I just. Sat there. Daaaaamn. That was going to be a complicated answer.

Not in the thoughtful, I am processing this deeply way. In the oh no way. In the I have spent two years writing about identity and this woman just walked straight past all of it and found the one question I genuinely cannot answer straight way.

If anyone is keeping score: Gaia one. Jessica zero.

I left Brazil as a young woman. I have been living abroad long enough that I learned how to be an adult somewhere else. Australia taught me how to navigate a workplace. Ireland taught me how to survive cold rain without losing the will to live. Switzerland taught me that silence in a meeting does not mean everyone hates you, it means it is an ordinary day.

Brazil taught me how to exist. And then I left before I finished the course.

I have written about identity on this blog. I have argued passionately for identity preservation. I have used words like inherited scorecard and identity migration with the confidence of someone who definitely knows what she is talking about.

And then Gaia asked me one question and the clear line between what is Brazilian in me and what is not turned out to be a lot blurrier than I had been letting on.

Inherited scorecard. Sure. What are the actual contents of the card? Unclear. Working on it.

Current Evidence That I Am Brazilian

Rice and beans. I cannot go more than three days without them. My husband has accepted this the way you accept the weather. You cannot change it. You just plan around it.

Jeans with running shoes. I am told this is very Brazilian. I am also told it is not universally considered a look. I continue to do it anyway because I am a woman of culture.

I am loud at restaurants. Not in a rude way. In a we are alive and celebrating the fact way. Switzerland has been patient with me. Mostly.

I say oi instead of hello even when I am speaking English. Sometimes I say oi even when I am speaking French. My daughter now says oi to everyone including the checkout person at the supermarket. I am choosing to count this as an unqualified win.

Current Evidence That I Have No Idea What I Am Doing

Every tradition I carry has been evolving in Brazil without me for over fifteen years. Changing, mutating, shedding old habits and picking up new ones while I was busy learning recycling schedules in three different countries.

Carnival looks different now and the music has shifted. The slang I grew up with has been replaced by slang I have to Google, ask my younger cousin about, and then Google again because her explanation contained two more words I did not know.

I watch my home country from the outside through Instagram stories and family WhatsApp groups. When I visit, I land and feel faintly like a tourist in the place that formed my bones. I know it, I love it, and I am no longer entirely sure I know it the way I did when I boarded that first one-way flight.

So when Gaia asked what traditions I will pass down, my mind stalled: which version of Brazil am I even passing down?

The one I left in my twenties? The one I imagine still exists? The one I reconstruct every Sunday from memory and a pot of black beans simmering in a Swiss kitchen?

Where is the line between living culture and personal nostalgia for a place that quietly moved on without you?

What I Am Going to Do Anyway

I have no plan that would survive contact with a nine year old but here is what she gets.

The music. I will make her learn the lyrics to at least three songs by artists I grew up listening to. She will roll her eyes. I will persist. This is non-negotiable and also extremely Brazilian of me.

The food. Cultural transmission through carbohydrates is still transmission and I will defend that stance in any room. Rice and beans are not optional. They are infrastructure.

The visits. I will take her to Brazil as often as possible so she can smell the air, hear the noise, and form her own version of it rather than inheriting my blurry homesick reconstruction.

The stories. I will tell her what it was like to grow up in a place that is loud, warm, contradictory, and deeply alive. And I will tell her the truth about leaving, what it feels like to miss something you can no longer fully describe because the place and the memory have drifted apart.

It is incomplete and patchy and real and it is what I have got.

The more serious version of this conversation lives in the identity preservation post if you want to feel less like you are reading my diary. And Parenting Unpacked is where the question of what you keep, what you lose, and what you pass on when you parent far from the culture that formed you lives in full. The first forty pages are free. 💛

Jessica Gabrielzyk