She Built a Support Network in Italy. The Deep Friendships Are Still Hard.
Fernanda Marfil is one of the specialists in Maternity Abroad, based in Italy. When I started writing Parenting Unpacked the book I wanted to include voices from parents all over the world, real answers to real questions about what parenting abroad actually looks like. That format did not make the final cut, five versions later. But the questions stayed with me. So I kept asking them.
I asked Fernanda three.
What unexpected strengths have you developed as a parent abroad?
"Living in Italy as part of a multicultural couple brought challenges, but it also strengthened our relationship in ways I never expected. Navigating different cultures as parents forced us to be patient, flexible, and open to new perspectives. We had to learn how to respect each other's differences while still finding common ground to raise our children. It wasn't always easy, but it brought us closer as a couple and as parents."
Two people bringing two different inherited scorecards into the same house. Neither of them wrong. Both of them running in the background of every parenting decision they make. The negotiation Fernanda is describing is not a problem to solve. It is a daily practice. She is saying it made them better. I believe her. I also think it made them more deliberate than most parents who grew up in the same place and never had to question what they took for granted.
What worked and what did not?
"I built a strong support network for practical help, but deep friendships are still hard to form. In Brazil, friendships and support networks went hand in hand. In Italy, I've had to learn that those don't always overlap."
You can be surrounded by helpful people but the depth is missing. In Brazil the person who picks up your child when you are sick is also the person who knows your whole story. In Italy those are two different people, and sometimes the second one does not exist yet.
The family capsule closes tighter when the friendships that used to hold it open are not there. If this is where you are, Parenting Unpacked has a chapter for that.
What do you wish someone had told you?
"Learning the language is essential, but real communication goes beyond words. It's about cultural nuances, body language, and emotions. That takes time."
It takes longer than anyone tells you it will. And in the gap between when you expected to feel fluent and when you actually do, the loss of felt competence has already started. Not only in the language. In every system of communication you grew up inside, verbal and non-verbal, the way all of it stops working at the same time in a place that has different rules for all of it.
She became a doula partly because of what she experienced on the other side of that room. She works with mothers navigating birth in a foreign country, knowing what it costs to advocate for yourself in a language that is not yours, in a body that is not behaving the way you expected, in a room full of people who assume a fluency you do not yet have.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
