Germany Has Entered the Chat.

Parenting abroad book
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

My beloved Germany. Always showing up.

Maternity Abroad has Germany as one of its biggest markets. My First American Coloring Book has Germany as its biggest market. I did not target Germany. I did not run a single campaign in Germany. Germany simply decided, repeatedly, that these books were worth buying and kept showing up in the dashboard like a very reliable friend who never needs to be asked twice.

And now Parenting Unpacked.

Germany is the biggest market for Parenting Unpacked.

I have been staring at this number for a while trying to understand it and I think I do, actually. Germany has one of the largest expat communities in Europe. It has a strong culture of psychological literacy — therapy is not a last resort there, it is a first response. And it has education fever, the specific cultural investment in children’s development that explains why a coloring book about cultural literacy landed there before anywhere else.

But also. Germany knows something about identity migration, about what it costs to become someone different in a place that was not built for you, and what it means to carry a history that does not fit neatly into a single national story. I do not want to overstate that. But I do not think it is a coincidence either.

Three books. Three times. Germany, unprompted, every time.

I do not know what I did to deserve this but I am not questioning it. Germany is in and Germany has been in from the beginning and at this point I think we have to accept that this is just who we are to each other.

Danke, Deutschland. Seriously.

Parenting Unpacked is available now on Amazon worldwide in paperback and Kindle. Link in bio.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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