You Can’t Keep Half Trying. I Wrote That. And Then I Did It Anyway.

Parenting abroad book
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

In Chapter 3 of Parenting Unpacked I interviewed Maria Heneghan, a mother of two living in Australia. She watched her partner struggle with the move and told him: you cannot keep half trying.

I remember hearing her say that over a voice message and thinking oh, absolutely.

I understood it because when I moved to Australia after high school I gave everything I had to making it work. Going back was always an option technically but I did not let myself treat it as one, because in my mind it was not available. That was how I made it work. You close the door and you go all in.

And then I left Australia. And I moved to Ireland, which I absolutely love. And then Portugal, where I have never felt more welcomed in any country. And then Switzerland, where I have been for three years.

And somewhere in that sequence I had been collecting Plan Bs, which is making me feel less integrated here than I ever felt in Australia by the 3 year mark.

Australia is always there, Ireland is always there, Portugal is always there, each one a door I left open to a version of a life I could still be living.

My husband said something the other day. He had read or heard somewhere that the more choices you have the less you try. And I went quiet for a second because I recognised it immediately, because I had written almost exactly that sentence in Chapter 3.

That is me and that has been me, half living Switzerland this whole time.

I thought this would never come back to bite me. And here we are.

But I want to be clear about something. Every migration is different and it is almost impossible to compare them fairly. Moving with children versus without, young versus older, chosen versus forced, enough money versus not enough. Each migration is its own fingerprint. So I can’t compare each migration word by word because they all are very different. But right now, I am looking at this pattern and deciding to do something different. I am working on full living here.

That is why this book exists the way it does, not as something you read once and put on the shelf but as something you come back to when a question lands that you were not expecting. Because this is not a straight line and you can understand something completely in March and find yourself living the opposite of it by August. The book will still be there and the question will still be there. And sometimes that is enough.

Parenting Unpacked is here when you need it.

I just needed a decade and four countries to find out she was also talking about me.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Parenting Unpacked is here when you need it.

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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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