The Lens Is Migration. The Book Is For Everyone.
When people hear that Parenting Unpacked is about parenting abroad they sometimes assume it is not for them.
They are not expats. They did not move countries. They are raising their children in the same city they grew up in, speaking the same language, surrounded by people who knew them before they became parents.
I want to talk about that assumption. Because I think it is wrong.
The lens I use is migration. But migration is not only geographical.
Consider the person who grew up in a small city in Brazil and moved to São Paulo. The language did not change. The passport did not change. But the room they walk into every day no longer matches the version of themselves they built before they left. The references are different. The pace is different. The unwritten rules about how to dress, how to speak, how much space to take up, what kind of ambition is acceptable, all of it is different. They are still capable but the felt sense of that capability is gone, and the context that used to confirm who they were is no longer there to do it.
That is identity migration. No plane ticket required.
Or consider the person whose beliefs shifted. Who left a religion they were raised in, or arrived at a different understanding of the world than the one they inherited. Who stopped being the version of themselves their family expected and had to build something new without a map for it. The scorecard they were handed no longer applies. The felt sense of knowing who they are and where they belong has disappeared. And they have to do that without anyone around them understanding why the map they were handed stopped working.
The structure is identical. Only the trigger is different.
The book I wrote brought together specialists and real stories from people living everywhere. Different countries, different languages, different circumstances. And what kept appearing across all of those stories was the same shape. The loss of the invisible layer of knowing. The inherited scorecard surfacing at exactly the wrong moment. The slow, non-linear work of becoming someone coherent again in a life that changed faster than the self could keep up with.
That shape belongs to many kinds of lives, not only the ones that involved a passport.
I use migration as the lens because it is my experience and because relocation makes these shifts impossible to ignore. When you move countries the disruption shows up in the language, the paperwork, the pharmacy, the school meeting, every single day. But the disruption itself, the identity migration underneath the geographical move, is not unique to people who move abroad.
It belongs to anyone whose life has moved in a way that left them standing somewhere unfamiliar, wondering who they are now.
Not everyone experiences everything the same way. The lens is migration. But if your life has ever moved and taken your sense of self with it, this book was written for you too.
Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self arrives on Amazon on June 24th.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
