I Woke Up at 2am. Two Days in a Row.

May 1

I am someone who talks about the good, the bad and the ugly. It is the deal I made with myself when I started writing publicly. So here is the ugly part. Things went fine. And I still ended up at 2am.

Two nights in a row I woke up at 2am. My brain just started going through everything I had done and everything I had not done, trying to find the thing I missed, the decision I got wrong, the thing that was still coming that I was not ready for. At 2am those thoughts do not feel like thoughts. They feel like facts.

I lay there and went through every decision I had made in the past few weeks. The font I changed before launch. The retailers I contacted. The posts I published and the ones I sat on too long. The messages I sent and the ones I probably should have. All of it, on a loop, for hours, going nowhere.

The anxiety does not care about the evidence. It does not look at the WhatsApp groups or the Reddit ranking or the voice message from Julia or the word "wonderful" from Papa Balla. It just asks: but what if it is not enough.

Here is the thing I have to keep reminding myself: I know how to talk about failure. I have said a hundred times that we learn more from failure than from success. I believe it. I have lived it. But knowing that does not make the 2am version of it any quieter.

And this is not even failure. That is the part that is hardest to explain. The launch happened. People shared it. People wrote to me in WhatsApp groups and Instagram stories and said things that made me put my phone down for a second. Rhoda Bangerter called the book brilliant. The Reddit post became number one on its community. All of that is real and I am grateful for every bit of it.

And I still woke up at 2am wondering what I should have done differently.

I think this is what nobody tells you about putting something into the world. The good response and the anxiety are not in competition. They are just both there. Gratitude in the morning. Panic at 2am. Same week. Same person. Both true.

Even the most positive person has nights like this. I am writing it down because I think you probably do too. And because 2am is less frightening when you know someone else was also awake in it.

I do not have a lesson for this one. I am not going to wrap it up. Some nights are just bad and then morning comes and the questions get smaller and you get up and keep going anyway.

Morning always does. But it takes until morning.

If you are also awake at 2am waiting to find out if something you made is going to be okay, I get it. It is a terrible feeling and also a completely normal one and morning does come. It just takes until morning.

This is the part Parenting Unpacked is about. Not the crisis. The part that comes after, when everything is fine and you still cannot sleep.

Back at it. Slightly tired.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ THE GOOD · THE BAD · THE 2AM · ALL OF IT ✦

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.

I Woke Up at 2am. Two Days in a Row.

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