A One Woman Business.

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

When I launched Maternity Abroad I had sinusitis for three months. Three months. The entire launch window. I was trying to promote a book about becoming a mother in a foreign land while breathing through my mouth and surviving on medication. It worked out. But not because it was easy.

When I launched My First American Coloring Book last week, my daughter ended up in the hospital. Launch day. The day I had been working toward for months. Hospital.

I am starting to think the universe has a sense of humour and I am the punchline.

👥 MY MARKETING TEAM, IN FULL

  • Strategy: Me

  • Content: Me

  • Social media: Me

  • SEO: Me

  • Press outreach: Me

  • Emotional support: My husband, who is wonderful and also not objective

  • Avengers: Unavailable

I used to work in marketing. Real marketing. With colleagues and briefs and someone else whose job it was to worry about the thing I was not worrying about. I could pee left and right and there was always someone to help out. I had a team. I had backup. I had the particular luxury of not being the only person responsible for everything at the same time.

Now I am an author. Also the marketing department. Also the person who has to figure out IngramSpark at midnight and check if the font looks right on the cover and schedule posts while my daughter has a fever and manage the anxiety of not knowing if any of it is working while pretending to everyone including myself that I am fine.

Sometimes I miss the team. Not the job. The team. The particular comfort of not being alone with a decision. Of having someone to send a message to that says "does this look right to you" and actually trust the answer because they have no personal stake in making me feel good about it.

The anxiety is not about the books. The books are good. The anxiety is about doing everything alone and not being able to tell, in real time, whether alone is working.

Both launches worked out. Sinusitis and all. Hospital and all. The book found its people. People shared it. Someone's son loves it and left five stars on Goodreads. Rhoda called it brilliant. Papa Balla said wonderful. A psychologist doing her PhD on expatriate motherhood found it and emailed me about the overlap with her research.

So the answer, apparently, is that alone is working. It is just working in a way that does not feel like working until you look back at it from a slight distance.

Completely worth it. But hard. And I think it is important to say that out loud because everyone who is doing this alone deserves to hear that the hard part is real and they are not imagining it.

If you are also out here being your own Avengers, you already know. And you are doing better than you think.

The books that came out despite all of this: Maternity Abroad and My First American Coloring Book. And Parenting Unpacked is coming June 24th. Let's see what the universe has planned for that one. If I could make a wish: a little less anxiety would be wonderful.

One woman business. Still standing.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ ONE WOMAN · NO AVENGERS · BOTH LAUNCHES WORKED OUT · STILL GOING ✦

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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