Uhhhhh… Turns Out I Like to Be Right.

Jul 12

You know when you know something but because you did it yourself you are not sure if you are just being biased?

I have been feeling that way about the Parenting Unpacked cover since the day it was finished. Something in it felt right to me. The tipping mug, the Best Parent, the coffee already gone, the hand that is not quite catching it. But I made it, or rather I was part of making it, and I chose it against popular opinion, so I could never fully trust my own read on it. Maybe it was just my vira-lata thinking, the Brazilian instinct to assume the good thing is not actually as good as it looks when it is yours.

Then an intercultural psychologist left a comment on my Instagram story.

She said: “Essa capa tá maravilhosa.”

screenshot of the intercultural psychologist calling the cover of the book Parenting Unpacked wonderful

An intercultural psychologist does not say a cover is maravilhosa the way a friend says it to be kind. She says it because something in the visual language landed. She has seen what happens to parents when the context changes faster than they can keep up. She works with it every day. And something about that cover said: this book knows what you know.

I am starting to think I might be right about it. And not in a snob kind of way.

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

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.

Uhhhhh… Turns Out I Like to Be Right.

Janaína Bought the Last Book.