She Would Have Appreciated a Warning About the Silence.

Jun 8

Dani Balieiro Amorim moved to Austin as a journalist correspondent. She had a title, a reason, and a purpose she could explain to anyone who asked. Her husband and son came with her.

When the circumstances that had made it possible collapsed, she did not announce it. She returned to the city she had left and resumed a life she had told everyone she was finished with. For months people kept asking how Texas was going. She answered carefully. Her story is in Chapter 1 of Parenting Unpacked.

Photo of Journalist Dani Amorim — This is Dani Balieiro Amorim 😊

I asked her two questions.

What unexpected strengths did you develop as a mother abroad?

"Patience — but not the passive kind. Living abroad with a small child forces you to slow down and explain the world constantly: why people speak differently, why Easter does not have giant chocolate eggs, why home can have more than one address. Benjamin did not just grow up bilingual in language. He grew up bilingual in perspective. And I realised, somewhere between the winters of Toronto and the summers of Austin, that I did too. I learned to sit with discomfort without falling apart, to build community from scratch, to find joy in what felt strange. I became a more intentional mother — because without the safety net of family nearby, every ritual we created was chosen. Nothing was automatic. And that intentionality changed me."

What do you wish someone had told you before moving abroad with children?

"That the hardest part is not the logistics. It is the identity. Nobody warns you that your child will adapt faster than you. That you will watch him make friends in a language you still stumble over, and feel pride and invisibility at the same time, on the same afternoon. Nobody tells you that grief and gratitude fit in the same day. I wish someone had told me: you will not be the same mother on the other side of this, and that is not loss — it is expansion. And I wish someone had been honest about the weight of being the emotional anchor of the family when you yourself are adrift. Motherhood abroad is one of the loneliest and most transformative things I have ever lived. I would not trade it for anything. But I would have appreciated a warning about the silence."

The logistics of a move are hard. The silence that comes after, the one nobody names, the one that arrives when the unpacking is done and the new life is technically working and you are still somewhere between who you were and who you are becoming, that is the thing Parenting Unpacked was written for.

Dani is in Chapter 1. If you know the chapter you already know which part of the silence is hers.

Parenting Unpacked launches June 24th on Amazon.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Dani Amorim

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.

She Would Have Appreciated a Warning About the Silence.

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