This Is Not a Normal Friday

Parenting abroad book
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

There are mornings you wake up, check your phone out of habit, see nothing interesting and get on with your day. This was not one of those mornings.

This morning I woke up to a voice message from Julia Kerscht Squassoni. In Portuguese. Warm and excited and completely unprompted. And before I had even finished processing that, I saw that Papa Balla Ndong had left a comment on the post about Parenting Unpacked.

Two things. Before coffee. I was not ready.

🎙️ THE VOICE MESSAGE

Julia Kerscht Squassoni

"… está curtindo ainda esse comentário da Ruth Van Reken? Foi maravilhoso. Curti muito com você e o texto que você colocou lá na página… você escreve maravilhosamente bem caso nunca ninguém tenha te falado isso um beijo."

For the non-Portuguese speakers: Julia was saying she loved the Ruth Van Reken post, that she enjoyed it enormously, and that I write beautifully, just in case nobody had ever told me that.

Let me explain why that message hit the way it did.

Ruth E. Van Reken is the co-author of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds — known in the intercultural world simply as the TCK Bible, now in its fourth edition. She has worked with globally mobile families, researchers and educators for over thirty-five years and co-founded Families in Global Transition. She is one of the most significant voices in the field of cross-cultural family experience. She endorsed Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self before it was even published.

And Julia Kerscht Squassoni is not just any reader reacting to that news. She is an intercultural facilitator working between Brazil and Germany, a TCK herself, and the current President of SIETAR Brasil — the Brazilian chapter of the same international organisation that Papa Balla Ndong leads at the European level. She lives and works in this field. She knows exactly what Ruth Van Reken's name means in it.

And she picked up her phone and said so anyway. Before I had brushed my teeth. That is a specific kind of generosity and I am keeping it.

Which means Julia, President of SIETAR Brasil, intercultural professional, someone who moves in this same world, was reacting to that endorsement. She knew what it meant. And she said so out loud.

Screenshot of the comment made by Papa Balla about the Ruth Van Reken about the book Parenting Unpacked

💬 THE COMMENT

"Parabéns! Wonderful. Congratulations, Jessica Gabrielzyk." - Papa Balla Ndong / Human Migration Expert · European Commission AI Policy · Executive President, SiETAR Europa · Co-founder, AICOSMO

Papa Balla Ndong is a Human Migration Expert and the Executive President of SIETAR Europa. He works at the European Commission on AI policy. He co-founded AICOSMO. He chairs the SIETAR Special Interest Group on AI and Intercultural Work and sits on the World Council on Intercultural and Global Competence.

He is not someone on the periphery of this field. He built parts of it. If you want to understand why that matters, picture someone who has spent decades deciding what belongs in the conversation about migration, identity, and intercultural competence at the highest levels — and then picture them reading your book and leaving a comment.

Parabéns. Wonderful. Congratulations.

In two languages. By name. He congratulated me by name.

I have been staring at that comment for longer than I will admit. One word from that particular person carries a weight that a paragraph from someone else simply would not. He knows this field. He knows what belongs in it. And he said wonderful. And congratulations. In Portuguese and English. To me. By name.

A voice message in Portuguese and a comment from people who knows exactly what Ruth Van Reken means in this world. Some mornings arrive with more in them than you were expecting.

Julia, thank you. For listening, for feeling it, and for sending a voice message instead of just thinking it. That gap between thinking something kind and actually saying it is where most generosity gets lost. Yours didn't.

Papa Balla: one word was enough. More than enough. Wonderful is going on the cover and in my heart and I am not being dramatic about this at all.

Parenting Unpacked. June 24th on Amazon. That is what all the noise was about.

Still processing, gratefully,

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ PARENTING UNPACKED · AVAILABLE JUNE 24TH ON AMAZON ✦

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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