📚 What’s New in My Next Book: A More Honest, Story-Led Take on Parenting Abroad

Parenting abroad book
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

I’m working on the cover for the book. What’s your first impression of this design?

✨ Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

When I finished writing Maternity Abroad, I closed the manuscript with a sense of practical relief. It was a guide, after all — a book that offered answers, frameworks, and real-life tools to support mothers to be on pregnancy and birth in a foreign country.

But when I sat down to begin my next book, something felt different. The same structure didn’t quite fit. The tidy format of “here’s what to expect, and how to prepare” no longer told the whole story — not mine, and certainly not the ones I kept hearing from other parents. What I needed wasn’t a guide. I needed to tell the truth.

So I started writing again. Draft after draft. Some read like memoir. Others leaned toward essays. But none of them clicked — until they did.

That’s when Parenting Unpacked was born.

This is not a relocation manual. It’s a narrative journey through the emotional landscape of parenting across borders. It’s built from lived stories — mine and many others’. It’s shaped by rupture, identity shifts, cultural rewiring, and the beautiful mess of raising children when the ground beneath your feet is still unfamiliar.

If the first book helped you prepare for the becoming a mother, this one helps you stay. It walks alongside the reader through the emotional undercurrent that so many guides leave out.

And while the heart of this book is storytelling — raw, real, and deeply personal — I’ve also expanded the team of voices within it. You’ll hear from intercultural psychologists, doctor of religious studies, nutritionist, and more. They ground the reflections with nuance and care, adding layers of support so that readers not only feel seen but feel equipped.

Because Parenting Unpacked isn’t about giving you a checklist. It’s about giving you a mirror — and maybe a map.

📖 Coming in 2026 (hopefully earlier!)

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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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