I Submitted the Book for the Print Test. Then I Ate an Entire Bag of Chocolate Covered Pretzels.

May 30

I submitted Parenting Unpacked for the print test.

Which means in the next couple of weeks I will see what the physical book looks like for the first time. The actual object. Pages, cover, coffee ring marks and all. The thing that has existed in five versions and one very sweaty final review in a Swiss heatwave is about to become something you can hold.

I was trying to stay calm about this.

And then Dr. Débora Pasin posted this on her Instagram story.

“And while we wait for @jessicagabrielzyk’s new book, we celebrate this beautiful sunny Saturday in family.”

Screenshot from Dr. Débora Pasin's IG Story about Parenting Unpacked Book — Screenshot from Dr. Débora Pasin's IG story.

I want to be honest with you about my reaction.

I was on a diet. Let me start again. I was on a diet. And then I saw that story and I ate an entire bag of chocolate covered pretzels. Every single one of them.

Dr. Débora Pasin — linguist, PhD researcher, 28 years of experience helping professionals navigate foreign systems and foreign languages — is waiting for the book. She said so publicly. On a Saturday. While celebrating with her family.

I did not ask her to do that. She just did it.

The book is not out yet. June 24th on Amazon. And people are already waiting for it in a way that apparently requires emergency chocolate covered pretzels on my end.

I am fine. The diet resumes tomorrow. or maybe next Monday.

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.

I Submitted the Book for the Print Test. Then I Ate an Entire Bag of Chocolate Covered Pretzels.

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