Rima Sent Me Notes While She Was Still Reading. L-O-V-E-D it!

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

I send advanced copies to people whose opinion I trust and whose work connects to what I write about.

Most of the time I send the book and then I wait. Sometimes I hear back. Sometimes I hear nothing. That is the nature of it and I respect it completely.

Rima Elahi-Syed did something nobody else had done before.

She sent me notes as she was reading.

Not after finishing, not a week later with a considered response, but while she was still in the book. Page 31 first. Then page 81. Real time. I was sitting with my phone watching someone experience Parenting Unpacked from the inside and reporting back while it was still happening.

Phot of Rima Elahi-Syed having a capuccino

Page 31: "Already taking notes. All resonates so well and the destruction that happens to the mother. So evident the need to support mothers through this process so they can show up as leaders in their families to create the resilience and harmony."

Page 81: "Everything you hit on makes sense. I feel the experiences in my bones, in my heart. This is reinforcing how critical a mother's role is in raising a thriving family in the expat adventure. And how she behaves shapes how her children live their expat lives to be embedded in body and mind for following generations."

I loved it.

Not just the words but the experience of receiving them. I felt as if I was reading the book for the first time again, from the outside, through someone who understood exactly what it was trying to do and felt it arriving in real time.

Rima is a Pediatric Physical Therapist, Certified Parent Coach, and Founder of Precious Parenting. She works with families navigating exactly the territory this book is about. I first met her at the Coffee with an Expat meeting that Rhoda Bangerter invited me to. You can read about that here. When she says she feels the experiences in her bones that is a practitioner recognising something she has been seeing in her work for years and finally finding it named.

Rima — thank you for reading with that much presence. And for letting me be there while you did.

She also endorsed the book. That is a conversation for another post.

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.

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