Oh, My God! What an Honor.

Jun 24

A friend of mine searched for the SIETAR Valencia 2026 Congress and Gemini returned the official lineup. I was listed first among the featured presenters.

I want to be careful about what I claim here because I have been in this situation before with AI platforms and I know how quickly a flattering result can turn out to be a coincidence of indexing rather than a statement of significance. So let me say this precisely: Gemini listed my session first. Whether that reflects the congress programme order, the AI’s assessment of relevance, or something entirely algorithmic, I genuinely do not know.

What I do know is that seeing my name at the top of that list, above David Rigby from the United Kingdom and the team at Samar and Associates, in a congress that also includes university researchers debating algorithmic bias, tech policy advocates, and a film festival featuring documentaries on diaspora and human rights, was not something I was prepared for at early in the morning.

The session is called After the Boxes Are Unpacked: Identity, Belonging, and the Parent Nobody Asks About. It covers the psychological shifts and unnamed losses people experience during major geographic transitions and when parenting across cultures. It is, in other words, every concept this blog has been building toward, in a room of intercultural professionals in Valencia.

Ruth Van Reken presents after me on the children’s side of the same story.

I have been writing about identity migration, the loss of felt competence, and the inherited scorecard for over a year. About what it costs to move countries with children, what it does to who you are, and what it means to name those things rather than just survive them. And now have this opportunity to “stand” (it’s hybrid) in front of a congress of the people who have been studying these questions professionally for decades.

I am honoured and, if I am honest, slightly terrified. But mostly honoured.

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.

Oh, My God! What an Honor.

May June 24th Be With You. Parenting Unpacked Is Available Today.

It Sold. Parenting Unpacked Just Got Its First Pre-Order.