She Said I Should Write a Book Two About This. It Was Already in Part 3.

Jun 21

A few months after Maternity Abroad launched, I had a conversation about the book in front of a live audience. She had told me she would read it before we spoke, and that is part of why I said yes to doing it live.

The conversation moved through themes, what the book was really trying to say, the things that mattered most in it.

At one point she said something like: every woman has the right to have someone with her during birth and at checkups.

I nodded. I said that is important.

Promotional photo for the book Maternity Abroad — I absolutely love this picture!

And then she said: you should write a book two with this.

It is in the book. Part 3 covers exactly this — advocating for your birthing plan and the role of partners and support persons during labor and delivery. It comes up twice, once in the chapter itself and again in the summary at the end of it. It is one of the things the book exists to say.

I did not correct her in front of the audience. I just nodded again.

If it happened today I would say something. Not in a sharp way. Just clarify, the way you would for anyone. "Actually that is in Part 3, the section on advocating for your birth plan."

At the time I stayed quiet. I think I was worried it would sound like I was correcting her in front of people, or making the moment about whether she had read the book rather than about the book itself.

But here is what I have learned since. You do not need to be angry to clarify something. Especially when it is something that matters to you, something you want people to actually know. Staying quiet does not protect the moment. It just means the thing you most wanted said goes unsaid, again, in the one place where saying it mattered most.

I wrote a book that says, more than once, that women deserve support during birth and afterward. If someone tells me they wish that idea existed, it does, and I would tell her exactly where to find it.

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.

She Said I Should Write a Book Two About This. It Was Already in Part 3.

There Is a Book I Am Supposed to Be Writing. I Am Writing a Different One.