Life Abroad Is a Tomato.

In Brazil we have a saying. A vida não é um morango. Life is not a strawberry. It means life is not always easy or sweet or simple and that it comes with its challenges.

I am hands down ready to say life abroad is a tomato. 😂 Bear with me.

Brian O'Driscoll once said something about his rugby captain Martin Johnson that has stayed with me longer than it has any right to: knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

I have not stopped thinking about it in the context of moving countries since. Because the tomato problem is everywhere in the expat experience. You have the knowledge. The rule feels completely correct. And then the room you are standing in is a completely different kitchen and the fruit salad is already on the table and you are holding a tomato and wondering why everyone is looking at you.

The inherited scorecard is a tomato problem.

The scorecard tells you the rules, how things work, what counts as success, what counts as respect, what counts as care, what counts as a good parent and a good professional and a good person. It was built from everything you absorbed before you were old enough to ask whether you wanted it. And it feels like knowledge. It feels like facts.

The wisdom part, the part the scorecard does not come with, is knowing when those rules apply to the room you are actually standing in and when they do not.

My Most Expensive Tomato Moment

I have written about this before but the birthday rule is the clearest example I have. In Brazil you do not wish someone happy birthday before the actual day. Bad luck. Something terrible will happen. The superstition is very confident about the consequence and completely vague about the details, which is honestly the most Brazilian thing about it.

So I grew up never wishing anyone happy birthday in advance. Not the day before. Not the morning of if it felt too early. On the day. Exactly on the day.

The problem is that I have the memory of a goldfish that has been through a lot.

I forget birthdays. I forget them spectacularly, in the way that makes people check if I am okay, then check if they did something wrong, then go through all five stages of grief before landing on anger. I have forgotten birthdays of people I love deeply. I have forgotten a family member's birthday in a way whose fallout lasted longer than some international conflicts. I have forgotten a childhood friend's birthday and lost years of friendship in the process.

The rule I absorbed was designed to show care. In every kitchen outside Brazil it reads as indifference. The knowledge felt airtight. The wisdom, that the rule was built for a specific place and would not travel, arrived much later and at some cost.

That is the tomato problem. The scorecard does not tell you which kitchen it was designed for.

The Heavier Tomato Moments

The same pattern shows up in places that carry more weight.

The belief that a woman's clothing determines what happens to her is a tomato that a specific cultural kitchen made look like a fact, one the research does not support but the inheritance does. I wrote about that here.

The discovery that being a minority is not something you are but something that happens in a room is a tomato that only becomes visible when the kitchen changes. I understood it intellectually before I felt it. The felt version arrived on a train platform in Australia. I wrote about that here.

These are not equivalent to forgetting a birthday. But the mechanism is the same. Something that felt like a fact was a rule. The kitchen changed and the rule became visible.

What Moving Countries Actually Teaches You

Not that your rules are wrong or that the new place is right. It teaches you to see the rules as rules rather than as facts and to ask where those rules came from before applying them somewhere they were never designed to go.

That is identity migration in its most practical form. The moment the inherited certainty becomes visible as a choice rather than a fact and you realise you have been holding a tomato and the salad in front of you does not need one.

The scorecard does not go away but you start to be able to see it. And seeing it is the first step to deciding which parts of it still apply to the life you are actually living.

A vida não é um morango. Life is not a strawberry.

But life abroad? Life abroad is a tomato.

The inherited scorecard is one of the central concepts behind everything on this site. The full definition is there. And if you want to go deeper into what it costs to carry the wrong scorecard into the wrong place, Parenting Unpacked is where that conversation lives. The first forty pages are free. 💛

Jessica Gabrielzyk