The Book That Was Not There When I Needed It

Maternity Abroad Book
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Every pregnancy book I read before my daughter was born told me what to pack in my hospital bag.

None of them told me that not understanding how health insurance works in a foreign country would cost me close to ten thousand euros.

I gave birth in Portugal. I am Brazilian. We technically speak the same language. I had done the reading. I had done the preparing. I had the hospital bag. I had the birth plan. I had everything the books told me to have.

Book Maternity Abroad by Jessica Gabrielzyk

Copy of the book Maternity Abroad

What I did not have was anyone who explained that the way health insurance works in Portugal is not the way I assumed it worked. Nobody in the room. Nobody in the books. Nobody in the antenatal classes. I found out the hard way, the way you find out most things when you are parenting in a country that was not built with you in mind.

And here is the thing about the language. Portugal and Brazil technically speak Portuguese. But three years after my daughter was born I was talking to a Portuguese father who grew up in Switzerland, a man with many Brazilian friends who knows both cultures well, and he mentioned a word I had never heard in my entire pregnancy. Penso. Throughout my entire hospital stay I had been nodding along to that word without knowing what it meant, assuming it was just something I had missed, something obvious to everyone else in the room. It was not obvious. It was just Portuguese. And nobody had thought to check whether I knew it.

That is what it feels like to be technically in your language and practically somewhere else entirely.

The pregnancy books did not prepare me for the insurance, the word, the food delivery app that became my village when everyone else’s mothers arrived with homemade soup and mine was on the wrong continent, or the robot vacuum cleaner that I am not embarrassed to say did more for my postpartum recovery than most of the advice I received.

The books that existed were written for a woman who already knows the system, who has family nearby, who understands the forms, who speaks the right version of the language, who has a village. They are useful for the reader they were written for. That reader is just not you if you are pregnant in a country that was not built with you in mind. And you deserve a book that was.

Maternity Abroad: Becoming a Mother in a Foreign Land was written for you.

Maternity Abroad is available on Amazon.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

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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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