I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

The Things Nobody Names.
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Two conversations have been living in my head, rent free.

The first one was a phone call. I was talking to someone, going on about how much I loved living abroad, the usual, and at some point his wife jumped into the call. Lovely woman. And when the topic of moving abroad came up she laughed, slightly awkward, and said: “I have a kid so I can’t just move.”

I was silent for a second.

Because I also have a kid.

I did not say that. I let it go. But it stayed with me because it was not a bad answer. It was a completely honest answer. It just revealed something about how differently two people can look at the exact same variable and reach completely opposite conclusions. For her, the kid was the reason to stay. For me, the kid is in the carry-on.

The second conversation was with a father. I asked why they did not try moving somewhere, even temporarily, even just for the adventure of it. He said: it is comfortable here, and the job I do now I would have to study again or start from the bottom somewhere else.

And I understood that too. I genuinely did. Starting from the bottom is real. Comfort is real. The cost of dismantling a life that works is real and significant and not everyone who chooses not to pay it is making the wrong choice.

But I still do it. Every time.

I have been trying to figure out why these two ways of being in the world cannot quite see each other. Why the person who moves looks at the person who stays and sees wasted potential, while the person who stays looks back and sees unnecessary chaos. Why neither of them is wrong exactly and yet the gap between them stays.

I think it comes down to what you find more uncomfortable. The discomfort of staying or the discomfort of going. Both are real. Neither one is getting away without paying something, just in different currencies. The person who stays pays in the question of what might have been. The person who goes pays in the loss of felt competence, in the starting from scratch, in the specific exhaustion of rebuilding yourself in a new context every few years.

What I cannot do is explain to someone who finds comfort in stability that the instability is the point for me. That the starting from the bottom somewhere new is not a cost I am reluctantly paying but something closer to the whole reason.

Parenting Unpacked opens in exactly that moment. The Leave phase. The one where you are sitting on the floor at midnight with cold popcorn, notebook open, circling the question you cannot resolve. Are we actually doing this? Someone says you must be so excited. You smile and say yes. The popcorn goes cold. That moment, between deciding and going, between the person you were and the person you are about to have to become, is where the book starts. Because leaving does not start at the airport. 💛

And I suspect the person who stays cannot explain to me why the predictability does not feel like a ceiling. Why knowing exactly what next week looks like feels like freedom rather than constraint.

I cannot pretend I understand it from the inside any more than she can pretend she understands why my kid is in the carry-on.

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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The Lip Twirl.