Someone Asked Me Why I Do I Write. Here Is My Answer.

May 27

Honestly. Why do you?

But here is my answer.

I paid close to ten thousand euros for my daughter’s birth because I did not understand how health insurance worked in Portugal.

Not because I was careless or unprepared. Because nobody told me. The book I had did not cover it. The antenatal class did not cover it. The system assumed I already knew how the system worked. I did not. And I found out the expensive way.

That is how this started.

Not with a plan to become an author. Not with a content strategy or a publishing house or a brand. With a bill I was not expecting and a persistent feeling that the information I needed existed somewhere but nobody had thought to put it where I could find it.

After that, people started coming to me with questions. Friends, acquaintances, strangers in expat groups online. What was labour like in a foreign hospital. How did I navigate the paperwork. What did I wish I had known. I answered every single time because I knew how much it mattered. I had been on the other side of that question with nobody to ask.

What I did not realise for a long time was how much I had learned. I had been taking it for granted. The hard way of learning things has a way of making the knowledge feel ordinary once you have it. It does not feel ordinary to the person who does not have it yet.

I wrote Maternity Abroad because I wanted to be the person I did not have.

That sentence is the whole thing. I still do not have that person, by the way. I am still looking for my mentor. Still the one who ends up helping others more than being helped. Still figuring out significant parts of this alone. But I know what it cost me to figure it out alone and I did not want that cost for anyone else.

I had to learn through hustle, through trial and expensive error, through nodding along to words I did not know in hospital rooms in a language that was technically mine but not quite, through health insurance bills and bureaucratic surprises and the specific loneliness of not knowing who to call.

The reader who picks up Maternity Abroad can get through most of what took me years in a few hours. She will still have her own journey. She will still have moments I could not anticipate. But she will not stumble in the same places I did if I can help it.

Knowledge is power. And it should not cost ten thousand euros to access.

That is why I write.

Now you.

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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