Why It Took Five Versions to Write Parenting Unpacked
Francine Marcondes sent me images of the cover illustration in progress this week. The drawing of the Best Parent mug, stage by stage, the hand reaching for it, the coffee already gone. I sat with them for a while. And somewhere in the accumulation of watching the cover come to life I felt the whole reason I wrote this book come back.
So here is that reason.
Maternity Abroad ended where most parenting books begin. The birth is behind you. The immediate crisis of navigating a foreign healthcare system in a language you are still learning is behind you. You are a mother now. You are finding your footing. The book ends there because that felt like the natural place — the moment a woman either goes back to work or finds her next path after birth.
I finished it and immediately wanted to know what came next.
So I wrote a first draft. Six months. I was proud of it. It was a full parenting abroad book, structured and researched and complete. I sent it to Luciana Gomide for a final critique and what came back was not quite criticism and not quite praise.
She said: “Adorei o quanto você e sua família estão muito mais presentes nesse livro. Você tem TANTA experiência enriquecedora para compartilhar, fico feliz de ter mais você no livro.”
She loved how present I and my family were in it. She wanted even more of me in the book.
I pushed back. Every version. The developmental editors and beta readers were all saying the same thing — more of you, more of you — and I kept resisting because I did not want a memoir. I wanted a map not a diary. I wanted something that would be useful to a woman I had never met, in a country I had never lived in, going through something I recognised but could not claim entirely as my own.
The tension between those two things — write from inside the experience, do not make it only about you — produced four more versions after that first critique. Each one with a little more of me in it. Each one getting closer to the thing I was actually trying to say.
What I was feeling, and what none of the standard expat parenting books were talking about, was the loss. Not of the old country. Not of the career exactly. The loss of the felt sense of yourself. The person you were before the move, before the birth, before you became the logistical centre of everyone else’s transition. The identity that migrated without you noticing and arrived somewhere you did not recognise.
Leave. Adapt. Anchor. Thrive. Four stages nobody had mapped from the inside.
Luciana saw it before I did. She knew the book needed more of me in it because the thing the book was trying to say could only be said from the inside. You cannot write about the loss of felt competence from a clinical distance. You cannot write about the inherited scorecard without showing the one you were carrying. The personal detail was not the memoir element I was afraid of. It was the evidence that the experience was real.
Five versions. One book. And a critiquer who kept asking for more of me until I finally trusted that more of me was the point.
If this book had existed when I needed it I would have known that what I was feeling had a name. That the loss of felt competence was real and documented and survivable. That the inherited scorecard I was still measuring myself against belonged to a life I was no longer living. That I was not failing the move. I was inside the hardest stage of it.
That is why I wrote it. And that is why it took five versions to get there.
Francine — thank you for sending those images. You reminded me what this was all for.
Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self will be available soon on Amazon.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
