Being a mother abroad

Being a mother abroad is like solving a Rubik’s Cube made entirely of shades of grey.

It’s a challenge squared. Need for Speed on Hard mode.

Your former classmates have already had children. They meet for cozy playdates at a café across from the school, the very school you once walked into yourself, dressed up, with a bow in your hair and a backpack far too big for your shoulders. But you can’t just “drop by”.

Instead, you build your circle from scratch. You look for playmates for your children hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometers away from the place where you were born.

You attend mom meetups, practicing small talk in a language that still doesn’t feel fully yours, even if you’re fluent. Living abroad means assembling your own community the way you assemble furniture without instructions.

Your parents live a thousand kilometers away, so there’s no spontaneous “leave the kids with grandma and run off to the cinema”. Spontaneity becomes a rare luxury. Everything is scheduled.

Planning. Time management. Logistics. Resource allocation. Sounds like a project manager’s résumé, but it’s just Tuesday.

Some days life turns into the Wolf, Goat and Cabbage puzzle — the one where one wrong move and someone gets eaten.

Who goes first? Where? And how do you make sure no one ends up crying, including you?

For example, you need to take the older kid to the activity club, but you have to take the little one with you, so the baby’s nap has to be planned accordingly. Also, there are stairs in the building, but the baby sleeps best in the stroller. But you can’t take the stroller, because there are stairs in the building. So you have to take her in a sling and be really fast, so that she’s not overstimulated before her nap. But at the same time, you can’t push the older one to be faster, because that is exactly what makes him slower. And this is just one of a million random daily logic puzzles.

And getting sick? For a mother abroad, that’s a luxury. An unaffordable one.

Your mother won’t come. She won’t make chicken soup. She won’t say, “Lie down. I’ve got this.” She won’t take the kids to the playground so you can sleep.

A fever? Great. Breastfeed. Change diapers. Get the older one ready for kindergarten. Smile at the teacher in a foreign language.

Your body asks for a pause, but there is no pause button.

And then there’s the endless internal forum running in my head.

Will their minds become a mix of languages?How do I preserve my own language when another one surrounds us? Who will they write to in December — Baby Jesus, Ded Moroz or Santa Claus?

Sometimes I look at my children and realize: the country they were born into is entirely my choice.

They are already growing up with Czech songs, Czech traditions and Czech ideas of “how things are done”. All of this is already becoming their “default settings”, their cultural code.

And that happened because of decisions I once made.

Do I fully grasp the weight of that responsibility?

Recently, my Czech husband showed our four-year-old his old kindergarten, his music school and the playground where he learned to play football. And I realized: I don’t know that feeling. I don’t know what it’s like to casually walk with your children through places where you once ran yourself, scraped knees and all.

Lately, people have finally started speaking honestly about the cost of motherhood. About the fact that it’s a 24/7 job. About burnout. About how “she just stays home” might be the most underestimated phrase in the world. But what’s rarely said is that for mothers abroad, all of this is multiplied by two.

Add bureaucracy. Adaptation. A foreign language. A different mentality. That constant feeling of being just slightly out of place. Worries about professional identity, because the career you built before in your own country now exists in a completely different context. Millions of mothers abroad face all of this every day.

That’s the challenge squared.

Usually, mothers abroad are expected to simply manage. To manage holding two fronts at once: motherhood and adaptation. To learn, translate, explain and integrate — all while raising new humans.

Mothers abroad build a home in a place where they themselves don’t always feel the ground beneath their feet.

Once, we chose this level of difficulty because we wanted safety. Opportunity. A future for our children, one we couldn’t guarantee back home.

Which means that maybe, in this grey Rubik’s Cube, there is not only uncertainty. There is depth.

Sometimes grey isn’t the absence of color.

It’s all colors mixed together. ------

Written by Nataliia Přibylová, An Expat Mother of Two ------ And this is exactly why, at Brusinka, we try to create a place where families do not have to carry everything alone. We offer childcare, speech therapy, tutoring, creative and wellbeing meetings, coaching and a safe, supportive environment where parents can breathe, ask for help, solve practical things and slowly build their own circle of support. A place where you can come with your child, learn something, create something, talk to someone or simply feel, for a moment, that you are among people who understand how complicated life abroad can be.