How my child saved me from ego-driven mania
Janine di Giovanni
After years of reporting from the front line in war zones this war
correspondent could not imagine doing any other job. Then along came
her first baby - and everything changed

RECENTLY a female reporter with a job similar to mine wrote an article
about how having a child made her a better war correspondent. Despite
the fact that she spent long periods away from him, she was proud that
her son could point out Afghanistan on a globe and was baffled as to
why he didn't want to talk to her when she telephoned him from
Pakistan.
A male friend phoned me, pointing it out and urging me to read it. The
article had annoyed him. He wanted my opinion. "Because her attitude
is the complete opposite of yours," he said.

I read it and it made me smile, because it could have been me writing
before I had my first child. Her ambition, her desire to be at the
centre of the story, was admirable. But she lost me when she boasted
how she had left her premature baby in the hospital a few days after he
was born and, still raw from childbirth, had got a world exclusive
interview.

My son, Luca, was also premature. I remember the days and nights
sitting by his blue light box, holding his little finger through a
small hole. He wore a blindfold over his eyes but was otherwise naked.
The whole experience left me tearful and traumatised and, more to the
point, frantic that it would traumatise him. Had Saddam Hussein himself
appeared at my hospital bed offering a world exclusive, I would have
turned it down. There was nothing in the world that mattered more to me
than that tiny baby.

Perhaps because I came to motherhood late and by fluke - I was one of
those people who never thought it would happen - my son is the most
precious thing in the world to me. I decided that since I had been
blessed enough to have him, I owed it to him and to myself to be the
best mother I could. Many of my friends struggled over the years to
have children and could not. I was acutely aware of how lucky I was. It
was not his role on earth to make me a better reporter. It was my role
on earth to be a better mother.

But of course, a commitment such as that involves choice. I now know
that the feminists I was brought up admiring: Kate Millett, Gloria
Steinem, Germaine Greer - none of whom had children - lied to us.
You cannot have it all. We cannot compete against men. It's a big,
fat myth: women do change emotionally after childbirth, and trying to
do it all never, ever works.

Something will suffer if you try to do everything: your children, your
marriage or your career. Most women have to work for economic reasons,
and I am one of them, but something had to shift slightly. I could not
keep up the pace I had when I was single and spending nine months a
year on the road.

Which meant that I had to put things in perspective. As one friend said
to me right after my son was born: "If you think about it, a lot of
conflict reporting is ego, isn't it? That you are tough enough to go
somewhere no one else can go and endure it. When you become a mother,
you have to let that go."

I agree with her, but I think it is more complicated. I believed that
the stories I reported made a difference. It was never scoops that
interested me, or world exclusives, it was giving people who did not
have a voice a chance to speak. The founder of Amnesty International
used to say that "it is better to light one candle than to curse the
darkness".

I believed that journalism, in its purest form, was a light, and for 15
years that is what I did. But this kind of life - travelling for
weeks on end with rebel armies, living inside cities on the verge of
falling, withstanding months of artillery bombardment - do not mix
with motherhood. Before I had Luca, I am embarrassed to say that I
really believed my life would carry on as normal when he arrived. When
people asked what I would do about my work, I either mumbled that I had
no idea (I really didn't) or that I would take him everywhere with
me, in a basket.

"You sound like an idiot when you say that," my friend Allegra
pointed out. "You'd better come up with a new line." But I was so
naive that I genuinely thought I could take him with me to Iraq or
Israel and leave him with a nanny.

Part of this stupidity was ignorance and the fact that I have no role
models. There are only two women I admire who did a similar job and
became mothers, Corinne Dufka, the former Reuters photographer, and
Maggie O'Kane, of The Guardian. Both cleverly devised new roles for
themselves after having children.

Dufka, possibly the bravest human being I ever met - a woman who hid
behind a bush and photographed men being executed in the Congo -
became a human rights activist in Sierra Leone, where she lived with
her small daughter. It was she who took me aside a few years ago. She
pointed out that time was moving on and that I should "remember to
have a baby". Maggie continued to travel after having her first
child, but after the second began producing award-winning documentaries
so she could stay closer to home.

There aren't many other historic role models who managed to do both
jobs gracefully. Martha Gellhorn adopted an Italian child, Sandy, in
her forties and took him to live first in Italy, then Mexico. But she
left him with her mother as she travelled, and the little boy was often
lonely. As he grew older, her expectations for him were monstrous. She
tormented him because he did not live up to her physical (she was
obsessed with being slim) or intellectual demands. Eventually the two
became estranged. She even had a provision in her will that he would
not inherit if he was overweight at the time of her death.

Eve Arnold, one of the founders of Magnum Photos, has a son whom she
adores, but she once told me how heartbreaking it was to leave him when
she went off on photographic assignments for months on end. She said
that she remembers crying in her hotel rooms in China or the Middle
East, and the loneliness of airport departure. Dessa Trevisan, who was
The Times's Balkan correspondent for decades, did not have children
and constantly chided me - lovingly - to stop being so obsessed
with work that I might forget about having a child.

"You are not a man and you will never be a man," she said. "There
are some things you simply cannot do."
In Bearing Witness, a documentary which will be released this spring,
Barbara Kopple, the American film-maker, followed five women - myself
included - for two years reporting the war in Iraq. It is a painful
portrait of the difficulty of working in conflict zones and trying to
have a private life. At the end, one correspondent, who had been
divorced twice and gravely injured while reporting, jokes that she will
never marry again and that she is undergoing trauma therapy. Another
says that she had a chance to marry in her twenties but chose work
instead. A third confesses that she doesn't know what a private life
is. My husband, watching the film, remarked: "You're the only one
who is happy."

I do not write that smugly. I thank my lucky stars that my life turned
around. There was one year when I was away for so long, I did not open
mail. I spoke to friends late at night on the satellite phone for three
minutes. I was in serious danger of having no life at all. My child
redeemed me from being an egodriven maniac who would stop at nothing to
get a story, including putting my own life at serious risk.

The worst thing was that I was becoming immune to fear. When Serb
paramilitaries marched me into the woods with a rifle in my back and
held me captive for hours, the first thing I did when I was released
was to file a story. When Grozny was falling, I did not think of
fleeing, like a normal human being. I just thought about how I could
charge the batteries of my satellite phone.

The worse moment was when I found myself bribing an aid worker in
Conakry, Guinea, to get on an empty helicopter on its way to Sierra
Leone to evacuate people from the rebels who were butchering civilians.
Everyone else was running away in the opposite direction, and there I
was, running into the fire. What kind of sick human being was I?

Then reporter friends started dying. An old boyfriend in Sierra Leone
while we were both reporting the brutality of the RUF rebels; I had had
dinner with him the night before. A friend who had sat on my floor the
week before, telling me how excited he was to be getting married, found
dead in his Pakistan hotel room; a third, whom I loved like a big
brother, shot himself in the heart. One producer friend collapsed and
ended up in a clinic in America. Two more were breaking down in
England. My husband came home from two years of war in the Ivory Coast
with nightmares, sweats, insomnia and the feeling that he will never be
safe again - classic PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

I think something turned around for me when I heard the news of my
friend who killed himself. I was alone on a rooftop in Somalia trying
to file a story. Another friend rang on my satellite phone and said:
"Sweetheart, sit down. I have some terrible, terrible news."

I burst into tears at the desperation of my poor, dead friend. Weirdly,
the hardened gunmen I had hired to protect me tried to comfort me.
"Death comes to all of us," they said. Well, in Somalia and for
reporters covering war, it just comes a lot faster.

In the first year of my son's life I tried to find advice from other
mothers, but I knew no one else who was in the same situation as me. My
other friends went to offices, then came home to their kids. They did
not have the drama of tears at the airport and calling the nanny ten
times a day. My Dr Spock guide says that separation from mother at six
months old means that the baby becomes depressed; at one year, it is
"severe trauma".

The last time I came home from a trip, which was only six days long -
my limit is seven days before I go mad with longing for my baby -
Luca, normally placid, sweet and independent, clung to me and cried
when I left the room. That's when I thought that I had to let go of
the ego thing. I will never be a young war correspondent again. But I
will always be Luca's mother.

Ironically, the best advice on mothering I received came not from a
woman but from Ahmed Chalabi, the Shia politician who was nearly made
leader of the new Iraq. I saw him when I was last in Baghdad, in
September. When my office called and asked me to go, I didn't
hesitate to cancel the house I had rented in Bridgehampton for two
weeks. I was so used to dropping everything in my life at a second's
notice that it still did not occur to me that I had changed. My
husband, whom I met in Sarajevo in 1993 and who understands me better
than anyone on earth, urged me to go. He later told me that he thought
the trip would help me to work out how to combine work and motherhood.
"Go and see how you feel," he said. "It will be clear to you how
to carry on once you are there."

The night before I left, I sat up packing my kit and writing a letter
to my son, telling him how much I loved him and how much I had wanted
him. I cried as I wrote it, thinking: well, if I want him so much, what
the hell am I doing?

I didn't care about car bombs or grenades. I never have, because that
is quick death. It was the thought of being kidnapped and physically
separated from Luca for months, years, aware of time passing and being
unable to hold him, that made me feel ill. I am a dual British/American
citizen with the two worst passports on earth. I didn't sleep that
night. But I got on the plane the next day.

In Baghdad I continued going on the streets to report, dressed in an
abaya, because there was no sense in travelling all that way and
reporting the story from my hotel room. But whereas in the past I never
thought that anything could happen to me - fearlessly and stupidly
putting myself at huge risk time and time again - this time, I
calculated my risks. Was it worth going to Sadr City the day after a
car bomb just to get two quotes? Probably not. Was it worth driving out
to see a politician who lived in a dodgy part of town but who could
help me with an important and useful story? Yes.

When Ahmed Chalabi invited me to spend a Friday holiday with him and
his family, I accepted because I knew that what he had to say would be
interesting. And it was. He asked how I was enjoying motherhood.

"Do you miss Luca?" he said. A lot, I answered glumly. He thought
about it and said: "Take one really good trip every three months.
That's enough." Something professionally rewarding, he advised, and
something that will have some affect on policy or human rights. Choose
your trips wisely. The rest of the time, he said, devote to your son.
"You'll regret it if you miss something," he said.

I missed Yassir Arafat's funeral and I missed the battle of Falluja,
but I know this much about life: there will always be war and conflict
and stories to tell. But my son's first birthday, his first tooth and
his first step will happen only once in his - and my - lifetime.


Janine di Giovanni is the author of Madness Visible: A Memoir of War,
published in paperback by Bloomsbury, =A38.99



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