Posted on 04/02/2005 5:17:33 PM PST by PopGonzalez
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, £8.99.
God Bless this Mom.
She smartened up in time for her son.
I watched two one-year olds watch snow for the first time as they looked out my front window. I thrilled for my little girl and cried for the mother of the other who missed the event and would never see it.
Priorities Ping.
later
One of the justifications some mothers use for avoiding their children is that the mother's career is somehow a great educational advantage for the child. Apparently the person in your quote bought that. She must have been fuddled by ideology, or she'd have understood that a child is not going to be very interested in a parent who's not interested in him.
My sons are crazy about maps, and I never go anywhere :-).
Must bump.
Needless to day, my friend quit her job and had three more children.
Great story bump!
Great life story ping!
Yep. We have limits. And yes, we are different, even if it is mostly due to potty training. (Stand while exposed and control vs. sit down, genitals covered by nature, and let go. No wonder boys have an advantage in hand to eye coordination and physics, and that we girls learn to do more than one thing at a time!)
If nothing else, the pain of full breasts after a few hours away from the baby ought to be a lesson. And the joy and oxytocin of nursing another.
But, mommas have always worked. I can't imagine the terror of leaving my baby by the hearth or the side of the field while getting the wood from the shed so we can be warm or picking the beans that we will eat to live.
(I do remember the dilemma of the laundrymat: do you take the basket of clothes in and leave the baby in the car, or do you take the baby in and leave him there while you go back outside to get the basket?)
What it all boils down to is that we do our best. And people are unbelievably adaptable. Don't beat yourself up over past mistakes or bad choices, but don't warp your world to justify those choices, either. Do better next time or tomorrow, or just veg out with your kids for a day now and then.
bump
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