It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (41 page)

Just as in Somalia, when I had felt my baby moving inside me as I witnessed the suffering of other infants, I could suddenly understand, in a new, profound, and enraging way, how most people in the world lived. I had been seeing that reality for years. But somehow, I had to admit, my pregnancy and the vulnerabilities of motherhood had offered me yet another window on humanity, yet another channel of understanding.

CHAPTER 14

Lukas

Lukas Simon de Bendern was born perfectly healthy on December 28, 2011, at St. Mary’s Hospital in London after eleven-plus hours of miserable labor. Paul had gotten a new job in London, and we had moved only three weeks before.

My first few weeks as a mother were a blur of sleeping and nursing and trying to reconcile my present life with the one that seemed to have existed in such a distant past. For three months, for the first time in memory, I didn’t pack a single suitcase, didn’t buy a plane ticket or look on Expedia, didn’t stress about hotels or assignments or breaking news or who was killing whom or who was dying from an outbreak of measles or cholera in what remote corner of the planet. My days were simple and repetitive: I slept until I was woken up by Lukas’s cries, nursed, made coffee, watched bad TV, and nursed again. I watched more made-for-TV movies during the last month of my pregnancy and while nursing than I had during my entire life prior. Every activity was punctuated by a diaper change and my gnawing fear that I would somehow break my new baby with my inexperienced touch. Before I gave birth, I knew nothing about infants. I had no idea what they needed, how to know when they were sick, how to dress them, how to duck their fragile skulls into an over-the-head onesie, and what to put on them in London’s cold, damp winter air.

The daily rituals around which the lives of most of the women on the planet revolved had become my own. And I embraced them, because all of a sudden the notion of routine didn’t seem unfulfilling. I had this baby whom Paul and I had created, and we felt a joy and a love that far exceeded anything we had ever known. For hours we sat on the couch and stared at Lukas, incredulous that he was born of nothing other than sperm and egg. We felt as if we were the first two people on the planet to have conceived. How could the most basic thing be so rewarding? Suddenly I understood why all the Afghan women over the years had looked at me with sadness when I admitted to not having children. And I knew, deep down, that I must cherish my initial months as a mother, because it would be one of the rare occasions I could allow myself to indulge in nothing other than loving and caring for Lukas, this tiny, helpless person we had made.

Lukas Simon de Bendern, December 28, 2011.

The euphoria of creation in the early months of motherhood came to a shocking halt one night in early February of 2012. I was in the coziness of my family cocoon, feeding Lukas at 4 a.m., when I heard my New York cell ringing from my purse in the living room downstairs. Only credit card companies and emergency calls rang me on my roaming cell in the middle of the night, and I asked Paul to bring me the phone. There were dozens of missed calls and familiar subject lines on my BlackBerry e-mails:

I’m so sorry.

Sad news.

Anthony Shadid, my longtime friend, had died in Syria of an asthma attack earlier that day. Tyler, who had been working with him, had shepherded his body across the border to Turkey, where Anthony’s wife, Nada, and two-year-old son, Malik, waited to collect him. It was less than a year after we had all narrowly escaped death in Libya. I felt angry. What was he doing in Syria so soon after what had transpired in Libya? I knew that, had I not gotten pregnant, I, too, would probably have been there. But it was easier to wish a conventional life on Anthony than it was at that moment to accept his resolution to cover Syria—at all costs. His death put a mirror to the pain I caused others with my decisions. And how could he have died of an asthma attack, of all things, in the middle of a battle zone? Who wrote these miserable cards of fate? They were all questions I would never have the answers to—except one. I knew why he was back covering the Arab Spring. I knew why he returned to cover conflict, just as I knew why I would one day return to cover conflict. As with all of us, it was in his soul, and very little could have kept him away.

My heart ached for his family, and yet I, too, could not give up the work I held so close to me. Three months after I gave birth, I started traveling again. I took my first assignment for the
Times Magazine
in Alabama, photographing mothers addicted to methamphetamine. Being away from Lukas was worse than any heartbreak, any distance from a lover—anything I had ever known. I cried all the way to the airport, throughout the journey, and right up until the morning I loaded the memory cards into my Nikons, placed my lenses in their pouches, strung them around my waist, and set off for the rugged barn in rural Alabama to visit Timmy Kimbrough and his three children. With my first few frames, I lost myself in my work.

I didn’t think it would ever get easier to leave Lukas and Paul. I struggled, like so many professional men and women, to find that perfect, impossible balance between my personal life and my career. Inevitably one suffered at the expense of the other, and when I returned from an assignment, I was confronted with the price of my absence: Lukas running into our nanny’s arms rather than my own, or calling out “Da Da” when I called on Skype from a random hotel room in India or Uganda. In the first year after giving birth, I shot assignments from Mississippi to Mauritania, from Zimbabwe to Sierra Leone to India. I cushioned each assignment with quality time with Lukas, going to play group and music class, straddling two worlds that couldn’t be farther apart. I convinced myself I would stay on the margins of war and tailor my work to my new life as a mother. When the violence in Gaza broke out in November 2012, I felt the familiar urgency in the pit of my stomach telling me that I needed to be there to document the civilian deaths. But I was in London. I went to the gym and looked around, positive that I was the only person in Notting Hill wishing she was in Gaza rather than in Café 202, sipping a latte with a coiffed poodle perched on her lap.

While I was happier and more complete with my new family than I had ever been before, I was still restless to get back out in the field and cover the stories I felt strongly about. But unlike early in my career, when I felt I needed to be in the midst of every top news story in order to prove myself as a photojournalist, I eventually started feeling comfortable saying no to breaking-news stories: I was more selective about assignments after the birth of my son, and I weighed the importance of every story with every day that would keep me away from my family. I met deadlines and editors’ needs while weaving in time for Lukas between assignments; the balance was possible because I worked with trusted editors who were supportive of my new role as mother, and because I had a partner, Paul, who was a hands-on father and a champion of my work.

The risks I took now had higher stakes. Every night when I put Lukas to sleep, I thought about whether I would be there to watch him grow from this perfect soul, a beautiful infant, to a toddler, to a boy, to a teen, and into a man. I struggled with the question of why I put us, and my extended family, into that equation of uncertainty, but I hoped Lukas would understand my commitment to journalism one day, as his father intrinsically understood. Before I gave birth to Lukas, I hadn’t truly understood that painful, consuming, I-will-do-anything-to-save-this-human-being kind of love. I had lived my life in defiance of fear, but now that I had this tiny being to care for, I thought about mortality differently: I worried constantly that something might happen to him, something I had never felt for myself. When I thought about his future, I hoped he would lead a life as full of opportunity and happiness and experiences as mine had been. My dreams for my child were the same ones that I knew compelled so many women around the world to fight for their families against the most unimaginable odds. My experience as a parent has taught me a new understanding of the subjects I photograph.

As a war correspondent and a mother, I’ve learned to live in two different realities. It’s not always easy to make the transition from a beautiful London park filled with children to a war zone, but it’s my choice. I choose to live in peace and witness war—to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty.

AFTERWORD

Return to Iraq

By late 2012 the war in Syria raged. For journalists it was at least as dangerous as Libya had been in 2011. If newspapers sent in correspondents at all, they went in with the help and logistical support of a particular rebel commander and stayed for only a short time. I wanted to cover the war’s civilian toll—far from the front line—and offered myself up to the
New York Times
to visit the camps for displaced civilians. I traveled to Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, and as I crossed the border from Turkey into war-ravaged Syria, I thought about Lukas and wondered if my love for him might overwhelm my ability to go to countries where my fate was so uncertain.

With a colleague, a security guard, a driver, and a fixer, I drove through the bucolic villages of northern Aleppo that lined the border between Syria and Turkey, my cameras tucked away in a bag at my feet, my hair neatly hidden under a head scarf. I watched the countryside whip past my window as we traversed small pockets of peace that existed precariously in a country torn apart by death: a few farmers toiling in the fields, young men lining up for haircuts at the barbershop. We drove to the rebel-controlled village of Tilalyan, where we were greeted by members of the town council, happy to see foreign journalists there to document their plight. I photographed boys who spent their days trying to secure flour for the bakery, teachers at a makeshift school who taught amid the air strikes. We visited a local clinic, swarming with Syrians who had been wounded in battle, others merely suffering everyday ailments that suddenly became impossible to treat as doctors disappeared or migrated to battlefronts to treat the gravely wounded. It was a story that had been routine in the past but took on a whole new meaning for me as a mother. With every scene I wondered how Lukas would fare in the same situation; I wondered how it would feel to be like these mothers, who suddenly couldn’t guarantee security or access to daily meals for their children.