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.