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