I've lost my bravado

I was getting ready to give my six-month-old son his bottle with one hand and speed-dial the Sudanese Embassy with the other, to hound them about a visa for an upcoming trip, when I heard the disturbing news that 23-year-old journalist James Brandon had been dragged from his hotel room in Basra by masked men.

I watched the video of his frightened face and felt physically ill. I was planning a trip back to Iraq, where I spent nearly four months last autumn. Our profession has always been a dangerous one, but things are different now. Since 9/11, journalists are more of a target than they ever were.

And things are different for me, too. Shortly after Luca was born, I had a telephone call from the Columbia Review of Journalism. The CRJ is the most prestigious trade magazine for journalists in the United States, and the reporter was writing a feature on war correspondents who are also mothers.

It's a pretty exclusive club. This reporter had worked in Africa, but wistfully told me she had given it up to raise a child and teach part-time. She wanted to know what I was planning for the future. "Now that you have your baby," she said, "how do you feel about putting yourself in the kind of danger you did before?"

It was late at night, and I was struggling with the "baby blues" and the shock of having this tiny creature sleeping next to me. I told her I would try to manage as best I could, but that the notion of stopping work was out of the question. For more than a decade, I had reported on war and conflict, focusing on human rights abuses. I could not imagine life without it.

"Tell me that in a few months' time," she said.

The truth was, those first few days after Luca was born, I was a very frightened person. I had just moved from London to Paris and left the security of my close friends, my doctors, my network, behind. I knew no other young mothers. I was filled with anxieties. What if he stopped breathing? What if the aggressive drunks in front of our building punched me as I took him out in his stroller? It was strange how painfully timid I felt.

Mainly, I was frightened of the responsibility. I couldn't just jump on a plane when my world got too heavy. This was real life! I was supposed to be a grown-up!

Apparently, this is a common response to motherhood. But at the trendy Notting Hill pre-natal class I went to - where I was one of the few working women - all they talked about was yogic breathing and baby slings. I had come to motherhood relatively late - a happy, wise decision - and it was the first time in my life that I had to take care of another human being.

People who did not know me very well, who believed I was capable and tough, thought my fears hilarious.

"Imagine you, afraid of a 2.9 kilo baby!" they shrieked. But the truth was, my tiny son scared me more than any war.

I am happy that I waited to have my baby. Not only was I more established in my career - therefore I didn't get paranoid while I stayed home during maternity leave - but I was more financially secure. I couldn't have afforded help when I was 25, even 35. And it was that help - the maternity nurse for two weeks and a wonderful, loving nanny right after - who let me get my energy back physically and mentally. I was at home with Luca for the first six months of his life, so I did not feel guilty that I was rushing back to work.

I was also fortunate enough to have married someone I was very much in love with, and both of us had travelled and lived enough so that we felt ready to have a child. As a result, my husband, Bruno, a cameraman whom I met in Sarajevo in 1993, was a tremendous support (he did all the night feeds!).

The first few months of my son's life, once I had conquered the fear, were wonderful. I did not care what the newspapers or CNN were saying, for the first time in many years. I was free to immerse myself totally in motherhood, without counting the days before I would go back to work.

The problem was that old dilemma: how to balance work and motherhood. I had very few other women to look to for advice. Working women ordinarily go back to work after three months, but they don't have to go away for weeks on end, or think about what will happen to their baby if they get kidnapped by Iraqi militiamen. Most of the women who do the work I do don't have children, but the few who do have a rough time.

One colleague gave up her career after the war in Afghanistan, saying the separation from her toddler "nearly killed" her. The other took her child with her around Africa for a while, but then decided that a more civilised life was better for her daughter, and settled down to work for an aid organisation.

Before Luca arrived, I dodged the question of work nonchalantly. My response embarrasses me now. "I'll take him with me," I had said.

Six months after his birth, I can't believe I naively assumed I would carry him along with me as though he were a satellite phone (although, when I travelled to Biarritz, he did sleep in my suitcase once, at five weeks, swaddled in a cashmere blanket, and was very happy). I believed that if I organised myself well, everything would fall into place. I failed to take into account the weight of my emotions and how deeply I would fall in love with him.

But that was before he was born and I wasn't thinking of suicide bombs, kidnapping, beheading, malaria, snipers, even the dangers of harmless drunks on my Parisian street. With the awful news of James Brandon, although he was swiftly released, I now have an added anxiety to add to my list, not just for me, but for my husband, who also works in war zones.

Last year, while I was pregnant, Bruno spent the entire time on the Ivory Coast dodging assassination threats and getting beaten up by government policemen (although he hid all this information from me until he got home safely).

Shortly before he left the country, a colleague of his from Agence France Presse, who had also been repeatedly threatened by the government, was assassinated - by a police officer, in cold blood. A bullet to the back of the head. It completely freaked me out. But I can hardly tell my husband to stop doing the work he loves, because he's the person I fell in love with.

The truth is, I lost my bravado the day my son was born.

Before, my work involved risk, but it was something that I have always been fatalistic about: if something happened to either one of us, I reckoned, it was what the Arabs call "makhtoub" - already written. I had lost colleagues and friends in war zones, and I had women friends who had been raped or held hostage, and I always assumed these things would happen to someone else.

I remember hiding with an old woman in a basement as rockets cracked around us as Grozny was falling. She said, "Well, I've lived a good life, I don't mind if I die tonight," and I calmly thought, "Yes, I guess she's right, I've had a good life, too."

Now I don't recognise the person I was. I don't recognise the person who stood up to drunken African soldiers at checkpoints, demanding to pass to a road where there was heavy fighting. Or the person who lay in a front-line ditch for three days during a mortar attack in Kosovo. Or even the person who went to Gaza when six months pregnant.

Before the news of James Brandon's kidnapping, I had blithely planned trips for the autumn to Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Gaza - where I have worked for many years.

I will still do them, but with a lot more fear in my heart than I had before.