No Country for New Mothers
A war reporter's first post-baby trip to Iraq.
by Maria Jimenez
December 28, 2007
It was somewhere along the desert highway, just before the Jordan-Iraq border crossing, that I began to seriously question my sanity. The mother of an eleven-month-old boy, I had just signed a waiver saying I would not hold the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan responsible if I was hurt on the "very dangerous" road into Baghdad. Vultures flew overhead. Not a good omen.
I was crammed into the back seat of a van, the only woman in a group of six, which included a driver, translator, cameraman and two other journalists. My son, Alvaro, was thousands of miles away, being cared for by my husband and nanny. I missed him desperately, his soft skin and sweet smell, his almond-shaped blue eyes, his tiny, perfect hands. I should have been home rocking him to sleep, not rocketing toward Baghdad. Instead, I had exchanged my baby carrier and diaper bag for a flak jacket and a laptop. I was surrounded by grizzled war correspondents. Torn between two worlds. Heartsick and homesick.
I had returned from my maternity leave only three months earlier, and my assignment at the time of the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was supposed to be covering the "safe, easy" story in Jordan, where hundreds of Iraqi refugees were expected to arrive. But after I'd spent two weeks waiting by the hotel pool for word of the refugees' arrival, they had failed to materialize, and trying to capture the mood of the "Arab street" had grown old. With the Americans marching toward Baghdad, and the fall of the Iraqi capital imminent, the four-hundred-odd journalists camped
I had exchanged my baby carrier and diaper bag for a flak jacket and a laptop. out in Amman grew impatient. We scrambled out of the Jordanian capital to drive the notoriously dangerous nine-hundred-kilometre highway into Baghdad.
That day, April 8, we made it only as far as the abandoned border post. It was too dangerous to travel at night, so we camped overnight in no-man's land in the freezing desert and waited for sunrise.
I looked around at the other journalists tumbling out of their vans and pitching tents in the dusk and realized I didn't fit any of the foreign-correspondent archetypes. There were the "Papa corros" — older, perennially single men, loudly sharing anecdotes about the last Gulf War, in 1991, accustomed to living out of a suitcase and eating at hotel restaurants. Then there were the "cowboys," young men hungry for adventure, growing beards to look convincing in their field portraits. Next came the "war babes," gorgeous young women just starting their careers, still single or hooked up with hunky photographers, not always wearing sensible shoes, and, in fact, not always sensible period. Finally there were a few grizzled war broads, women who had never had children or had long ago bade them adieu.
Apart from CNN's Christiane Amanpour, mother of a three-year-old boy and an archetype unto herself, there appeared to be few if any others in my demographic: a thirty-eight-year-old new mother in need of a haircut, with a knot in her stomach and a lump in her throat. I asked myself for the umpteenth time why I had schemed so desperately to cover this dangerous story. It went against the very essence of motherhood, which was all about nurturing, protection, selflessness and love.
©2007 Maria Jimenez and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Marina Jiménez has been a journalist for sixteen years. She has a master’s degree from the University of London and has worked for CBC Television, The Vancouver Sun, The Edmonton Journal, the National Post and The Globe and Mail. She has won numerous awards, including a 2003 National Newspaper Award and two 2001 National Magazine Gold Awards. She lives in Toronto with her husband, the journalist John Geiger, and their son, Alvaro. |
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