In my old life as a war correspondent for The Times of London, I'd travel around the world for nine months out of the year, happily sleep in tents with two or three photographers, and not bathe for several weeks at a time. My home in London was a reflection of this life: The photos on my walls were of war. There was one of a curled dead hand, stiff with rigor mortis. There were images of a young Chechen fighter standing in the ruins of his decimated city, and of West African soldiers with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. There were lots of photographs of me under fire: in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Africa.
Those pictures are no longer on my walls. In my new home in Paris—which I share with my husband, Bruno, and my 5-year-old son, Luca—they've been replaced by a single photo taken by my friend Eve Arnold. Called "The First Five Minutes of Life," it shows a mother reaching out for her newborn's hand. Eve gave it to me to celebrate the fact that I had managed to stay alive this long and to achieve the thing I wanted most in life: motherhood. The photograph hangs in my bedroom, along with a framed clipping from a 1950s Italian Vogue, of a beautiful couple going on vacation, dressed to the nines and smiling in front of their station wagon. That image symbolizes stability, family, happiness—the opposite of my life for so many years.
I had lived in London for two decades, thriving on autonomy, on living alone, on having things entirely my way. I met my husband, a French TV journalist, during the war in Sarajevo in 1993, but we didn't get married until 2003. When we walked out of the church together in the remote French Alpine village where Bruno's ancestors settled 400 years ago, we emerged a married couple: two independent spirits who had once vowed never to settle down.
I got pregnant soon after, and in January 2004 we moved to Paris. We wanted serenity and the kind of stability neither of us had ever had. Bruno was coming back from three years of reporting a brutal war in Côte d'Ivoire and was going to scale back his traveling; I had just spent five months in Baghdad. As we boarded the train from London, I, with my bags and seven months pregnant with Luca, wondered what our life would be like. You can get addicted to rambling, and it wouldn't be easy to settle for the everyday. Was it going to be possible for us to remain in one place for more than a week? Would we miss our old life reporting from the frontlines? We focused on what we could control: becoming parents to a newborn and setting up our home and a life of rituals and routine for our new family.
Next Page: Sharing the Same Values
