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SOMEWHERE BETWEEN FIVE and six months, my stomach popped. I found out I was having a boy. Back in New York for an assignment, I started breaking the news to a few select people. Kathy Ryan, with whom I had worked for a decade at the New York Times Magazine, was one of the first. She immediately offered to throw me a baby shower. Did I really have to have a baby shower? There was no turning back. Kathy’s generosity to host a party at her place was overwhelming, but I hadn’t even told anyone else I was pregnant yet.
“Kathy,” I suggested, “maybe the shower invitation could be the way I tell my friends I am pregnant? Do I have to actually tell people before I invite them to my baby shower?”
That night I broke the news to Michele McNally and David Furst, my editors at the Times. The next morning my cell phone rang. It was David. I was hoping he had been too drunk to remember what I had told him the night before.
“Good morning,” David said, rather seriously.
“Morning. What’s up?” I asked.
“Listen: I want you to know something. I didn’t get into this last night because there was a lot going on, and we were all out and drinking. But I want to congratulate you again on the baby, and I wanted to tell you that I am really happy for you and Paul.”
“Um, thank you.” I said. “Sorry the news is a bit late . . . I just didn’t really feel comfortable telling anyone.”
“Listen, I want to be clear: I will give you work until the day you tell me you are ready to stop shooting, and I will start giving you work again after the baby is born, the day you tell me you are ready to go back to work. I am so happy for you. This is going to be great. Don’t worry about your career. It will be fine. I will personally give you as little or as much work as you want. I’m just really happy for you both.”
I was shocked by his reaction. I assumed I would be looked at differently as soon as they heard I was pregnant. My editor’s reaction gave me pause, made me think that perhaps the industry was changing a little. Was it possible I had finally proved myself enough?
Throughout my pregnancy, though, I remained terrified that my editors would write me off with childbirth and stop hiring me because the assignments were perceived as too rigorous or dangerous for a “mother.” These were decisions I wanted to make for myself; I didn’t want to surrender those choices as a woman and as a professional. Photojournalism, journalism as a whole, is brutally competitive. I knew that at the end of the day it didn’t matter that I had won a MacArthur fellowship or been part of the New York Times Pulitzer team or won numerous other accolades along the way. After all, I was a freelance photographer, with no professional security other than the reputation I had built over the years. I had no guarantee of future assignments and a future paycheck. And I was haunted by the maxim “You’re only as good as your last story.” Too often I had seen that it was true. It was still possible that motherhood could bring me down the professional ladder.
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TWO WEEKS LATER Furst sent me to Gaza for a prisoner exchange between the Israelis and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The Israelis announced that they would trade 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier: Sergeant First Class Gilad Shalit, twenty-five, who had been abducted by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006. It seemed like a pretty straightforward assignment, even while pregnant, and I was to team up once again with my colleague Steve Farrell. I hadn’t seen him since our post-Libya visit to New York.
The safest, easiest way into Gaza was through Israel. A journalist flew into Tel Aviv, drove to Jerusalem, and went to the government press office for media accreditation. She then drove a short two hours to Erez Crossing, the high-tech, airportlike terminal that served as the official border gate between Gaza and Israel. The New York Times bureau in Jerusalem was an institution: well connected, with an excellent office manager and correspondents who immediately knew which officials to contact to facilitate any kind of story. As I headed to Erez, I called Shlomo, the Israeli press official who handled media relations at Erez, and he assured me the cross would be smooth.