The day I got out of hospital after having my first baby I went for tea with an evil dictator. My son Lourenço was in intensive care having been born at 29 weeks and my caesarean stitches felt as if they were tearing, but the first interview with General Augusto Pinochet under house arrest was a world exclusive.

When I returned to my son’s incubator later, the nurses asked where I had been. When I told them they looked horrified. But I was 22 when I became a war correspondent and 12 years on I was determined that having a child would not change my life. I had cried when I found out that I was pregnant because it meant missing the war in Yugoslavia.

And perhaps, if I had to admit it, it was more scary watching a baby the size of my palm connected to an array of tubes and machines than doing what I know best.

Last Sunday the BBC screened On the Front Line, a documentary by Jeremy Bowen, a veteran BBC reporter, about being a war correspondent. To watch reporters like Fergal Keane talk candidly about resorting to drink or Jon Steele, a former ITN cameraman, on wandering round Heathrow babbling, was not comfortable for any of us who cover conflict for a living.

But apart from Christiane Amanpour of CNN they were all men. As a mother who keeps a terrible secret in her wardrobe — a flak jacket — and whose child’s first words were “bye-bye”, it was decidedly guilt making.

For some time after Lourenço was born I thought about giving up foreign reporting. On September 9, 2001 we moved to Portugal, where my husband had been brought up, for me to start writing a book. Two days later I got a telephone call and switched on the television to see the World Trade Center in New York in flames and studio analysts talking about Osama Bin Laden and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was where I had first started back in 1987. I had walked into the American Club in Peshawar and a group of whisky-drinking middle-aged men with blood-stained army jackets swivelled round on their stools to look me up and down.

Soon I was crossing back and forth along the Khyber Pass on donkeys or by foot, face darkened and dressed as a mujaheddin or disguised in a burqa. “Going inside” we called it and we spent all our time trying to do it, then most of the time inside trying to get out. When I won young journalist of the year in 1988 it seemed an irritating distraction to go to London for the ceremony. The Afghan jihad was an adventure, it was like my first love affair, and when September 11 happened I knew that I had to go back even though Lourenço was just two.

When I finally returned home months later, his nursery manager asked me what I did. She said Lourenço kept telling everyone, “My mummy lives on a plane.”

Of course it is difficult being apart. By luck I was there when he took his first steps. But I have yet to make a parents’ evening and usually when I am away he refuses to speak to me. It may take hours to get through on the satellite phone from some mountain top in the Hindu Kush, only for him to say, “I’m busy, Mummy.”

I think having a stable home life, a loving husband and child helps me to deal better with the horrors of being a war correspondent. It feels as though I have two separate lives. But sometimes those two worlds collide.

Two weeks ago a contact from Pakistan intelligence, who is close to some of the world’s most wanted terrorists, was in town just for an afternoon. It was Lourenço’s class “bake sale” and I had arranged to pick up him up from school. When I explained this, begging my contact to squeeze me in later, he said no problem, he would come too. He bought £10 of cupcakes. Last week we received the school newsletter congratulating Swan Class on a record total.

But generally the benefits for Lourenço seem few. His great-aunt gave him a globe and by the age of four he could point out Afghanistan and Iraq. He regularly gives me his old toys for “the poor boys in Afghanistan who don’t have anything”.