This is not so much as a review, as 21 reasons why Jessica Hepburn should step onto the stage and take a bow.

Bow 1: Skilful narration

21 Miles is about Jessica’s endeavour to swim the Channel after 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, which she has written about in her previous book, The Pursuit of Motherhood. She gets a skilful narration point for telling the IVF backstory in a way that makes sense to those who don’t already know it but which isn’t repetitive to those who do.

Bow 2: Swimming

It’s an awesome thing that’s hard to describe. Jessica captures it both physically and metaphorically. “I can feel tears in my goggles but here in the pool, no one knows, not even the water, because water only knows tears as itself.”

Bow 3: Nature

It’s not just any old swimming but open water swimming that Jessica’s doing here. So the book is also about our relationship with nature. “Even though I feel small and vulnerable, as I start to swim I also feel something else. The words of a poem my dad used to recite to me when I was a child come unbidden into my mind: ‘And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more’.”

Bow 4: Humour

What can I say? This girl’s hilarious.

Bow 5: Food

As if it wasn’t enough to connect motherhood and swimming, Jessica makes this into a food story too. In so doing she integrates another of those themes that’s BIG for most women. Big love to Jessica for her fully-fledged fest of all things edible.

Bow 6: Skilful narration

She gets another skilful narration point for integrating such diverse themes into a coherent story.

Bow 7: Other women

Jessica invites women, ranging from scientist Baroness Greenfield (childless) to businesswoman Nicola Horlick (mother of six), to have lunch with her and answer the question of whether motherhood makes you happy. This is interesting, as it’s a question we don’t tend to ask. It’s also beautifully expansive as she finds a point of connection in each of the women’s baby stories and thereby binds them (us) together.

Bow 8: Reflections on motherhood

She might have missed the experience of motherhood but she had the meaning (to paraphrase TS Eliot). Through her quest she unveils insights that are fuller and deeper than those of many a literal mother.

Bow 9: Skilful narration

Jessica asks each of the women to give her one word to take with her on her swim and in so doing creates a poem. She deserves a skilful narration point for the very idea. When she has to dig deep in her swim, she recalls those words with each stroke. In so doing takes all the women she has interviewed with her and, by extension, all of womankind too. God bless you, Jessica.

Bow 10: Vulnerability

This vulnerability is all the more powerful because it’s shared before the wound has healed. “Sometimes I think the hardest thing about what I’ve been through – what we’ve been through – is that it makes it difficult to love because you’re so frightened of happiness being taken away.”

Bow 11: Living for the unborn children

A fellow swimmer, Nick, says swimming the Channel is all about the strength of the things deep inside you that are driving you forward. Jessica discovers her motivation. “Mille Gade swam the Channel for her children. I’m swimming it for me and Gertrude Ederle and the children we never had.” I find this both poignant and deeply inspiring.

Bow 12: Uterus-power

Jessica has her doubters, the greatest of which is Chris, who doesn’t think she stands a hope in Hell’s chance because she’s always complaining about the cold. But Jessica unveiled what the competitive sportsman couldn’t see – the gravitational pull of the womb.

Bow 13: Healing of family

It’s not part of the core narrative, but along the way Jessica grows in appreciation for her mum and dad and their own journeys into parenthood. It’s a beautiful reaching back as the stretches forward. After her swim, she goes for a picnic with her mum. “Because although neither of us quite had the family of our dreams, we do have the family of our reality and that will always be something to treasure.”

Bow 14: Control

There are plenty in our culture who make out we can control our destiny through a mix of positive thinking and grim determination. Swimming the Channel and making a baby give the lie to that. This book tells a more truthful story – about the dance between what we can control and what we can’t and is all the more inspiring for it.

Bow 15: Conclusion 1 – sadness

And so Jessica starts to reach her conclusions on her search for the meaning of motherhood. “Every single person in the world seems to have something that makes them terribly sad. And life is about making the best of your sad thing.”

Bow 16: Conclusion 2 – connection

“Connection is vital to human happiness and if you can’t get it ready-made by having your own children you need to create it in different ways.”

Bow 17: Conclusion 3 – something else

Jessica recognises that however much women want to have children, they need to have something else as well. I am sure this is true. There is, at the heart of motherhood, and ambivalence. We want our children, but we also want to get back to our “something else” – our work, our silence, our creativity, whatever it is. If we don’t have a something else, it will be very difficult to let our children go as they grow up. So the something else is at the heart of motherhood as well as the heart of life.

Bow 18: Skilful narration

Jessica manages to keep the story twisting to the end. In almost the last chapter, she reveals she had asked each woman what they would eat for their last supper. When she has finished her swim, she eats that food as a celebration. It’s a surprising detail, all the better for being held back and which celebrates the symbolic power of food as well as nicely concluding the theme.

Bow 19: Climax 3 – relationship

There are three endings to this story, each of which had me in tears. The final (surprising) climax is the last word – love – which Jessica’s partner, Peter, giver her retrospectively as her Channel word. This is a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship. (It’s also NOT a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship and Jessica gets a bonus skilful narration point for the way she manages to tell the story while empathically not telling that story in deference to Peter’s desire for privacy.)

Bow 20: Climax 2 – She did it!

She bloody well did it! Listen to that sound. It’s the sound of all my eggs rushing down my fallopian tubes to stand on the edge of my uterus cheering. Well done Jessica! Bloody, menstrual bloody, well done!

Bow 21: Climax 3 – mother

For me, the most profound part of the book was when Jessica’s mother gave her childless daughter the word “mother” to swim the Channel with. I could have cried her a Channel. I almost did.

I hope you’ve not got backache from all the bowing, Jessica. But you’ve swum the Channel, so you should be OK. What more can I say? Thank you.

It’s arguably the most important job you’re ever going to do and – apart from the twenty-seventh rendition of Thomas the Tank Engine – is utterly fascinating.  And yet the demands of feeding, entertaining, wiping, holding, soothing and life-saving are so relentless it’s impossible to reflect upon what you’re doing as you are actually doing it. (I wrote about this at the time: Can you be a feminist if you can’t think?)

What I didn’t know during my child’s early years is that as your child grows so does the space to pause and consider. When he’s old enough to walk home from school alone, you gain an extra hour each day.  When she can stay in the house on her own, you gain another hour, maybe two.

Now my child is aged 11, I’ve found it’s possible to mine that rich repository of milky, burpy, tired-as-zombie experience in a way that would have been an impossible luxury only a few years ago.

I will be doing that next month at Fertility Fest 2018, at the Bush Theatre, London between Tuesday 8 and Sunday 13 May.

Fertility Fest is the world’s first arts festival dedicated to fertility, infertility,modern families and the science of making babies. I was part of the first Fertility Fest in Birmingham last year so I know it will be a thoughtful, emotional, caring and beautiful occasion. (I can’t tell you how much it made me cry.)

Lots of questions will be being asked:

• How does not being able to make a baby make you feel about your body?
• Are there different pressures and prejudices about infertility depending on the community you come from?
• What makes you angry in the field of fertility, infertility, modern families and the science of making babies?
• Why do we not talk about miscarriage?

The question I’m most looking forward to is one posed by the incredibly engaging and generally awesome Jessica Hepburn: Does motherhood make you happy? Jessica, who co-founded Fertility Fest, asks 21 women that question in her new book: 21 Miles.

I can’t wait to read it, not least because not all of the women said: “Yes”.  I know that motherhood has made me happy; very happy indeed, even when it’s meant I haven’t had time to think.  But I will relish the opportunity to reflect upon why – and do that with other mothers and those who longed to be mothers.  We are woven together with the same golden thread, my sisters.

Other times it was a walk, a scoot, a dwardle and a climb.

In the early days, your eyes would search for me in the playground and light up when I was found. “Mummy!” you would cry and you would sprint into my arms.

More recently my eyes would search for you, bag adrift and tie awry, a giggle down Oxford Road with a gaggle of friends.

Sometimes, I would be distracted and hasty. A call from work. An engrossing thought. A resentment of the 3.30pm curfew that cut across productive afternoons.

Other times I would gaze at you on the road ahead and feel again that first amazement: “Are you really my son? Are you really my boy?”

Each day would bring a different conversation, each day a different mood. But the route was well-trodden and the rituals were clear: hiding in the wasteland, crossing with the lolly-pop man, looking for the ice cream van, climbing along the handrail by the neighbourhood office, walking along the Silver Street wall…

One day, amongst the demands of work and requests to play with friends, we walked home together for the last time. When that day was, I cannot say but today is your last day at primary school so that day has passed, for sure.

And so I grieve. I mourn the interruption: the gazing, the scooting and the dwardling. I feel the loss of the small, repeated acts of ordinariness – the 10p sweets and muddle of bags.

Thank you for the school run, my son. Celebrate. Enjoy. Take pride in growing up. And please also know that whatever your day, someone is waiting for you. Wherever you play, there’s someone who delights in you. However you meander, you’re being brought safely home.

One day I shall look back at this time

At the waiting

And the counting

And the bleeding

And the longing

The trying

And the not-trying

The loving

And forgiving

And I will say that it made sense.

I know the time will come again

When my womb will be holding

The secret hope,

The possibility of miracle,

Origins so awesome

That only God can know.

But today my vulva

Is tender-lipped

Heralding blood.

And today is the day

I have to live

Right now

Learning to embrace

My own body and grieving dreams

With the fierce

Unconditional

Over-whelming

Mother’s love

That is present

That is ready

That is now.

I am enormously grateful to have my experience articulated so very accurately.  (And it’s interesting that it was a man who did this for me.)  I would like to share it as Mother’s Day approaches.

“After many years of talking with women about their motherhood experiences, it is clear to me that almost without exception, the birth of her baby (especially her first one) is a central event in a woman’s life, in equal parts miraculous and traumatic, packed with unforgettable emotions and implications.

“For most women it is an event so primitive and profound as to be difficult to fully assimilate or put into words. It is a story that never gets fully told, not even to the mother herself, and therefore remains a partly-known unmovable cornerstone in the construction of her life story.

“Whether the birth experience was good or bad or a mix of the two doesn’t matter.  The memory remains vivid, no matter what.”

Exactly.

From The Birth of a Mother – How the Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever by Daniel Stern

The grief in going up to the loft to exchange the 0-3 month old baby-grows for the 3-6 month ones, the grief of withdrawing the breast and saying: “No more,” the grief of a child’s first day in school.

It is widely accepted that many parents need to grieve when their children leave home. “Why wait til then?” I say.

I have wept over a boy becoming so bonny and chunky he has to be moved from his Moses basket into a cot, over him becoming so independent he no longer finds it necessary to curl my thumb within his hand.

I am grateful to a friend who gave me this poem when I was puzzling over why something as good and natural as a child growing up should also be so poignant.

It  is the kind of question that only a poet can answer.  What better answer than this could there be? Walking Away by C D-Lewis.

I made a decision to remember what it’s like to feel you simply can’t do another contraction and yet have to do it again and again and again – cruel,  relentless, merciless, on and on and on for 48 hours.

Re-living labour every year

This time six years ago, I was in hospital waiting to see my consultant to discuss being induced.  Tomorrow is the day I took my first prostin.  The day after that I took my second and my third.  On the fourth day, I went into labour.  On the fifth day I was still in labour.  On the sixth day my son was born.

I re-live it every year.  And as I do I salute, with awe, our great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers and women today,  in some parts of the world, for whom there is more than a slim chance that death will be the outcome of their labours.

Each May in its fresh, lime greenness and sweet, exuberant blossoming, I remember the savage cost of new life.

I also remember it was worth it.

Waiting for a baby

And I had done plenty of anticipating being a mum. I first started longing for a child when I was in my early 20s. The dream wasn’t fulfiled until I was in my early 40s, so there was plenty of time to yearn and imagine how it might be.

The biggest surprise for me has been the discovery that having a baby hasn’t completely dealt with that part of me that…wants a baby.  Five years on, I still want to be pregnant, to give birth and to breastfeed. That desire is more of a still small voice than the womb-wrenching scream that it was in my childless days, but it is there nonetheless.

“Have another one,” is my first response on observing this but  – even if I could – I’m not sure that’s the solution. I’m guessing that even if I had five or six, I’d still end up grey-haired, saggy-bellied and wanting a baby.

Embrace my desire as metaphor

As I already have a child, I’m wondering if the desire that remains is best not taken literally. Perhaps I should welcome it as primal, as archetypal.   I wonder what would happen if, instead of feeling saddened that my baby-days are over, I embraced my desire as a metaphor to live by and found other ways of conceiving, bearing, giving birth.

This is a new thought. It’s very much in embryo but I shall wait as it implants and see what grows.

They started on Friday when I dropped him off at nursery for his last day there. I came home and wept those kind of from-the-belly tears that go on for a long time.

I cried

I only cried a little bit when I saw him in his school uniform for the first time on Monday morning and then a bit more when a friend sent me a photograph and some apposite words about the love being in the letting go.

I cried remembering his first day at nursery, his first night in a cot, his first solids, the time I bagged up his 0 – 3 month baby-gros and put them in the loft.

I cried remembering the two of us being in hospital. Me – battered, bruised, bloated, iron-deficient, utterly exhausted, on a drip, using a catheter, unable to move from the chest down. Arch – exquisite, opening his mouth, like a fish needing food, and searching for my tender, aching breast, not knowing what to do with it when he found it.

I cried remembering that primal urge, as fierce as a tiger.

It never goes.

The grief gets hidden

The grief gets hidden as we go about our day to day business, but these rites of passage, these separations and letting-gos, bring it to the forefront of consciousness.

It won’t get any easier. I will be crying again when Arch leaves primary school, when he leaves secondary school, when he leaves home… He will look like a young man. I will look like a woman in my late 50s.

But I will be that fluid-filled bag of a mum on morphine in hospital wincing with pain as I try yet again to get my red swollen nipple in that tiny toothless mouth.