But do women who have become pregnant through fertility treatment have a slightly different relationship with their children from those who have conceived naturally? Do the years of struggling to have a child make the love more intense if the baby eventually arrives?

And what about pregnancy? Is that fraught with particular anxieties for women who have miscarried many times? Is it ever possible to find a way to enjoy it?

We will be asking some of these questions at Fertility Fest 2019, when I’m chairing a session, Parenting after IVF at the Barbican, London.

The evening will start with a performance of To the Moon and Back, a dialogue between a mother and daughter on the experience of IVF from their respective perspectives – a fertility patient and a person born as a result of reproductive science. It uncovers th intensity and complexity of being born “special”.

The artists, Anna Furse and Nina Klaff will join me in conversation with Ann Daniels, record-breaking polar explorer and mum of IVF triplets, and Victoria Macdonald, Channel 4’s health and social care correspondent.

Do IVF parents love their children differently? I’ve no idea. But I am hoping to learn something. Do join us on Friday 26 April to find out. Or I will post an update and let you afterwards.

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.

We think we’re talking about the 11+ or goalies or whether it’s better to learn classical piano or bass guitar – but what we’re actually talking about is who with think we are.

One of the great challenges of parenting is the invitation it offers to continually reassess your identity.

Maybe you’re someone who has always considered herself to be a nice person. Taking care of people’s feelings and helping them feel good is what you do and who you are and what you always have been…

…and then you have a daughter whose brain is wired in a way that means empathy does not come naturally to her. She tends to blurt out exactly what she thinks and isn’t able to understand that it’s hurtful, not to say shocking, to be on the receiving end of her comments.

One reason why this situation is difficult for the mum is that it challenges her identity. Can she continue to think of herself as an empathetic person when she has a daughter who isn’t?  How can she have faith and confidence in her daughter, as a mother surely needs to do, when her own sense of self is built on her belief that she doesn’t hurt other people – and that matters?

A father who is passionate about rugby might have a similar difficulty if he has a son who hates sport and who feels – and looks – clumsy in his body. If the dad has developed his own sense of masculinity through being a flanker on the rugby pitch, his son challenges him to recognise there are other ways of being a man.

Time and time again, I find being a parent causes me to question the ideas I have about myself. Did I really take such pride in getting full marks in spelling tests?  Is my identity rooted in something as flimsy as that?  It would seem that is. Why else do I feel uneasy if my child doesn’t do the same?

We all emerge into adulthood with stories that we tell ourselves about who we are – clever, middle-class, well-liked, sporty, funny, musical, whatever….  And these stories are important. They give us confidence and a way of navigating the world of work into which we thrust our adult selves.

But if we have kids who aren’t well-liked or sporty or whatever our particular thing is, it raises a question. How would we have survived without that story from which our identity was formed? It’s a deep question. And it’s what we’re all exploring as we chatter away about whether what school our child is going to, whether our daughter is gifted and talented, whether our son has special needs..

Birmingham Rep will be the venue for Fertility Fest – the first event of its kind in the UK.  Produced by Jessica Hepburn and Gabby Vautier, it will bring together 20 writers, visual artists, theatre-makers, film-directors and composers alongside some of the country’s foremost fertility experts.

We will be talking about, and sharing art around, the diagnosis of infertility, IVF, donation, surrogacy, the male experience, egg freezing, involuntary childlessness and alternative routes to parenthood.

I will be crying

I will be there (speaking at 11.30am).  I think it’s highly unlikely I will manage to be there without crying. (I say that to prepare myself as much as anybody else.)

Other people might want to talk about the effects of fertility science on future generations and how far as a society are we prepared to go in our pursuit of parenthood. I want to be there because I want to stand in the same space as people whose deep longing to have children remains unfulfilled.   Grieving is inevitable.  There is no escaping that. But whatever else we feel, we do not need to feel alone.

• Book tickets for Birmingham’s Fertility Fest, which includes a performance of The Quiet House by Gareth Farr.
• Book tickets for London’s Fertility Fest on Saturday, 11 June 2016.

Day 26

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.

Jo Ind

My response is that I’m the last person to claim  that I “have it all”.  On the contrary, my life feels very precarious.

Yes, I do earn a living (just about), look after my family (just about), squeeze in some time for my own creative work (just about), put in some time with my charities (just about) – but it could all come crashing down at any moment.  I am hanging on in there by a thread.

This sense of the fragile eco-system – of doing nothing very well – is something I will be talking about with ChaplaincyPlus on Thursday 11 February.

ChaplaincyPlus supports professionals in Birmingham’s city centre, creating a space where people can consider what it means to work soulfully.

CityWomen, which is part of ChaplaincyPlus, will be hosting the event at St Philips Chambers, at 1pm.

I will be in conversation with Sarah Thorpe, who convenes CityWomen.  What we really want to tease out from those who are there, is how they manage the just-about-ness of it all.

Is the precariousness nature of our lives a symptom of trying to do more than we should be, or can hanging on in there by a thread be all all part of the glory?

• Order tickets for the free event Changing Patterns of Work – A Conversation with Jo Ind.

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.

First of all the treasure trove which is the Oxfam Bookshop on Kings Heath High Street, Birmingham will be celebrating its refurbishment.  Still cosy, still welcoming, it will be enjoying a brand new look.

Secondly, that treasure trove which is Katrice Horsley will be there telling tales in a way that only a national storytelling laureate can.

Thirdly, the theme of the morning will be motherhood and creativity (one of my top topics) – and I shall be there discussing it with Katrice and you too, if you would care to come along.

Do you see motherhood as the ultimate creative act – or something that makes it impossible to get on with your own creative work? What’s the difference between raising a child and making art?

We will be telling stories, reading texts and sharing anecdotes on the theme of motherhood and creation at 11am to mark the re-opening of the Oxfam store.

Anyone is welcome but please note the event is for adults rather than children.

• Motherhood and Creativity with Jo Ind and Katrice Horsley is on Wednesday 25 February 2015 at 11am at the Oxfam Bookshop, 110A Kings Heath High Street B14 7LG.

What should a mum do about swearing?

What is a mother to do? Do I tell my son it’s unacceptable to swear and forfeit pocket money whenever a foul word leaves his lips? Does that mean I have to clean up my own act? Do I want to do that? Could I? Do I tell him it’s sometimes acceptable for adults, but never for children? It’s OK in private, just not in public?

Cue Melissa Mohr and Holy Sh*t, a Brief History of Swearing… How I wish she had written it before.

This is an utterly delightful book. It’s beautifully written, witty and in many places laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also a serious book.  She looks her subject matter square­-in-the-face. Mercifully, she never resorts to being silly or coy, though she does acknowledge her own sensitivity to taboo and the words she herself finds hard to write down.

Swearing has a history

Mohr looks at the history of swearing, as in taking oaths (that’s the “holy” bit of the title) and at obscenities, those emotive words that tend to remind us we have bodies (that’s the “sh*t” bit).

She traces their stories, from Roman times, through to the Bible, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries right up until the present day, looking at how oaths and obscenities have evolved and how they are related to the culture of the day. It claims to be a brief history but it seems pretty thorough to me.

It’s worth reading for the chapter on the Bible alone. I learnt a great deal from that and not just about swearing. For example, Mohr asks the question – why does God swear? Every word God says is true, so why does he say to Abraham: “By myself I have sworn” in Genesis? And why does God command us to swear by him: “The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by him alone you shall swear.” (Deut 6:13)?

Mohr explains the role of swearing is related to the establishment of monotheism.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, God was one of hundreds of gods a person could worship and so he was in a quest to establish himself as the one true God.

Swearing is a key weapon in this campaign. When you swear by God, you acknowledge that he is omnipotent; he is the one that can see your actions, hear your words. If you swear by Baal, you acknowledge his omnipotence instead. That is why God asks his people to swear by him and why he swears himself to them, by way of example.

Taking oaths is a tool to establish monotheism

The taking of oaths, which is still part of our legal system and government today, is rooted in that tool to establish monotheism that goes right back to the days of Abraham.  How interesting.  (Well, that’s one way of putting my response. What I actually thought was “Blimey!”)

And while we’re talking fascinating anecdotes, listen to this.  Mohr takes us on a hilarious romp through the use of euphemism in the Hebrew Bible. She says it never refers to the genitals when hand, foot, side, heel, shame, leg or thigh will do.

Eve is made from Adam’s penis

She then quotes the scholar Ziony Zevit, who argues that, in the Genesis narrative, Eve is actually made out of Adam’s penis, in particular from his penis bone. Most mammals have a bone in their penis, a baculum, which helps with erections. Humans, spider monkeys, whales and horses don’t, but the other species can’t achieve erections through blood pressure alone and have a baculum to assist.

Zevit claims that the ancient Israelites would have known about anatomy, being familiar with skeletons, and would have known men and women have the same number of ribs.  Zevit thinks that in this story, the word “tesla” often translated as “rib” is actually a euphemism for genitals, as it so often was. What the story really means is that Eve was made from Adam’s penis. The baculum was taken from him and used to create his companion, thus in one neat myth you explain where women came from and why men don’t have penis bones.

Is swearing good or bad?

But enough of these tit-bits, I’m sure that what you really want to know is whether swearing is a good or a bad thing and how embarrassed we should be feeling when our children start saying: “Bugger.” (If indeed other people’s children do.)

Mohr does have a view, but she restricts her opinions on the rights and wrongs of using obscene language to the introduction and the epilogue. I am grateful to her for that. I am also grateful to her because through reading her entertaining history, I found myself developing my own thinking , so now I feel confident and robust in what I am passing on to my child.

When my boy was aged six, he came to me and said: “Mum. I really want to swear. Can I? Will you be cross with me?” I said: “That depends. Is it one of those occasions when only a swear word will do?”

“Yes,” he said.

“In that case,” I replied.  “Swear quietly and make sure you don’t repeat it outside this house.”  He came over and whispered in my ear: “F***ing Mrs Stapleton!”

And he was absolutely right.

• A version of this review  appeared in Third Way.