21 Miles

Jessica Hepburn is 43 and making sense of motherhood when you cannot become a biological mother. She decides to do something big with her life: swimming the Channel. During her year of training, she meets with women of different backgrounds to enquire about motherhood.

Quotes: 
"you find happiness through the people you choose and the people you love"

"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." But "people are most fulfilled when they have a passion." 

"nature is not a feminist. Like many women of my generation, I didn’t ever consider that I would have a baby before my thirties."

About feeling sad and jelouse: "echoes of love I had for my children. You only grieve what you have loved. I loved my children, I just didn’t meet them" 

"reasons being a mother is so important is because humans are happiest when they have connection with other people. " 

"And nobody, not a single person, writes to me and says: ‘You’re forty-three, go and do something big and have a fulfilling life without children instead.’"

"never having sex for fun any more, because sex is only about having a baby which never arrives".

From Camila Batmanghelidjh: "if you take another route [to motherhood] you will have to accept that there will always be a third mother in the relationship."

"it's grief that has driven us to [...] extremes".

Quoting Rilke: "The answer to life is to live the question."