Kirsty Woods

Sunday, 25 July 2021

We circle the Arch of Remembrance, the war memorial in the park. It is a war of attrition, this trying to get you to nap. Your little head bobs up and down, little grey rabbit ears on your hat flapping gently. There is too much to interest you, your senses assaulted from every angle with noise and colour and pattern. So we stop our walk around the park at the memorial and I just circle. Around and around. There are wood pigeons cooing in the trees. The high pitched call of a bird I cannot name. I pause to let you listen before carrying on, steadily circling this monument of sacrifices. Gradually, your muttering and grizzling quietens and your little grey head rests gently on my chest. You are asleep. The battle won. I stop to rest on a bench but you, as if sensing my surrender to tiredness, start to stir, ready to wake again. So I carry on walking, circling the memorial, as if pulled into orbit by a gravitational force I can't resist.

'Remember in gratitude', the engraving above the arch reads. 'All who served and strove and those who patiently endured'.

There is no comparison of course, no true similarities between the battles fought and the losses suffered by these men whose unspoken names are celebrated by this monument. Nor of those who continue, to this day, to fight in wars across the globe. I am not so arrogant to assume that there is. But I feel a kind of comfort in the prescence of this giant arch of rock. It is a visual symbol of this very idea of 'patient endurance'. It seems to acknowledge battles of a different kind, albeit without pomp and ceremony.
It is guarded by iron railings, topped with brass finials. The gates into it are locked. It is sacrosanct. Entirely separate and untouchable but right now its energy is palpable. I have walked past it so many times on walks like today and barely registered it, save for it's size and the fact it seems to be a magnet for personal trainers and yoga fanatics to work out on the path which leads up to it. Yet, today, for some reason, it calls me in. I circle again, stopping frequently to look up and read the inscriptions. As if seeing it for the first time.

'I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand'. Jerusalem rings out in my head. I remember myself in another park, in another lifetime. A girl in my 20s. Last night of the proms, soaked in rain and watered liberally with beer and nourished by the rousing chorus of my girlfriends around me. I sang the words then but did not appreciate their gravity. How very distant that person feels now. How very ignorant she was of what lay ahead. Good things and bad.

Government rhetoric throughout this pandemic has called upon the metaphor of war. Whether its really an apt or appropriate analogy to draw is up for debate of course, but there is no denying that this situation has faced us all with daily battles of our own kind. This certainly feels like a kind of war. And there have, undoubtedly, been losses. We have all been enlisted to fight with small, every day sacrifices and means of attack. We have been asked to show resilience. To think of others as comrades needing our protection.

I am heading back to my battle ground now. You have woken up. Your little cheeks pink from the cold but giving the smallest smile as I kiss them. We stop circling and start to walk back home. I wonder what war will lay ahead of us between here and bedtime.

I don't want to feel this way about it. 'I want to enjoy my children, not endure them', I told my husband the other day. 'Pithy', he said. But there it is. That's how it feels. Each day a battle. My little allies sometimes feeling like the enemy. My own thoughts and feelings of inadequacy torturing me. A bombardment of guilt. Each day the battle lines are drawn, the advancing battalion of three small people who weaken my defences steadily with repeated requests for snacks and tv and attention at all costs. Repeated skirmishes between your elder brother and sister as they fight over toys and territory. And each day I feel the weapons at my disposal less effective at countering the barrage. I will not cease from mental fight nor shall my sword sleep in my hand. It will not sleep, but it is blunted nonetheless. My body is weary. My skin is literally scarred with the scratches and bites and pinches where you have tried to seek comfort from teething gums. My mind feels shell shocked.

I want to serve and strive. To endure this situation with the quiet patience that surely a good mother should feel. I want to stand strong and proud like the limestone of the war memorial in the park. But sometimes I wonder how much longer this struggle will last and just how much fight I have left in me. This writing is my memorial to this time. A testimony of the struggles that I, like thousands and thousands of mothers, have faced over this past year. It is my own anthem of remembrance and I hope that, one day, I will feel I can sing it out loud, a chorus as rousing as that girl singing Jerusalem in the park twenty years ago.

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