The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Personal Journey of Peace Building From Author Laura Davis
“The white blanket barely rose and fell with her breath. How had she gotten so small? Could she really be the same woman I’d loved as a girl? Hated as a teenager? Characterized as a monster? Turned into a sometimes-friend? Mom and I had done better than anyone witnessing our estrangement had expected. Better than we expected. I’d invited her to move to California, and she had come. When we signed those papers years before, it had all been theoretical. Become her medical power of attorney? Sure. Now it was real…her life was in my hands.”
In a mother-daughter memoir that reads like a complex, multilayered novel, author Laura Davis closes a decades-long chapter in her own life. “My mother was a dramatic, incredibly complicated, loving, challenging, and dynamic woman,” Davis said. “My mother wanted to be the sun and she wanted me to be a satellite revolving around her.” The title of the book, the Burning Light of Two Stars, represents the intensity of two powerhouses bumping up against each other. It was never going to be easy between them.
Davis takes on the role of caregiver at the end of her mother’s life, but how do you forge a relationship with someone who has become your nemesis? In healing the relationship with her mother, she had to get beyond the microcosm of this particular mother-daughter and had to start looking at her mother’s life from a much broader perspective; examine the forces that had shaped her, the family she had grown up with, the epigenetics of trauma passed down through the generations and through the cultural line. Davis learned to see her mother as an imperfect — in some ways tragic — and loving human being.
“One of my big goals was that I didn’t want the book to be about a villain and a hero. I really wanted both of us to come across as flawed, honest, real.” As she developed the story, her mother became more human, and Davis became more vulnerable on the page. Like seeing things through the rearview mirror, Davis said, “Memoir writing is about looking at the past from a different vantage point. The eyes of wisdom, of maturity. All the stories I had always told about this troubled relationship with my mother, I realized they were just stories. And they were set in stone by me to make myself right.” Davis had to face some of her own missteps in the relationship, her own rigidity in needing to hold her mother up in this certain box as the villain in her life. “She wasn’t a villain at all. She was a loving mother and she really did her absolute best with all the resources that she had. It took many years for me to be able to see her that way.”
Davis’ hope by sharing her journey of reconciliation is that the story will be a model proving that even when things seem absolutely impossible, there is the potential for change in ways we might never anticipate. “My mother and I had a very dramatic rift, and she betrayed me at a really critical time in my life.” Yet Davis had a deep hunger to try to be there for her mother when she needed support the most. “Taking care of her was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And also incredibly rewarding, even while going through the motions of doing the right thing, being a good daughter.” On the inside she was often in turmoil, filled with resentment, and the dementia would trigger old wounds. “But I wanted to fulfill this commitment I had made to her.”
Davis published her first book, The Courage to Heal: For Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, over 30 years ago. She has also published Becoming the Parent You Want to Be and I Thought We’d Never Speak Again: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation. The Burning Light of Two Stars is her 7th book, and it took her over 10 years to write. “The themes in this story I’ve been writing over the course of a lifetime. Themes of estrangement and reconciliation, complicated family relationships, trauma of childhood sexual abuse. This is a culmination of all the other work I’ve done.”
Davis talks about her book in a virtual event via Bookshop Santa Cruz on Tuesday, October 26 at 7:00 pm. Here’s the link to the event: bookshopsantacruz.com/laura-davis
Featured photo contributed by Laura Davis
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