I’m extremely excited to bring to you today a wonderful guest post by Laura Bynum author of Veracity.  I don’t want to give the secrets of the book away but a large part of the plot revolves around the love a mother has for her daughter.  Since today is Mother’s Day, I hope you enjoy the wonderfully personal and touching story Laura has to share with us below.

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Laura Bynum Guest Blog: Truth & The Warrior-Mother

I became my best self the moment my oldest daughter was born. Well, not quite then. About three months before, when, for reasons I won’t elaborate on, I was required by this best part of myself to separate from my ex-husband while being six months pregnant. The divorce was final the day OJ made that infamous white bronco run. Eight days later, my daughter, Alex, made her way into the world through me, and I became, happily, poignantly, something else. Something greater. To sum, I became an action hero.

I might not have been able to leap tall buildings in a single bound or bend steel with my bare hands, but I could go seventy-two hours without sleep and hook thick bites of banana from the tracheas of all three of my children. In the thick of a hot August, I could drive a hundred and twenty miles per hour on a highway, weaving carefully in and out of traffic and through blocked intersections, to make sure my twins were extracted from a babysitter’s locked car. I could walk out of a close relative’s church, toting my twelve-year old behind me, when the minister began preaching hate for homosexuals, and show her the power of protest, and what standing up for what you believe looks like. I could show my girls that dreams aren’t meant for the solitary confinement of our minds, but that they need air and realization. I could take my own medicine, and write.

My first novel, Veracity, was the result.

Alex was my model for the girl named Veracity (the daughter of Harper Adams, protagonist). It was Alex’s face in my head when I wrote the scene where Harper is screaming herself free in the old farmhouse, using her daughter’s forbidden name as the key to an unshackled voice, and therefore, an unshackled mind. In the few times I’ve been asked to read this chapter, I’ve not once been able to do so without misting up, my voice wobbling. For the first three years of Alex’s life, it was just the two of us together in the big world, and this experience is reflected in this love story between this mother and daughter.

In Veracity, Harper Adams is an important cog in the workings of a totalitarian society. Her position provides her and her daughter their basic needs and a much-touted security. For too many years, Harper goes to work for this government, helping them sustain a regime of violence and fear in exchange for the unspoken promise that her child will have a place to live, won’t be killed, won’t be tortured, and so on. It’s an understandably tough decision for Harper, seeing as the price of leaving such a system could be death for one or both of them. Mother and/or daughter. But what Harper comes to understand is that, by not joining the resistance, she is further enslaving Veracity, and binding her to a future as miserable as her own. The question she finally asks of herself, and answers, is this: Is security worth the loss of freedom? And is there really any security to be had in a system whose cost is that which makes you ‘you’?

I have been overwhelmed by the number of other warrior-mothers/action heroines who’ve written to tell me how much Veracity has meant to them. I think part of the reason this book has resonated so strongly with these readers is that we have been on the razor’s edge of this battle for too long. I’m talking about the battle for our children’s cognitive freedom. The battle over their thoughts and opinions, over their critical thinking skills and political, financial, and even religious leanings. We live in the most mediated society in history. Marketing and public dialogue have begun to blend. News and hate speech. News and entertainment. It’s become a game of ‘follow the loudest, angriest person in the room’, or, ‘you’re only valid if you’re wearing, thinking, doing, believing ‘x’…’ It’s been hard to put our proverbial fingers on the problem, which I believe is this – we’ve been taught to stop looking for truth. Which is exactly why I named my novel as I have.

I say it’s time to suit up. Get out those shields of knowledge and those swords of self-awareness, and teach your children how to use them. After all, (and as I recently saw on a bumper sticker), ‘No quiet woman ever made history.’

Freedom was Harper’s choice for her daughter and, wow, what a maelstrom of response did this choice invoke. Thank you, warrior-mothers out there, for your hard work and diligence. I hope that by reading Veracity, it was helpful to know that you are not, and never have been, alone.

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Laura, thank you for visiting it was a pleasure to host you!  Watch for my review of Laura’s novel Veracity tomorrow.

Happy Mother’s Day to all, I hope your day is filled with celebration and appreciation.