A Mother's Prayer
2025 • Memoir • Paperback • 276 pages • $18.99 • ISBN 9781966607397A Mother's Prayer is a striking memoir about an ordinary woman doing extraordinary things, persisting for the sake of her family, mainly her three children. Steve's mother, Anne, asserted her newfound womanhood while confronting a deadly disease. She battled cancer for thirteen years while raising three children and working three low-wage jobs. During the last four years of her life, she was a single mother after her husband fled New York to live in California with another woman.
Anne's family begged her to return to Vermont. She refused, believing a return home represented failure if she could not overcome a deadly disease on her own while raising three children.
In her weakest moments, as her illness persisted, Anne mourned the loss of her beauty and the touch of a lover, claiming, "No man wants this body." In her bravest moments, she wore bikinis at public swimming pools, scars exposed, her body a reminder that we all suffer.
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Voices That Resonate
- E Emily Carter Reader
This memoir held my attention from the first page. The honesty, emotional clarity, and courage behind every moment make it a book I'll return to again and again.
- J Jordan Smith Reader
A Mother's Prayer is filled with sincerity and meaning. It felt like listening to a friend speak their truth with vulnerability, grace, and undeniable strength.
- L Linda Reyes Reader
I was struck by the raw emotion in every chapter. It's a story that reminds you of the human capacity for love even in difficult times.
- K Kate Haughey Executive Director, Vermont Folklife Center
A Mother's Prayer renders an intimate portrait of an American family made extraordinary by one woman's quiet courage. Rand focuses on what might otherwise be unseen—the grace, endurance, and humanity of a mother whose strength shaped everything. In honoring her, Steve reveals the deeper truth and dignity within everyday life.
Photos from A Mother's Prayer
Quotes from A Mother's Prayer
- A home was ephemeral in my father's mind, merely a place to store food and to sleep, an icebox, a bunkhouse, an impermanent fixture that could easily be replaced like engine oil, like worn tires.
- My father sketched our family into a Norman Rockwell painting alongside all of its endearments and idealism.
- We were far too young and ignorant to understand our mother's dream of a pristine family and her need to have us sit for portraits without blemishes, without scars, without betrayals.
- As boys, our bodies were not holy temples nor were they evil. On the contrary, they were wonderment: how pliable, dexterous, willful and durable could our bodies become?
- There were many nights as a child I crawled into bed feeling hollow, a shadowy figure in a second family, vaguely corporeal, a body fabricated from the gray mist that appears once orange coals are extinguished.