A Mother's Prayer
2026 • Memoir • Hardcover • $26.99 • 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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10% of book sales go to the American Cancer Society.
"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."
— Kate Haughey, Executive Director of the Vermont Folklife Center
"A Mother's Prayer is a touching memoir of adolescence in the 1980s amid grief and loss. Rand's carefully selected anecdotes form a picture of his childhood and young adulthood, his mother's own youth, and the bittersweet realities of growing up amidst the looming loss of a mother. Sprinkled with a vivid sense of time and place, Rand paints a gripping and at times joyful account of the in-between moments a family can face in great struggle."
— Jenna Danyew, Bridgeside Books
"A Mother's Prayer is a testament to how the bravery of an ill parent can lift their children to be stronger than they ever thought they could be. The experience of being the observer of a loved one going through immense pain, yet also observing them walking tall and proud, holding their dignity as the world and the sickness try to wrench it away—such strength and power of the soul is magnified in the children. Rand has immortalized the life of his mother, a soul-powered parent full of strength, conviction, and fearlessness. Her children battled the disease by proxy, and like carbon under pressure, the children who emerged are precious gems, forged in fire, a mother's pride."
— Jacqueline McCarty, Educator & Writer
"In telling this deeply personal, family story, Rand shares the painful narrative of witnessing his parents' marriage end, his father leaving their home in western New York to move to California with another woman. He recounts numerous detailed episodes of growing up in the 1980s, a confusing time for his childhood self to grasp what was happening both for his family as a whole and for his mother, who would disappear for periods to undergo surgeries and cancer treatments."
— Lisa Scagliotti, Editor of Waterbury Roundabout
Listen While You Read
A Spotify playlist curated by Steve to accompany A Mother's Prayer. Scan the code or follow the link to open it on Spotify.
Open Playlist on SpotifyPhotos 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.