Welcome to my official website. This space is dedicated to connection, community, and the profound lessons hidden in our hardest seasons. Whether you are navigating your own difficult chapter, supporting someone you love, or simply looking for a reminder of what stays steady when life jerks the wheel, I am glad you are here. Pull up a chair, grab a good cup of coffee, and let's explore how to bloom in the places we never planned to grow.
Who is Rebecca Holder?
I am an educator, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a business owner, and a thirty-year cancer survivor.
In 1995, my life was moving perfectly according to plan. I was twenty-nine years old, balancing a toddler and a newborn daughter, still soft with that sweet baby smell. Then the steering wheel jerked violently out of my hands. A small knot below my collarbone, initially dismissed as a normal pregnancy cyst, revealed itself as aggressive, Stage IV Hodgkin’s Disease.
What followed was a clinical gauntlet: four rounds of experimental chemotherapy, a devastating relapse, a pioneering stem cell bone marrow transplant at UAB, and wide-beam radiation. I flunked out of remission, fought my way back to absolute zero, beat the odds, and finally went home to get on with my life and raise my babies.
But as any survivor will tell you, survival keeps receipts.
Thirty years later, the late-effects of the treatments that saved my life came back to collect their payment. The ensuing years required a preventative mastectomy, a voice-stealing thyroidectomy, and open-heart surgery to replace a radiation-damaged aortic valve.
In the years between those medical chapters, I lived a life that was impossibly full. I raised two children, built a career in education, earned a doctorate in Educational Leadership, married my childhood sweetheart, Ricky, and became a grandmother to identical twin girls who completely rewrote my understanding of joy.
Through it all, I learned that some of the best advice I ever received had been hiding in the common-sense family "isms" I grew up hearing on an East Alabama dairy farm.
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You can’t grind an axe on butter.
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Can’t never could.
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Root hog or die.
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Take the bitter with the sweet.
They sounded like ordinary Southern sayings at the time. Turns out, they were pretty good instructions for life.
My memoir, You Can’t Grind an Axe on Butter, isn't a story about having all the answers. It is an intimate, gritty, and often humorous look at what happens when life doesn't go according to script and figuring out how to keep living anyway. I still live in Alabama with Ricky, and I still believe in an unwavering faith, the fierce protection of family, showing up for the next play, and a great cup of coffee.
From Survival to Stronger Strands
My book, You Can’t Grind an Axe on Butter: What Survival Taught Me About Life, tells the story of what happened when life asked more of me than I thought I could carry. Cancer. A relapse. A stem cell transplant. Radiation. Motherhood in the middle of all of it. And the lessons I carried with me long after treatment ended.
One of those lessons came from the Hebrew word qavah, translated wait in Isaiah 40:31. Its roots carry the idea of strands being gathered or bound together, like a cord. One strand can only hold so much. Twisted together, strands become stronger.
I know what it feels like to reach the point when your own strength isn’t enough. I also know what it feels like to be held up by faith, family, doctors, nurses, friends, and people praying for you. When I couldn’t carry myself, they carried me.
Thirty years later, that lesson became Stronger Strands Foundation.
The book tells the story of how others helped carry me. The foundation is my opportunity to help carry someone else.
Stronger together. Never alone
