Building, with hope, for the future
They wanted children. “Kids had always been part of my mind-vision,” Alanna says, though she wasn’t interested in becoming pregnant.
THE PARENTS: Alanna Sklover, 38, and Rebecca Kirzner, 37, of Mount Airy
THE KIDS: Bina Yael, 4; Eitan Shalev, born June 9, 2021
THEIR NAMES: Bina is named for Alanna’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who “preached kindness,” and for Rebecca’s grandfather, a driven worker who also loved to dance and sing. Eitan is named for Rebecca’s great-grandmother, a feminist and entrepreneur, and for Alanna’s grandmother, a calming, pragmatic presence in the family.
It was September 2003, and Hurricane Isabel dashed the East Coast forcefully enough to cancel classes at both their colleges — Goucher, near Baltimore, where Alanna was a junior, and the University of Delaware, where Rebecca was starting her second year.
They headed into the storm.
Rebecca boarded a train for Baltimore; the two wandered into a field in the relentless downpour, the sky seared by green lightning. “That’s where we had our first kiss,” she says. “We had this magical moment in the swirling winds.”
They’d met just a month earlier, at a Hillel leadership conference. Alanna had been out for years — she started the gay/straight alliance at her all-girls’ prep school, and even went to prom with another girl — but Rebecca was just coming to terms with her sexual orientation.
“Alanna was patient with me and pretty persistent, basically saying: It’s OK. We’re two women; we can date.”
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They did — through college and afterward, when Alanna landed a job at a synagogue in Wilmington so they could be together. At some point, they recall making a checklist for the coming years: Find an apartment. Get a cat. Start rabbinical school (for Alanna). Get engaged.
Those plans brought them to Philadelphia, where Rebecca was a Teach for America fellow and Alanna enrolled in the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. They got the cat. And in the summer of 2007, Alanna devised a scavenger hunt that wound through Old City to the restaurant FARMiCiA, where champagne, and a proposal, were waiting.
They married in 2009, a DIY wedding at the Abington Art Center; pals baked pies and played guitar, and Rebecca’s aunt designed a chuppah that included written blessings from their families and friends. Each table’s centerpiece nodded to a shared passion: favorite books, beloved films, places they’d traveled, college memorabilia.
Five years later, when marriage equality came to Pennsylvania, they stood in line at City Hall, obtained a license, and signed it in a small living room ceremony with 10 witnesses.
They wanted children. “Kids had always been part of my mind-vision,” Alanna says, though she wasn’t interested in becoming pregnant. She identified as genderqueer — the term nonbinary wasn’t really in use yet — and wondered “what it would mean to use these expressly biological female parts of my body.”
So Rebecca tried. And tried. After four years of unsuccessful attempts, the two realized their desire to have a child overrode Alanna’s trepidation about pregnancy and Rebecca’s disappointment about her inability to conceive.
“We got to a place where we were both like: All right, what is the path from here to having a kid?” Rebecca says. “We were more than ready to actually be parents.”
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So Alanna tried, and became so used to the pace of fertility treatment — blood tests, hormone injections, regular appointments — that when a nurse said, “You’re pregnant,” her reaction was, “You mean, for now? When will I really be pregnant? It took me so long to get out of the data-game: hormone levels and shots.”
Those early months blur in retrospect: the pregnancy, the 2016 election, the strain Rebecca felt in her work for HIAS, an agency that assists refugees. Bina arrived on her due date, in an unplanned C-section because the umbilical cord was wrapped under her arm and kept compressing with each contraction.
“I got to hold her first. I cut the umbilical cord and brought her over to Alanna,” Rebecca recalls.
Alanna’s sharpest memories are from a few days later: “Coming home from the hospital, the colors of the world looked different. Everything seemed heightened, more vivid. That moment of [realizing], ‘Oh, we’re a new kind of family now.’ ”
They wanted another child, but Rebecca, the more pragmatic of the pair, couldn’t figure out how to manage the conception process — the carefully calibrated injections, the numerous medical appointments — while commuting to her job in New York.
Then COVID-19 happened. “After our initial shock, we realized that it was, weirdly, the perfect moment for us to try,” Rebecca says.
Both of them — Alanna is the rabbi at Reconstructionist congregation Or Hadash in Fort Washington — were working from home. And though Alanna wasn’t able to attend any of the ultrasound appointments or the embryo transfer, she could identify with each stage of trying to conceive. “I had so much muscle memory from being the one who was pregnant the first time,” she says.
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The second round of IVF yielded good news, and once they told Bina, she announced the pregnancy to everyone, even strangers they passed on the street: “There’s a baby in my mommy’s tummy!”
It was a long labor: Rebecca went into the hospital — both kids were born at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania — on a Monday and, over the next two days, progressed gradually to 9.5 centimeters before her labor stalled. “He just wasn’t coming. They started to wonder if something was wrong, and the safe thing was to do a C-section.”
That period felt like a respite in the pandemic, they recall, a time when vaccination rates were climbing and social interaction felt a bit safer. They were able to have Eitan’s bris — the ritual circumcision at eight days after birth — outdoors, in person, with other relatives and friends participating via Zoom.
These four years have been a tumultuous ride: the birth of their first child in the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency. Activism, like that rally in D.C. against family separation, with Bina in a spit-up bib that read “Families Belong Together.” Then their second, born in the throes of a pandemic.
With both kids, Rebecca says, “We felt like we were building for the future, seeing hope rather than feeling despair for the way things were going. We felt like we were actively bringing something good into the world, planning for a time that could be better, for a future with hope in it.”