Finding the community they’ve been looking for

THE PARENTS: Ray Rachlin, 35, and Asher Lerman Freeman, 34, of West Philadelphia

THE CHILD: Havi Eydl, born Jan. 1, 2023

THE NAME: Havi is short for Haviv, which means beloved in Hebrew. Eydl, a Yiddish name, means gentle.

They were committed to dating casually. That meant seeing each other perhaps once a week, discovering cultural and ideological touch-points: Judaism; antiracist and queer activism.

It was 2013, and they were young enough to pass as college students when they crashed a talk by a gender theorist that was meant only for the Portland State University English department.

Then Ray, who had moved from New York to Oregon for midwifery school, injured her back. “That wound up bringing us closer,” Asher recalls. “Ray needed support and intimacy.”

A few years later, Asher had top surgery; this time, it was Ray’s turn to jump in with tenderness and help. So when Ray, who uses she/they pronouns, completed midwifery school and planned to return to the East Coast, Asher faced a choice.

“I loved the forest and the mountains and the coast and my people,” says Asher, who uses they/them pronouns. “I also realized that Ray and I had something really good. It took some time; there was grief in that decision.”

Asher distinctly recalls one day — a bike ride in Portland from their own house to their mom’s — when the choice suddenly snapped into clarity. Ray had been a steady anchor through Asher’s gender transition and a parallel career-shift from working with queer youth to becoming a personal trainer.

“Having [Ray] in my life made me feel braver, like I could do more scary things if we were together. That moment, riding my bike, I thought: I want to marry Ray.”

The engagement — ”I’m ready to get married now, and I have jewelry,” Asher said — happened in December 2017; they married about six months later, on the Schuylkill River Trail, witnessed by five friends, including a toddler whose shoes vanished in the river’s current.

The ceremony was hasty and giddy. “We stopped at Reading Terminal in the morning and got cannoli and flowers. It was a really pure excitement that I have not experienced before,” Ray recalls.

Ray was already living here; Asher biked from Oregon to the East Coast that fall, making the transition in slow motion. “Ray moves through the world at a much, much quicker pace than I do,” they note.

They both wanted kids. Ray, who had been a birth worker since 2010, knew they wanted to be pregnant; Asher felt equally sure that they would not be the gestational parent. They asked a relative of Asher’s to donate sperm; after a year, the answer came back: No. Then another family member of Asher’s said yes.

“It was really important to me, at first, to have a kid who was genetically related to me,” Asher says. But after seven tries and one miscarriage — and each attempt was complicated, because the donor lived in a different state — they shifted gears.

A friend’s ex-boyfriend was eager to donate sperm. One attempt, two, three, four, without success. Ironically, as they struggled to conceive, Ray was at work on a book about queer family-building.

“It was rough,” they remember. “An isolating process. I’m an expert in queer fertility and I was not getting pregnant. It was very humbling.”

Asher concurs. “Every single negative pregnancy test, and watching friends conceive before us, watching straight friends get excited when they accidentally got pregnant, it still feels painful and hard; it still feels raw.”

They were planning to use the advance on Ray’s book — once she delivered the final manuscript — to pay for an IVF cycle. Then, after insemination #12, there were two lines on the pregnancy test stick.

The next nine months were a challenge to Ray’s sense of invincibility. “It was life-altering fatigue,” she says. “I had six births a month in my midwifery practice. The book was requiring 10 hours a week. I was so exhausted and so sick. This was the first thing I couldn’t just push through.”

Ray’s water broke on a Thursday, the day before the due date. When Saturday dawned with no contractions, they went to acupuncture, drank castor oil, took labor-inducing herbs, and used the breast pump.

“Within an hour, I was in labor. Once things started, it was hard and fast, but from my water breaking until the baby [arrived], it was 55 hours.”

Havi was born at 2:03 in the morning, at home in their bathroom, on the first day of 2023. Friends took turns staying at their house to help; others filled a stand-alone freezer with meals for the family.

“We were delirious and sleep-deprived,” Asher recalls. “And we both were very surprised by how much fun it was. We had awesome support. People cared for us.”

That support was made plain at the baby-naming after Havi’s birth, when friends, family, and congregants of congregation Kol Tzedek lifted their arms in blessing and welcome.

“It was a rite of passage for us into the queer Jewish parent community,” Asher says. “It was powerful to look around the room and feel so surrounded by people who were ready to love our baby and support us.”

Now, six months into their parenthood journey, both feel changed. “I feel more like myself than I have in years,” Ray says. Asher agrees: “I feel very complete, like this is who I was meant to be. I love moving at Havi’s pace; I love getting to see all the things that he’s learning.”

Ray’s book, Baby Making for Everybody, was published when Havi was 15 weeks old. Some parent-friends came over to celebrate with cake. “It was a surreal experience: This is the community I’ve been wanting, looking for, and needing.”

Asher holds tight to some counsel offered by another parent during the first trimester of Ray’s pregnancy, when the two were still nervous about another miscarriage.

“The friend said, ‘Nothing is going to be safe and perfect again. You’re going to be worried forever. This is the beginning of uncertainty.’ ”