On Saturday morning, two dedicated parents, Rachel and Emily, will start their day like any other, having breakfast with their 16-month-old daughter, Ava, and focusing on their parental duties. However, their day will take a dramatic turn as they prepare to compete in the Octagon at a major mixed martial arts event.
Emily, 35, will face a formidable opponent in a match that could be her retirement fight. Eight fights later, Rachel, 36, will defend her women’s bantamweight championship against a former champion. This is arguably the biggest night of their professional fighting careers as a unit, with a title defense and a bid to stop a losing streak.
As MMA fighters for nearly half their lives, fighting is normal for Rachel and Emily. But being a married couple with a toddler and also being professional fighters has presented a new world of challenges beyond training camps and fistfights. While they may have mastered the art of preparing for the possible damage that can happen inside the Octagon, they are still learning how to navigate the nuances of parenthood while maneuvering around criticism of being in a same-sex marriage.
“It’s all about balance,” Rachel said in a joint interview with Emily. “We’ve learned how to navigate having a relationship in MMA. We’ve had to learn how to leave the job at the gym and be partners at home without bringing emotions into it. That was a big challenge, and now our new challenge is being fighters who are parents.”
Former women’s bantamweight champion, Sarah Taylor, knows Rachel more than most. She went from coaching her on a reality TV show to facing her in the Octagon. The two remain friends today, and Taylor is proud of her former pupil evolving into a world champion. She also sees how sharing a fight card with her significant other can be as challenging as defending a title on Saturday night.
“I don’t think you can balance it, you compartmentalize,” Taylor said. “It’s too much to take in when two people in a relationship are on the same card. You can’t get sidetracked because fighting is such a self-centered sport. You want to be there for them, but you can’t because you still have a job to do. You have to be selfish.”
If Emily had it her way, she wouldn’t share Saturday’s fight card with her wife. It’s not that they haven’t fought on the same card before, though. This will mark the sixth time Emily and Rachel have been on the same fight card. They weren’t a couple at the earliest of those events, but each time they shared a card, they grew closer. Both fighters hold a 3-2 record in fights where they’ve shared a card.
“It’s difficult for me emotionally,” Emily told us while noting that having her fight before Rachel’s will alleviate some of the stress. “I can worry about myself and fight first. Then I can worry about her. If it were the other way around, I don’t think I could focus on myself to get ready.”
Rachel and Emily fighting together wasn’t something the event organizers purposefully set out to do for storyline purposes. It just so happened that their timelines to compete aligned, and Rachel nudged her wife to ask to be placed on the same card.
“I felt like it would be fun and easier for our coaches and family, they get a two-for-one deal,” Rachel said. “We’re on a unique journey together, and I think it’s really cool to make these memories. It was my idea, and she just rolled with it.”
Emily nodded in agreement, though she didn’t look as confident.
“It’ll be fun fighting together as moms,” she said.
Interestingly enough, fighting is what brought them together in the first place. Rachel and Emily had become friends in 2013 while fighting in a smaller MMA organization. While Rachel was smitten with Emily, Emily had yet to come out publicly and had a boyfriend. In 2015, Rachel invited Emily to train with her in Colorado, and by 2016, they were in a relationship. It would be Emily’s first same-sex relationship. By 2022, they were married, and their daughter was born a year later.
When Emily came out to her parents, they went through an adjustment period. Eventually, they came around to accept the union of their daughter and Rachel. However, not everyone in the family was as accepting.
“I no longer speak with my sister because of my sexual orientation,” Emily said, the pain of their distance felt through her words. “Our relationship has suffered, but the rest of the family has accepted us.”
Rachel’s journey to Emily started as a teenager. “I was living two different lives,” she said of her past. Rachel remembers herself as a “tomboy” growing up. She had a boyfriend, but also had romantic relationships with girls that she hid from her family. By her senior year of high school, Rachel knew it was time to tell her parents that she was gay. Unfortunately, coming out to her mother didn’t go as well as she had hoped.
“It really tore us apart for a while,” she said, noting that her mother threw a Bible at her when she heard the news. “She thought it was a phase I was going through and would eventually end.”
It didn’t end. Instead, years later, on an episode of a reality TV show, Rachel shared with her castmates how coming out affected her relationship with her mother. Having Rachel’s sexual orientation and her family conflict broadcast into homes across the country made her mother realize that she wasn’t going through “a phase.” This was her life. Rather than fight it, Rose let her guard down to learn the parts of her daughter that were hidden from her. Today, their bond is stronger than ever, and Rose plays an instrumental role in her granddaughter’s life.
Unfortunately, some people aren’t welcoming of the couple. Rachel and Emily’s social media accounts are filled with people negatively commenting on Ava and direct messages questioning their marriage. A few MMA fighters have been vocal with their criticism, including one of Emily’s opponents on Saturday.
During her reign as champion in 2022, she quipped that she was the event’s “first mom champ” due to her giving birth to her daughter. The words were targeted at another champion who is a parent in a same-sex marriage but didn’t give birth to the child.
Those words still rub Rachel the wrong way. “[I can’t believe] that another female fighter had the audacity to say she was the true mother champion,” Rachel said. As part of a tumultuous rivalry that dates back to their shared tenure on a reality TV show, the comments have added gasoline to the fire underneath Rachel.
“I don’t mean it like [Rachel’s] not a mother,” the opponent told us on Wednesday. “I just mean that Emily’s a hell of a woman for going through those nine months of having that baby. And she knows what it’s like.”
“I’m just going to have to shut her up,” Rachel said.
To shut her up, Rachel will have to be at her fighting best. When preparing for the event, Rachel and Emily’s striking coach, Justin, said that the couple deliberately kept their camps separate. If Emily trained in the morning, Rachel would take care of the parenting until her wife came home. They would then switch while the champion honed
Leave a Reply