The Other Rapinoe

Home, by contrast, was chaos: a revolving door of half-siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. “My family unit is like, ‘If you’re blood, you’re family, and if you’re family, anyone can live in this house,’” Rachael says. Brian was in and out, too, between stints in juvenile detention facilities and drug rehabs across the country. He first got arrested at 16, for bringing meth to school. By 18 he was using heroin. “There was a lot of shuffling and substance abuse in the family,” Rachael says. “I could tell it was serious, and kind of scary, but we didn’t really talk about it.” 

Brian had a son who became Rachael and Megan’s de facto little brother, joining the household along with Denise’s two children from a previous marriage, and her youngest sister, who effectively became Rachael and Megan’s big sister. Their mother meant well, but her attention was fractured. She was “going to take care of anyone in our family that needed help,” Rachael says. “No questions asked, and definitely not checking in on, you know, how it was affecting us kids.” It was indeed affecting them: By the time Rachael was in high school, she began having panic attacks. Denise would find her in the middle of the night, wide awake, lying on the kitchen floor, and just tell her to go back to bed. “We didn’t have the tools to deal with anxiety,” Rachael says.

Denise Rapinoe, née Kimball, was born in Texas, the second oldest of eight children. When she was seven, the family moved to San Bernardino, California. She says that her father, a Korean War veteran, may have been bipolar, and was definitely an alcoholic. At 18, she left home to get married and moved to San Diego. By 23, when she met Jim, then a 29-year-old commercial fisherman, Denise was a divorced mother of two. “She sort of had to learn to roll up her sleeves and just keep moving forward,” Rachael says. 

Rachael and Megan inherited their mother’s tenacity; nowhere did it manifest more clearly than athletics. From an early age, they knew that sports would be their way out of Redding, which by the mid-2000s had become a conservative stronghold in the otherwise blue state, with militias and secessionists dotting the countryside. Rachael initially didn’t want to go to college with Megan, who got some big offers that Rachael didn’t. But Megan was still so shy that Rachael didn’t want to leave her. They started telling schools that if a program wasn’t recruiting both of them, they weren’t interested. 

And so, in 2004, the Rapinoe twins accepted offers from the University of Portland. That fall, Megan was invited to play in the FIFA U-19 World Championship, in Thailand, and deferred her entry to UP until spring. Rachael went alone to Portland, where intense practices, dining hall food, and a genetic predisposition to anemia sent her iron levels so low that she could barely run, let alone play soccer. When Megan arrived in January 2005, she came out and embraced the city’s thriving LGBTQIA+ scene. Rachael, struggling with far more than low iron, embraced the church. 

Rachael had begun secretly dating another woman on the UP soccer team, and it tortured her. “It was very confusing, because I was raised Christian and I didn’t really have a lot of language around gay and lesbianism and same-sex [relationships],” she says. When they were together, Rachael was happy; when they were apart, she “just had a lot of shame.” She began attending a charismatic church in Portland where congregants gathered to help her “pray the gay away.” The church became a refuge for Rachael during her “more intense bouts of sadness or confusion,” she says. “They thought they were praying the sadness away for me, protecting me from my demons.”