Its because of Emersyn: Jaccob and Kylie Slavins love for their child shifted their reality ·

24 Jun 2024, 00:00

Editor’s Note: This story was included in The Athletic’s Best of 2020. View the full list.

A late May evening walk after dinner in North Carolina’s Triangle was followed by a visit to a nearby candy store along the way. Jaccob Slavin and his family blended right in with the crowd. He wasn’t the Carolina Hurricanes’ All-Star defenseman, but a dad with his family. His wife, Kylie, was on stroller duty as they navigated the aisles of a candy store in search of something sweet.

They made their way to the register and the checkout clerk peered into the stroller.

“Did you adopt her?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Kylie answered proudly, excited at the mere mention of the couple’s newborn daughter.

“Was her birth mom on drugs?” the woman followed.

Kylie’s smile evaporated and she flipped instantly into protective mother mode. She wanted to ward her baby girl from the judgment, the assumption, the stereotype.

“No,” she replied. They left the store. Jaccob and Kylie stewed over the exchange for the entire ride home as they peppered each other with rhetorical questions. How do you answer that beyond simply saying ‘no?’ What sort of person asks that question? Why did she assume drugs were involved? What is wrong with some people?

Epiphanies are inherently striking. But this one hit the Slavins unlike anything they had ever experienced. That store clerk, who could have been just as driven by curiosity as by malice, didn’t even see their daughter.

She didn’t see the puffiest adorable cheeks or eyes sculpted from the finest ivory. She didn’t see the blessing the Slavins prayed for fervently. She saw an issue, a stereotype. She saw validation for ingrained assumptions.

See, Emersyn is Black. Her parents are White.

The pieces of a frightening reality started coming together. Jaccob and Kylie recalled earlier moments, occasions that slipped by them, that hinted at this reality. The stares. The comments dripping with enough politeness to hide the slight at their core. It was on this drive when they began comprehending that they were up against something they didn’t fully understand themselves.

This was months before Atatiana Jefferson was shot by a Fort Worth, Texas, officer. Before Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by Louisville police. Before George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer and ignited a national uprising for racial justice. That candy store incident and the ensuing events have been an awakening for the Slavins. Their love for Emersyn opened their eyes to the experience of African-Americans in America. That enlightenment comes with terror. Nothing had prepared them for the realization that despite Emersyn’s privilege of wealth, her father’s fame, her mother’s guidance, the nice neighborhood she will live, the top-notch school she will attend, the love she will receive from home, even despite the devout faith they pray she develops, it won’t prevent her from the plight of being Black in America.

“I don’t think White people will realize Emersyn will grow up as a part of a group of people who are having injustices done to them,” Jaccob said. “If she ends up being a lawyer or whatever she wants to be, she could (still) end up being Breonna Taylor.”

It’s because of Emersyn.

They know it now. The Slavins believe in divine intervention, the will of God moving in their life for His benefit. It’s their best explanation of how they ended up with this beautiful girl, and for the growth they are experiencing as young adults.

When Kylie was a freshman at Lewis and Clark Community College in Godfrey, Ill., she worked in a classroom where most of the children were in foster care.

“A lot of the parents we saw did not care about those kids,” she said. They did not show up for school meetings and their kid’s individual education program meetings. Nobody was advocating and fighting for those kids. That is when I said I wanted to be that person.”

From that experience, she became convinced that she would either foster children or adopt. This was not a hope. This was not a maybe. This was a conviction.

Jaccob, on the other hand, never thought about adoption before. Growing up in Erie, Colo., a northern Denver suburb, he always figured he would have biological children. But he knew something about convictions.

He was a promising prospect with the USHL’s Chicago Steel in spring 2012 when he came across Kylie’s Twitter account. His attention was seized by how passionately Kylie shared her Christian faith with an audience of mostly strangers. He became even more enamored when clicking on her profile picture. Their first conversation came March 10 when there were around three weeks left in the USHL regular season.

There would be days after practice when he would return to his billet home, bored with the idea of doing homework. But what broke that boredom was talking to Kylie. They first exchanged numbers via Twitter. He admits to being young and already in love with her, his “pick-up line” being that he wanted to hear about her testimony.

“He was using God as an excuse to talk to me,” Kylie quipped. He never thought to mention that he was an NHL draft pick.

Jaccob and Kylie began a continual text conversation that would get them through bus rides, trips, days at school or long workdays. It was the modern technological love story with Jaccob declaring on the first day they texted each other that he was going to marry Kylie.

“Hold on, buddy,” Kylie recalls thinking.

His conviction eventually became hers. Even living many miles apart, their love grew to the point where Kylie knew she’d found her husband. And as they got closer to that reality, she needed him to convert to her side about adoption. It was a pretty important detail, a conversation that couldn’t wait until after they got married.

They were married in August 2015. Jaccob made his way to the NHL with the Hurricanes and as the couple talked through their future together, “God worked on my heart,” Jaccob said. They were on the same page about adopting first. Her conviction became his.

They started meeting with adoption agencies. In hindsight, they are appalled at how little was done to educate White parents about to adopt a child of a different race.

“(Adoption agencies) give minimal training on that,” Kylie said. “It’s ‘these are racial slurs you might hear and invasive questions you might get asked.’ But you are not taught about deep, systemic racism.”

Michelle M. Hughes, a Chicago-based adoption attorney, said every state has different adoption rules when it comes to transracial adoptions. Some states require education. Others do not. Some parents seek out education on their own. Others don’t make the investment.

“The people adopting might think a baby is a baby is a baby,” Hughes said. “It’s a very color-blind approach. It is very clear right now in America that a color-blind approach is not effective.”

Kylie still remembers the day she got the phone call. It was mid-April 2019. It was a rainy, overcast day in Raleigh. A nurse told her a child was about to be born and she needed to get to the hospital, which was two hours away. Jaccob was with the Hurricanes in Washington, D.C., for an Eastern Conference quarterfinal playoff series (a series they won on the way to a conference finals run).

The birth mom, who the Slavins met through an adoption agency five weeks earlier, had already said she wanted to make her baby available for adoption. But there is always a possibility that after giving birth, that connection would happen between a mother and child and plans could instantly change. And that was fine by the Slavins. They understood. Kylie told the birth mom during one of the meetings they would support her if she changed her mind and decided to parent. They assured her there wouldn’t be hard feelings. That she shouldn’t be concerned about the Slavins and do what’s best for her and the baby.

Kylie said it. She believed it. She was going to honor it. But it was going to be tough. She felt the anxiety as she drove through the rain to the hospital. This was going to end one of two ways.

She would hold a newborn baby, call Jaccob describing their blessing and make plans to bring their new addition home. Or she would drive two hours back with a broken heart, her vision blurred by tears and rain, after holding a baby and having to let go. It was all up to the birth mom.

The baby girl was born just before Kylie got to the hospital. Jaccob was on the team bus when he learned of her arrival. Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon offered Jaccob a ride on his private jet. Kylie met her for the first time in the hospital’s nursery. She had big full cheeks and deep brown eyes and a full head of hair.

“She is the most adorable baby we have ever seen,” Kylie recalled one nurse saying.

No truer words.

The nurse asked Kylie if she was adopting the baby. She didn’t know how to answer. When Kylie held the child for the first time, she was terrified the birth mother would change her mind. Not knowing if this would be the only time she got to hold this precious girl, Kylie savored every second.

“The love was so immediate.”

It’s because of Emersyn.

Kylie Slavin likes to take her daughter on walks throughout their neighborhood in north Raleigh. The awning of the stroller keeps Emerysn shaded. The clash of the green leaves against the Carolina blue sky keeps the 15-month-old’s attention. The ambient sounds — bristling leaves, muttered conversations, her mom’s panting — fill the baby’s ears. Emersyn likes the walks. It’s sensory overload.

Kylie fits the mold of a Millennial mom. Yoga pants. Earpods. Sunglasses. Pushing a stroller along meticulously paved trails weaving around manicured landscapes. She fits in the picturesque setting of White suburbia. She hardly noticed the hegemony before, but Emersyn changed that.

Catch Kylie on her walks now, she’s probably listening to podcasts like “Combing The Roots” or “Token Confessions.”

The education of Blackness is fully underway for the Slavins. She and Jaccob watch films like “When They See Us” and “Just Mercy” together, read books like “White Fragility” and “The New Jim Crow” and frequent websites like The Racial Equality Institute and Be The Bridge. Rachel Cargle is one of their favorite follows.

They are also part of a Facebook group that helps parents with children from different cultures. It was founded by Valarie Chavis — a Black woman raised in the suburbs who adopted two children from Ethiopia.

The Culturally Fluent Families group started in 2017 and now lists more than 6,000 members. CFF, as it’s also known, has a waiting list of more than 1,500 people.

Chavis is plugging a significant hole in the adoption industry. Chavis was not a bi-racial child but when her father remarried a White woman in the 1970s in Indianapolis, her life divided into two worlds. During the week, she lived in a White neighborhood and attended a predominately White school. On weekends, she stayed with her mom, who lived in a predominantly Black neighborhood on the city’s East Side. The constant culture-shifting experience left her wanting in both worlds. In 2009, she adopted two children from another continent and was again navigating the cultural differences in her own young family.

“My whole thing is how can I accelerate learning?” said Chavis, who is an organizational learning strategist who helps guide major companies through challenging issues. “Can I actually create learning? Can it not be just a chat group on a Facebook page? I am actually using it as a classroom and as a laboratory classroom. We post questions that make people think about their answers.”

Chavis presents questions to the group that don’t have a right or wrong answer. Some have no answer at all. Chavis’ goal is to create a problem in someone’s mind, such that they cannot sleep. That forces them to find a solution — for them.

“Our group is about introspection. We don’t have a lot of debates because it’s on you to figure it out,” Chavis said. “It’s your own learning process at your own pace. The way I can tell if you are doing the work is what I see you doing and if you change. You think differently. You act intentionally. You engage authentically.

“You will not be able to engage authentically if you have not done the first two and that is how you can tell someone is not doing the work.”

For Chavis, education is everything. She wants children in transracial adoptions to have a strong, positive cultural identity. She said there are times when Black or children of color, in general, grow up and reach a certain stage in life when they believe they are going to become White. There are parents in CFF who have asked Chavis and her associates “What’s wrong with that?” only to inform those same parents that it is not healthy behavior.

Hughes said there are times when White families adopt Black children and see themselves as just that instead of having a transracial dynamic. Ignoring the transracial component, she said, means that a Black child is going to view the world through a White lens and risk not knowing anything about their cultural and racial background.

Hughes explained why it is crucial to have these conversations at an early age. She said there might be White parents who are comfortable living in an all-White suburb. But that changes when you are the only Black child in that neighborhood. It leads to people asking why an adoptee is of a different race than their parents or why their real parents gave them up for adoption.

She described it as “you’re always being othered” because your race and identity are always on stage.

Adoptions involving children and parents of the same race will face questions at a later point, she said. Transracial adoptees encounter those juxtapositions much earlier. It is an even larger contrast if the adoptee is older than 8 and is aware of the cultural changes around them versus that of a newborn.

“The problem is some parents don’t think about what type of experience their child is going to have,” Hughes said. “They may like their setting, whatever that may be, and the police are going to be nice to them in their setting. Their neighbors are nice to them in their setting. They don’t think, Will my 16-year-old get pulled over by the police? Will the teachers in his school grade my child fairly?

“A good school might be an academically outstanding school but it may be an outstanding academically school for White children who do not have to deal with these racial pressures.”

Jaccob readily admits that Kylie is “further down the path” than he is when it comes to understanding what lies ahead for their daughter.

“We want her to know she is a Black woman being raised by white parents and that is going to be a different story than most,” Jaccob said, “and we want her to know who she is and her culture. We want her to know who she is in Christ and as a strong, Black woman.”

The Slavins know Emersyn will need actual Black people in her life. They already had relationships with Black people. But they want to have even more relationships and make sure they are organic and not forced. They have a relationship with Emersyn’s biological mother. She invited Emersyn and the Slavins to her church, which is all-Black.

For Kylie, it was a cultural shock to see the divides that exist even in the way different races worship. But it was also one of the best experiences imaginable. They found everyone at this church to be warm and welcoming without needing a greeting committee, which is something that exists at the Slavins’ current church. The energy was different, with people clapping, singing and smiling at the Black church.

They have been told that finding a diverse church might be a challenge but they do not view it that way.

“We are fine with going to an all-Black church,” Kylie said. “We’d rather come in as outsiders rather than Emersyn feel like an outsider.”

The Slavins have seen Emersyn’s birth mother on numerous occasions, one of them being when they had dinner on a late May evening right before entering a certain candy store.

That’s what made the “was she on drugs” comment so infuriating. They are trying to navigate the most emotional and psychologically challenging of waters. They understand the difficulties the birth mother faces, because how could you be human and not? To so easily write off this woman, who delivered them this perfect baby girl, as a statistic just felt wrong.

It certainly snapped the Slavins out of their self-proclaimed color-blindness.

“Too often in transracial adoptions,” Hughes said. “It is assumed every Black person comes from poverty. The reality is almost, for the most part, most adoptees’ birth parents come from poverty regardless of race.”

It’s because of Emersyn.

Knowing what they know now, the Slavins don’t let those candy store moments pass anymore.

They didn’t see then what they see now. They now recognize the existence of racism and how it is interwoven into society. They have to see it, because it impacts their daughter.

“Seeing Atatiana Jefferson getting murdered for playing a video game, my daughter will be seen as threatening,” Kylie says. “Everybody is like, ‘We love her and we don’t care about her skin color.’ You don’t. But there are people who do not know her who will feel threatened or accuse her of things. We need to teach others a lot of things. The balances come and we have learned from other Black people not to just teach her about racism. But to also teach her she does not have to back down because of that and that she still needs to use her voice.

“It’s not teaching her to feel sorry for enduring racism. But to be proud of who she is because (Black) people have endured for more than 400 years in this country and are still going. That is what we are teaching her.”

Even casual interactions with friends often include moments where Emersyn’s otherness is apparent. Like that day in a coffee shop when one of Kylie’s acquaintances noted how cute Emersyn was and added: “I want one.” All Kylie could think was, no, adopting a Black child is not some trend, her daughter is not an accessory there to be dehumanized.

They are quick to fire back questions that challenge the faulty premises they once didn’t recognize. Why would you assume that? Why did you feel the need to ask that question? What did you mean by that? They can’t let the microaggressions go unchecked.

They don’t go around calling people racist, either. That’s not the point. They just want to make people aware of their implicit biases, their unintentionally offensive commentary and even bigoted perspectives. They want to have the conversations because people need to think about these things. They can’t help but see their former self in the people who they sometimes interact with, who have no clue about the plight of African-Americans.

“There are some people who are not worth having that conversation with,” Kylie said. “But I think as (Emersyn) gets older, it’s worth the fight.”

The Slavins have begun to discuss what comes next for their family. They want more kids but their views on adoption have changed.

They don’t regret Emersyn. Not for a second. But they do question the system. They have learned it should be working toward reunifying families and not keeping them apart. What if all a mother needs is time and support, including a safe space for her child and the peace of knowing her baby is OK? The Slavins might want to provide that.

There are situations where a foster child has a biological parent who is fighting for custody but trapped in a hopelessly lengthy process to be reunited with their child. That is why the Slavins want to get involved with programs like Safe Families for Children. The non-profit organization’s mission is to provide homes for children in need and create an extended support system for families in the hopes of keeping them together.

“I don’t think we took the time to consider what if God is calling us toward keeping a family together,” Kylie said. “The answer I would have given a year ago is different than the answer I would give now.”

Emersyn Ruth Slavin is now about 15 months old. She is full-on walking and running and loves birds and airplanes. She laughs easily and says “Googa!” whenever her mom and dad use their Google Assistant.

Her first name was just something Kylie liked. She threw the ‘y’ in there, in place of the ‘o’, because Kylie said it looked more girly. Emersyn’s middle name, on the other hand, was a deliberate reference to the Book of Ruth, in the Old Testament of The Bible. It is a story that is, in part, about different cultures coming together.

That, and what does it say about Ruth that she is only one of a few women in The Bible to have a book named after her?

Jaccob and Kylie know they have made growth but are also beyond aware that this is a lifetime of learning –and a humbling experience. Jaccob compared it to living a life only to realize that there is a whole new world others experience that is a far more drastic reality than what he previously experienced.

“It is overwhelming in a sense because it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, we could have done so much to help in our own little circles,” he says.

Kylie said they have learned from friends how to better address certain situations. They have a stronger idea about what to do when the conversations are about removing Confederate statues or Black Lives Matter. She said their family has learned that in order for them to be heard, they must first listen.

They have learned to disarm people who disagree with the Black Lives Matter group and help them understand that it is about Black Lives Mattering, regardless of who is leading the cause.

“Even with us, we did not get to a point of understanding overnight,” Kylie said. “Probably five years ago, I would have thought (Colin) Kaepernick taking a knee was the worst thing because that was the world I lived in. Even if people have a little change and say something as small as, ‘I did not think about it in that way,’ that is a little change.”

Jaccob and Kylie said these things a day before Jaccob flew to Toronto and she flew to St. Louis for the start of the NHL playoffs. It is the bizarre dynamic where they want to be together but know more time apart means Jaccob and the Hurricanes are a step closer to winning a Stanley Cup.

Kylie was on Amazon earlier in the day looking at a mannequin head with Black hair so she could learn how to do Emersyn’s hair. At first, Kylie wanted one because she had a mannequin head as a child that conveniently disappeared without her parents ever really explaining the circumstances.

Black hair, as the Slavins have learned, is the one conversation people, regardless of race, ask about when they see Emersyn.

“That is the one thing every White person cares about is their hair,” she said. “They see you have a Black kid and ask what you are doing about her hair. You bring up systemic racism and they’re like, ‘No! No! No!’ But they really care about her hair.”

Jaccob and Kylie have had Black friends who have made recommendations and Kylie has spent countless hours online researching. When the day came to take Emersyn to a Black stylist Kylie knew she was going to be told that she did everything wrong.

And that held up but it was because she was doing too much. The stylist told her to scale it back and do a few other things instead.

“I went to (Emersyn’s) stylist three different times and she styled it to make it more interesting each time,” Kylie said. “She asked me, ‘Do you know how to plait?’ I was like, ‘Do you mean a braid?’ She said, ‘No. This is a braid. This is a plait.”

Even that conversation shows the disconnect that can exist with hair, let alone talking about race.

So Kylie plans to practice on that mannequin head with Black hair instead of on a toddler who can never sit still. Jaccob, who admits to not putting any product in his hair for at least 15 years, said he might have to also get one shipped to the team hotel in Toronto so he has time to practice, too.

It’s because of Emersyn.

(Photos courtesy of the Slavins)

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Its because of Emersyn: Jaccob and Kylie Slavins love for their child shifted their reality

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