Kelley Nikondeha is an adoptee and an adoptive mom to two children. She and her Burundian husband and children spend their time between the USA and Burundi, where Kelley and her husband founded Amahoro Africa. She currently serves as co-director of Communities of Hope, a community development agency, and as the theologian in residence for SheLoves magazine. Kelley is a warm and friendly person, who laughs easily and is eager to share her thoughts.
We wanted to speak with Kelley because of her four-year-old book, Adopted, in which she creates a theological framework for adoption. We were curious to speak with Kelley after reading it, especially since it puts adoption in a mostly positive light and makes adoption a metaphor for belonging across any kind of relationship. In Adopted, adoption becomes a lens for attaching to each other across tribal, racial, ethnic lines. Adopted speaks to a broader view of social harmony, but for the adoptee it can present a challenge: what do we do if our own adoption narrative is not as positive, healing, or hopeful?
We hope you “listen” to this interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, and hear yet another perspective from an adoptee who has had to ask those hard questions of adoption and yet continues to contribute to the conversation.
Aaron: Why don’t we start with you telling us a little bit about your personal adoption story?
Kelley: I was adopted when I was three months old through a Catholic adoption agency in Los Angeles. My birth mother had a plan to place me in this adoption agency and have a smooth transition into an adoptive family. Looking back I know that was really a blessing because there was a lot of trauma that I don’t think I experienced initially, it was a pretty smooth transition.
We celebrate my adoption day every year, every April 28th is when our family was born, and we celebrate it like a second birthday every year. I’m now in my fifties, so it’s always been a point of celebration for us. I was very blessed with parents who talked a lot about adoption. Oftentimes people would talk about how much I look like my parents; it was always this inside joke, will we tell them that I’m adopted or not? My parents didn’t take advantage of that in a negative way, they were very straightforward about it, saying, “If you ever have questions, we talk about it.” It was very comfortable. Adoption was not a dirty word, it was a very normal part of our family’s story.
Adoption for me is really my first sacrament. In the Catholic church we talk about sacraments as being a visible sign of an invisible grace. That framed my experience of adoption: what a grace that there was a place for me, that there were people waiting for me, that I had a place where I belonged.
Because the adoption happened under the auspices of the Catholic church I really did feel like this was my first sacrament of many. There would later be my first communion and my first confession, but I understood this to be the first grace in my life. As a young adult I began to wonder how you steward it. A sacrament is for the edification of the church, for the family and even beyond our church for the world. My understanding of belonging, if I could crack that open, would be a gift for other people.
I really believe that those of us who are adopted have a gift to give. We understand some things about the anatomy of belonging, things that are both good and hard, that we can share with our communities. We have a world that just doesn’t know how to belong well, I don’t even need to give examples. If those of us who are adopted could adapt our better experiences of how to create belonging and family and connection even without shared biology or shared ethnicity, that’s a gift we can give the world.
As I became older I came to realize that not everybody had my story. Like any sacrament it could be used for good but it also has the potential to be deeply hurtful and painful if misused. As a matter of fact, since the book was written I found a half-brother. I wasn’t looking for him, but he was looking for me. Our birth mother had him, and he was put up for adoption in a Catholic adoption agency where she lived at the time. Three years later, when she got pregnant again she was kicked out of her family and sent to live with someone in California. And then I was adopted through a Catholic agency in California.
Aaron: Wow, so what was his experience?
Kelley: His experience was the exact opposite. He was adopted into a family that didn’t know how to love him well. For him it was another family that couldn’t keep him, couldn’t love him, couldn’t embrace him. I hear a lot of people who say to me, “Oh, you think adoption’s great, you must want everybody to do it!” and I respond, “No, I don’t.” Because I know that it can be a weapon in the wrong hands. I think when the right people adopt it’s a sacrament, but if you put it in the wrong hands, well, we get what happened to my brother: he was abused and went into foster care and cycled through that. For him adoption has become the symbol of loneliness and isolation and feeling like he doesn’t fit anywhere. For me adoption is a sacrament and for him adoption is a deep trauma, a deep pain.
Aaron: As I read your book I was really curious how you’d interact with this particular conversation. A lot of what you were writing seemed to come from your positive personal experience of adoption. But when I speak with other adoptees I feel like I hear equal parts of what you’ve shared and what your brother has lived, so to hear both sides is really interesting.
Kelley: I did write from my own perspective, and I wanted to make a positive case. This is how I see it. I felt like the conversation at the time was missing that. I wanted to add another contribution, to say, “Well, here’s another way it can be experienced.” The challenge of writing the book is realizing that my experience is not the only one, it may not even be the predominant one. Of course, the more I told my story in public the more people wanted to sit and talk and tell me. I started hearing even more than I had already known about the ways in which adoption can be so painful, and wrong.
Aaron: One of the themes that’s strong in your book is that family is defined by daily, mundane, repeated tasks that build relationship. True relationships, true family is built through these shared practices, not biology. As you’ve met your brother, how has that view evolved?
Kelley: The daily ways that my parents showed up for me by making breakfast, picking me up from school on time, always being there for recitals and celebrations are the very things that made belonging stick for me. Durable hospitality made me feel so deeply safe.
The reverse is also true. My brother said this family never understood him. He always felt he was just out of step with them, didn’t fit in. While I was getting daily messages of, “You can trust us, you’re family,” he was getting daily messages that said, “You’re weird. You’re not like us. We’re the normal ones and you’re the abnormal one. Not only don’t you fit in with us, who knows where you fit?” He was getting messages that were traumatic, because he started to think, “Nobody’s going to want me. Nobody’s going to love me.” What that ended up doing for him was that he struggled to find love. You hear his story and you think, “Maybe adoption… man, maybe we should not be…”
One of the changes for me is that I do not want to be telling everybody to adopt. When I was younger, even as an earlier adult I would have told most people, “It’s a good thing, I’m going to tell you how great it is! I’m going to tell you my story, do it! Thoughtfully, yada yada, but do it!” Conversations with my brother and other people who have his story have really given me pause.
I don’t tell people to rush out and adopt anymore. I encourage them to think of other ways they can enact belonging in their communities and not to think that adoption is the only way or the best way. People want to be the hero in the story, but that impulse is destructive in the life of a kid who just wants to be loved and wants to belong. It’s given me a lot more pause about encouraging people to adopt because I’ve seen how it can go sideways and how painful it can be.
As adoptees we don’t get the choice. We’re thrust into this risky arrangement. That’s why I think a lot of times the parents have the onus to do the hard work because for adoptees adoption is just this passive thing that happens before we have a choice. And that’s why I no longer encourage people to adopt flippantly. It’s always part of a longer conversation.
There are times adoption is the thing that helps. But I think Christians rushed into it, and churches pushed them into it, this ideal of adoption, and the ones who were supposed to be most supported and buoyed by this were actually the ones who were the most traumatized and bruised by it. How can this thing that was a sacrament in my life have been a weapon in my brother’s? It forces me to be so much more careful in how I talk about it.
Aaron: You’ve clearly evolved in your thinking about adoption. How would you rewrite or update the book if you could go back? What pieces do you feel like you’d change?
Kelley: Adopted came out in 2017 and it was my best thinking and understanding at the time. But we continue to evolve, I continue to have conversations with adoptees and families, and I continue to raise my own adopted kids who are now 17. I’m never done thinking through this theologically and experiencing it. I would go back and add a lot more conversation about the role of trauma. I had a really light touch in this book. Part of it was I wanted to make my positive argument because that was not being heard at the time. Now I realize that my experience may not even be fifty percent of people’s experience.
What happens when adoption doesn’t go well – what do we do with that? I don’t have any more answers. I was already coming to realize it shouldn’t be the first thing we do but one of the last things when it comes to seeking shalom for families. I would lean into that a lot more.
I didn’t want to point fingers at certain church movements or certain people who were on the adoption circuit, the book was about sharing my perspective. But at some point you want to say, “You guys created an environment that was so unhealthy, what do we do with that?” These are people who are now living with the effects of a Christian perspective of adoption that I think hurt them. It is hurting people still. How do we have an honest conversation about – even repent for – the ways in which we talked about adoption at the expense of children who just needed a safe place in the world? I would grapple more with that.
I still have a really high view of adoption; I still call it a sacrament. But I think what I’ve come to is that it’s like the priesthood. Priesthood is a sacrament in the Catholic church but it’s not for everybody. There is a whole lot of preparation, a whole system of preparing somebody for the priesthood. It’s a serious call and requires serious preparation and vetting and equipping. Not everybody can come into adoption and do their own cultural work and raise a child who’s allowed to have that dual culture. I wish we saw adoption more like the priesthood where it is a beautiful thing, we should treat it like the priesthood with as much support and time and vetting and yes, honor.
It’s a beautiful thing when it comes together at its best, but instead we open the floodgates and say everybody should do it just like everybody should go on a mission trip to Africa. Everybody who can should adopt a baby. No, no, no, no, no. You want to treat it like a summer mission trip, and I want to treat it like the priesthood.
Aaron: I appreciate this, you are putting this book out there and you’re willing to talk about it, revise it, nuance it. I’m glad we had this conversation.
Kelley: As we continue to talk that’s my thought, that I’m adding to a conversation. Conversations keep moving. Hopefully there’s more nuance, more understanding. I’m never done learning what it is to be adopted. I’m never done learning how to think more deeply about this theologically. Just because I wrote a book doesn’t mean it’s the end of my thoughts, it’s just the beginning because it’s put me on the runway. In a sense, you go public and then you get to have these conversations. You and I never would have met otherwise. I hope more people recognize we can have ongoing conversations and it’s ok to say maybe I could have done that better, or this is what I would have changed. Isn’t that the project of being human and growing? Being transformed into the image of Christ, right?
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