Sons of Other Fathers

Adoption is often described as a journey—but for Rick Parks and his wife, Joni, it was a full-throttle emotional ride marked by hope, fear, heartbreak, and grace.

In Sons of Other Fathers, Parks recounts the deeply personal story of building a family through adoption in the late 1980s and 1990s, a time when laws, social norms, and expectations around adoption were very different from today. Through vivid scenes, candid reflection, and lived experience, he brings readers inside two profoundly different adoption journeys—one closed, one open—revealing how each shaped his children, his marriage, and his understanding of fatherhood.

This memoir is not a guidebook or a checklist. Instead, it is an honest, compassionate exploration of what it means to love a child fiercely while navigating uncertainty, loss, and questions that have no easy answers. Parks captures the quiet moments and seismic ones alike: the questions children ask, the silences adults carry, the fragile trust between birth parents and adoptive families, and the lifelong impact of decisions made in moments of vulnerability.

At its heart, Sons of Other Fathers is a story about resilience, love, and the many ways families are formed. It offers reassurance to those considering adoption, validation to those living it, and insight to anyone who wants to better understand the emotional terrain of modern parenthood.

Rick Parks is a retired insurance company executive who now teaches Risk Management and Insurance part-time at Marian University of Wisconsin. While Sons of Other Fathers is his first book, Rick has always had a love for reading and writing in his leisure time. He was a frequent blogger during his insurance career and has been published in several business-related journals, usually on topics related to leadership, resilience and living your best life.

His next book project, Son of a Son of a Storyteller, continues the theme of sons and grandsons; by sharing family stories spanning from his master storytelling grandfather to experiences he has had in his own life