Author Marion Crook of Gibsons has recently published a book on the subject of adoption, Thicker Than Blood: Adoptive Parenting in the Modern World (Arsenal Pulp Press). This is not her first tackling of the subject – 25 years previously she wrote a book about teens and adoption, The Face in the Mirror (updated in 2000). The need for such a book became painfully obvious to her when her own two adopted kids were growing into their teens. The book included 50 interviews with teenagers about their thoughts and their issues. She discovered that some respond well to counselling, while others live with abandonment issues all their lives.
But when she suggested to her publisher that she write another update, they both realized that times had changed. Adoption has emerged from its dark, secretive history, and these days adopted children can track down their birth mothers on the Internet. LGBTQ and single parents who adopt children are now more common. Yet challenges linger.
“That first book still sells,” Crook said, “because there are timeless problems. The biggest one for teens is not knowing who their birth parents are.” Teens may love their adoptive parents and not want to leave them, but they still want to know more about their birth parents. “We can do harm with secrecy,” she said.
And what identity does an adopted child of another race have in society? Is the child’s identity defined by his birth parents or his adoptive parents?
“They have to learn to dance in both cultures,” Crook noted, acknowledging the challenges her family faced with her own Aboriginal adopted son.
Crook has a PhD in education and has had a career as a community health nurse. She gives a startling and well researched history of adoption – startling because consideration of the rights and wishes of the child were long ignored. She tells of her own rage when she learned that unwittingly she had been part of what is called “the sixties scoop,” the 1960s government practice of taking Aboriginal children from their birth parents and placing them in non-Aboriginal families.
Crook explores issues that every adoptive parent and child must face with honesty, and she references her material in detail. Her personal experiences highlight the book, but they do not take over.
Thicker Than Blood can be found at Talewind Books in Sechelt for $18.95.
