USA Today describes a remarkable family in California.
Janet Kornblum begins her story with the mother, in 1968 at age 5, seeing the movie Oliver (excerpt):
“I walked out of that movie saying, ‘I’m going to adopt orphan children.’ I dreamt about it. I thought about it. I got books on orphans. I was consumed by it.”
Many of us forget our childhood dreams. Today, Belles, 40, lives hers. She and her husband, Jim Silcock, 41, have adopted 25 boys — boys who have been abandoned, abused, rejected and usually labeled unadoptable; boys from across town and across the world; boys with disabilities from autism to mental retardation to attachment disorders; boys now ranging in age from 3 to 25 who represent a panoply of ethnicities.
This is the Silcock family: a mom with a dream; a dad who is quadriplegic and has a love big enough to make his wife’s dream his own; and their children: 25 boys who had nowhere else to go.
“I tell people that it’s like any other family — except extremely large,” says Hunter, 16. When Hunter, who uses a wheelchair and has cerebral palsy, joined the Silcock family five years ago, he was considered borderline retarded. Today, he tests as gifted and has appeared on TV in three episodes of Boston Public.
The Silcock family is not like any other family. “There are obviously people all over the country who adopt individual children and groups of children with special needs,” says Adam Pertman, executive director of the not-for profit Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York. But “it is unusual for anybody to adopt this many children.”