Meant to be a mum: We adopted 7 kids thanks to Facebook
Pam and Gary Willis are parents to 12 kids after spotting an advert on Facebook…
Imagine approaching your 50s, having raised five of your own children, helped look after the grandkids and fostered countless youngsters who needed a loving family. You’d surely be exhausted and well and truly ready for an empty nest!
That’s the situation Pam and Gary Willis found themselves in, ready to retire from repeatedly opening up their home, providing support and love to those in need. Back in 2019, the Californian couple were about to say goodbye to their last child leaving their six-bedroom home. Only Pam, now 50, had spotted a Facebook advert and knew she had to help.
It was a post searching for a permanent home for Adelino, Ruby, Aleecia, Anthony, Aubriella, Leo and Xander. The seven siblings had been in foster care for over a year after tragically losing their parents in a car accident. Miraculously, all the kids had survived.
‘I can’t explain it – I just knew I had to be their mom,’ Pam told a magazine, and she couldn’t stop looking at the children’s faces.
She never discussed it with Gary, but tagged him in the social media post and, despite thousands of people already applying to help the orphaned kids, Pam put their names forward.
The siblings had already been through so much, having struggled for food and having lived in homeless encampments before their parents – who had both battled addiction – died.
But in April 2019, the children were matched with Pam and Gary and moved into their Menifee home in June of that year.
Pam said that the younger kids were easiest to connect with. ‘I think they didn’t quite trust that we were real. Like maybe we were going to go away,’ she said. The children had trouble sleeping at first, and suffered nightmares but, as a family, they found their way. In August 2020, the Willises enjoyed a joyous adoption ceremony and they’ve shared much of their amazing, heart-warming journey on Instagram (@second.chance.7). ‘Who would keep them all together? Who would have the space for them? Who would have the time, and the love, and the patience for their trauma,’ the couple wrote online. ‘The answer was clear… we would.’
In one heartbreaking post, the Willises wrote about Ruby on her birthday, the year of the kids’ arrival. ‘She’s mothered her siblings since she was about seven or eight. She can cook a mean scrambled egg, she can rock a baby to sleep, do the dishes, and change a diaper. Does she do those things in my house? Nope. (OK, maybe dishes once in a while.) Her job here is to be a kid. She hasn’t really the chance to do that before.’
You know that Adelino, now 15, Ruby, 13, Aleecia, nine, Anthony, eight, Aubriella, seven, Leo, five and Xander, four, will be taken very good care of, finally happy and settled in their forever home. Something every child deserves. Thank goodness there are people like Pam and Gary in the world…