In one day Henry and Tasha Wertin went from having no children to being parents of a 4-year-old

Henry and Tasha Wertin went from one day having no children to the next day being the father and mother of a 4-year-old. And as much as they wanted to be parents, it wasn’t an easy adjustment.

“It was hard to become an instant family,” Tasha said.

That was in 2005. The 4-year-old is now 16. Since then, the Wertins have adopted six more children. “We always wanted a big family,” Tasha said.

As much as Henry and Tasha love their children, each one came into the family with emotional issues. The Wertins knew they needed help in how to deal with the kids’ issues, but they didn’t know where to turn. A friend told them about the Bert Nash Center.

“It was a really big moment for us, to have somebody say it’s OK,” Tasha said. “We had been treading water for years. We were at the end of our rope. I remember coming home after that intake and I just cried, because somebody finally got us. Somebody finally told us we weren’t the crazy ones, that we weren’t doing anything wrong.”

“That was the really cool thing about Bert Nash, they took the blame off of us. They let us know it was going to be OK,” Henry said. “It was a relief that someone finally understood what was going on in our life.”

Henry and Tasha tried for years unsuccessfully to get pregnant. A friend who is a social worker asked if they had ever thought about adopting an older child. That was their first. They became a foster-to-adopt home, licensed by the state of Kansas. They now have four boys and three girls, ranging in age from 16 to 1.

“The kids have always been welcoming when another child comes into the household,” Tasha said.

“Anytime we get a phone call about a situation that we think may be a fit for our family, we have a family meeting to discuss the situation, and then we vote on who’s in favor of saving this baby. Nobody has ever voted against taking in another child,” Henry said. “Our norm is so not the norm, but it’s our norm. Everything is about family. That’s the culture we have.”

There can be different fostering arrangements. Some are short term; some are long term. For the Wertins, they foster to adopt. If there is no possibility of reintegration, they want these kids to become a permanent part of their family. They have had only one child go back to her biological parent while they were fostering -- a 5-month-old girl. 

“That’s our goal, to get them back with their family,” Henry said. “If that is not an option, then we look at adoption. Our personal goal is to save as many children as we can.”

“We don’t know if we will keep them or they will be reintegrated with their biological family, but we will give them as much love as possible until what happens happens,” Tasha said. “Our kids have really big hearts. They know we want to save as many kids as possible.”

Each of the children the Wertins have adopted has some type of attachment issue. They all have come out of traumatic situations. Two of the children have Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). RAD is caused by lack of attachment at an early age and can make it difficult to form loving relationships with others.

“Some people say that anybody who goes through an adoption has a form of RAD, because of the attachment being severed somewhere,” Tasha said. “This is not a diagnosis you can fix. You can work to make things better, but you can’t make it go away.”

“They’re programmed to sabotage,” Henry said. “They sabotage what to us is comfortable; they’re used to people giving up on them.”

That’s why the services the Wertins received at Bert Nash were so life altering. It gave them the tools they needed.

“We thought we were the problem. It was hard to see other kids flourish and wonder what are we doing that’s so wrong. But once we got the diagnosis, we were like, oh, this explains a lot,” Henry said. “The people at Bert Nash were phenomenal. They were friendly, they were compassionate, they were kind, they were understanding. All of the awesome adjectives you could think of.”