Seven is enough

Chicoans Nancy and Garry Scherbert’s entry into the world of adoption ended in heartbreak. The couple had taken into their home a medically fragile infant with Down syndrome. Bethany was born with a major heart defect that required surgery and months in a neonatal intensive care unit. And tragically, after two bouts of pneumonia, she passed away at the age of 9 months.

But instead of allowing her death to consume them, the Scherberts, just months later, adopted yet another child with Down syndrome.

“In a very strange type of way, she made us go on to adopt other children,” Nancy Scherbert said during a recent interview. “It made us aware that there was such a need for homes for kids with special needs.”

Indeed, over the past 24 years, the Scherberts have opened their hearts to 10 children with Down syndrome. They’ve endured more heartbreak, too, losing another infant girl, 4-month-old Mariah, to complications following heart surgery, and then a son, 17-year-old Jeremiah—or “J.J.”—who succumbed to a drug-resistant infection three years ago.

Scherbert choked up while talking about the boy she’d taken in at 12 days old and who lived with, among other issues, autism and celiac disease. Like many children with Down syndrome, most of the couple’s adopted kids have or have had medical issues. The Scherberts are Bay Area ex-pats and continue to take the children to see medical specialists there. Sometimes life is a juggling act.

But Scherbert isn’t one to focus on that aspect of caring for her seven adopted children, who range in ages, from 23-year-old Sam to 5-year-old Gloria. And she also doesn’t focus on their developmental disabilities or how they’re different from typically developing children.

“Our philosophy is not that they can’t; you have to challenge them. But you don’t set them up for failure,” she said.

The kids lead full lives just like other children their ages. Sam and brother Peter, 19, both belong to a bowling league with typical people. Sam also participates in theater performances at the 7th Street Centre for the Performing Arts. There are activities for the younger kids, too, such as Challenger Little League baseball. The morning after Scherbert’s interview with CN&R, the family was headed to Oroville for the Butte County Special Olympics.

Jeannie Alden, a local Early Intervention speech therapist who has worked with three of the Scherberts’ kids, noted how hard the couple work every day to give the kids what they need. “They are people who enjoy life, even when it gets crazy, and they are making sure their children enjoy life, too,” Alden said.

Scherbert downplays the praise that people invariably heap on her: “I feel like I’m just a mom. I’m not super mom,” she said.

The Scherberts moved to Butte County 19 years ago, first to Thermalito and then to Chico in 2005. It’s back in the East Bay, though, where they were inspired to adopt kids with disabilities. Husband Garry was near the end of a career in the Navy and Scherbert, who did childcare, looked after a little girl with Down syndrome. “The whole family fell in love with her,” she said.

The couple’s own biological children were in high school at the time, and both wanted to expand their family. Scherbert was medically unable to have more, so they chose to adopt. Once they went through the process for the first child, adoption agencies seemed to seek them out with others in need of a loving home. “We’ve never really gone looking,” Scherbert said.

Just a few years ago the couple, now in their early 60s, decided seven was enough.

Scherbert said those who may be interested in adopting children with special needs, whatever those needs might be, should educate themselves. Children with Down syndrome are very loving, but each one is different, each one is an individual—just like any typical child, she noted.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s so rewarding,” she said. “They give back every bit as much as I put into this relationship.”