Let’s be hopeful today. Let’s hope Nadya Suleman, mother of six, plus newborn octuplets, has sparked so much cultural revulsion that we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of baby mama love.
“I longed for certain connections and attachments with another person that I lacked growing up,” she said yesterday in a TV interview filled with declarations of what Nadya “longed for” and Nadya “wanted.”
It was but a variation on the reason given by thousands of teen-age girls and young women who give birth to babies they can’t take care of: I longed for someone to love me.
Nadya Suleman is that needy girl times 14.
And her mother, Angela, like exhausted grandmothers all around America, is left to rescue the fatherless, penniless kids. She has two cribs in her bedroom, two more down the hall, bunk beds in a third room. There are mountains of clothes piled everywhere and food on the walls. Angela Suleman says she has no idea where, in her modest three-bedroom, cribs for eight more will go. “She has no way to support them. It’s very difficult to cope with all this,” she said.
“To what degree is this too much about you and not enough about them?” reporter Ann Curry asked Suleman in an interview begun on the “Today” show yesterday and continuing tonight on “Dateline NBC.” Isn’t this, said Curry, “completely irresponsible and selfish?”
You watch Suleman for 30 seconds. You can answer for her: Yes.
You keep watching. You see this pretty, sweet-voiced, seemingly rational yet oddly calm woman in a maternity shirt. She declares that she can do the impossible (care for all these kids). Then in the next breath she admits how she’s repeatedly projected “her own wants and wishes” onto her children but was “so fixated and focused” on having more. “I just kept going (thinking) God will provide.”
Meanwhile, in the neonatal intensive care unit, NBC cameras revealed babies the size of their mother’s palm with tubes down their throats, wires on their chests, loose and wrinkled red skin where baby fat should be. Imagining their perilous futures made me cringe – and not just because they’re so physically needy.
Short of a miracle, they’re headed for neglect, just like many millions of babies born every day to unequipped mothers.
“Nadya really has no idea,” her mother Angela said, “what she’s doing to her children, and to me.”