Motherhood with exuberance
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This is an article on the controverial Nadya Suleman who had all her fourteen children via IVF. Her last were a set of octuplets, which propelled her into the public's eye.
Nadya Suleman's life-long dream was to have as many children as possible. She married at twenty-one, but her eight years of marriage were fraught with miscarriages and fertility problems, and ended in childless divorce. She eventually saved enough money, about $100,000, to have her fourteen children through IVF. She worked for a number of years in a psychiatric ward, only to leave with back injuries after a patient riot, and received a worker’s compensation award of around $165,000. This additional sum duly went to finance and maintain the growing brood she was having through her IVF treatments. Her octuplets were born on January 2009, and brought the final tally of her children to fourteen. The octuplets catapulted her into the public’s eye.
Technology and the compliance of doctors assisted Nadya in her decision to have children. She used IVF to overcome her past reproductive problems. She found a willing donor to fertilize her eggs. And she went to an anonymous fertility clinic which didn’t ask too many question to perform the embryo implants, including the quasi-dangerous procedure of implanting her remaining six embryos that resulted in the unprecedented eight births (with two sets of twins).
Nadya, dubbed the Octomom, has been receiving constant negative reactions from the media throughout the news of her ocutplets. Newspaper op-eds, pundits and bloggers decried what they called her selfish, narcissistic behavior, some calling her evil and even crazy. The news in general portrayed her as a disorganized, unemployed, child-obsessesed woman who was scamming the government. Some of this information is incorrect, since for many years she lived off her $165,000 worker’s compensation and student loans (which she rationalizes she will pay back). The welfare she receives was just in food stamps and disability checks for three of her children. She has also lived with her mother and has the help of both her parents.
Still, since the outbreak of her octuplet news, enough people have quietly supported her to provide the necessary provisions for her expanded family. It is still not clear how much she receives for her various public appearances on television and her stories in tabloid magazines. Some calculate it to be in the hundreds of thousands. But whether it is raw fascination or some kind of empathetic curiosity, there is no doubt that she has garnered the public’s interest.
Nadia has a profound confidence that the most natural, the most normal, thing a woman could do is to have children. She just wanted lots of them. In her own honest way, she had things properly planned out. All the children are from the same donor (father), and she avoided “killing” her embryos, hence her insistence on having them all implanted during her final IVF. She admits that she made up the name for the babies’ donor father from the Bible, calling him David Solomon, two personalities who themselves are joined together in family. She even tried to change her own last name to Solomon, presumably to legitimize her actions and give her children a united mother and father, albeit in her fertile imagination.
Her social environment provided her with the means to fulfill her plan and she simply convinced many people, including her parents, the IVF doctor, the sperm donor (apparently there are two donors, although one never had the chance to fertilize her eggs), and a crew of hospital staff to follow her requests.
So what is it that repulsed people, or at least those in the media, who continue to denigrate her? It certainly is not the illegitimacy of her children. After all, the unplanned infants of teen mothers, children of single career women from anonymous donors, and even movie stars who expand their families without marriage, are acceptable. Her lack of funds was not at issue with her first six as she has indicated that much of her worker’s compensation provided for several years of upkeep. And as people are belatedly presented with her explanations, they realize that she only expected a manageable one or two from her final IVF, not the eight that resulted. Still, writers and commentators just wouldn’t give her any slack. Where did Nadya go wrong?
Close reading of many articles, shows one thing in common: Fourteen! is the exclamation point. Some (deep in their articles) have referred to the babies as “litter” or “freakish”. One writer described Nadya as a Third World Muslim Jihadist set to out-breed the American population, even though Nadya has indicated that she is a Christian and was born in America . A female writer talks about Nadya as “the maternal equivalent of a cat collector” with an “out-of-control female body”. And an op-ed columnist has called her behaviour “motherhood psycho kind of thing”.
Sarah Palin and her five, and the Duggar family with its eighteen, have received similar, although less vitriolic, reactions. Even ordinary families with more than four children have to deal with the derision of family and friends for having more than the expected two or three. It doesn’t matter if these children come from a single mother, or a happily married couple. It is their numbers that derails the critics.
Movie stars like Angelina Jolie, who has only three of her own, and Mia Farrow who has four, have more than doubled their children by salvaging babies from third world countries or providing homes for disabled children. Their fans find this expansion through “rescuing” (rather than birthing) a worthy and admirable behavior. Nadya’s fourteen, on the other hand, are all hers.
Modern elites, and especially feminist women, are disturbed by large numbers of children and by unabashed displays of motherhood. Life is surely more than just about children. But Nadya doesn't think so. She's not at all shy about hers, something which we don’t see with Jolie and Farrow. Nadya has a voluptuous post-natal body, unlike the scrawny and gaunt Jolie whom many incorrectly say she tries to resemble. In fact, a recent celebrity poll showed that Jolie was not a favorite mother, and lingers around number five on the poll’s results. Nadya is constantly hugging and kissing any one of her six children in abundant motherly love. She sings individualized songs to the eight that are still in hospital. Her quick mind is constantly thinking of her offspring, often coming up with unconventional ways to provide for them. And Nadya says things like, “I believe you expand your love [for each child]”, and “I’m trying to make myself bigger [for all fourteen].”
Nadya is a modest regeneration of Cybele, the Great Mother (of gods and men), the Magna Mater, the fertility goddess, whose story is full of the powers and secrets of womanhood and motherhood. Cybele is flanked by lions and worshiped by castrated men, and reigned over ancient cities. She has a strange resonance with the insouciant Nadya, whose breeziness camouflages a will of steel. Jolie tried to win this role, but her strange, detached demeanor and her lanky body makes her an unlikely candidate.
The avant-garde filmmaker Man Ray even made a surrealist film on Cybele with his L'Étoile de Mer, where he simultaneously showed his fear of her vagina dentata (toothed vagina) and his great admiration of her being, “Si Belle! Cybèle?”. This fear has been attributed by cultural critic Camille Paglia not only to that of castration, but also the fear of returning to the womb, of being engulfed whole by this great mother. André Breton, founder of the surrealist movement, has uncanny references to the modern-day Nadya in his novel Nadja, whom he depicts as some mad woman, which is how the media (incorrectly) has been portraying our current Nadya. He even cites a film The Grip of the Octopus in which film critic P. Adams Sitney says refers to the vagina dentata of Man Ray’s fears, the cloying, emasculating tentacles pulling unsuspecting men towards the all-engulfing female and back into the primordial world of the fetus.
Nadya’s men did indeed symbolically get emasculated by providing their seeds for her progeny without the sexual act. One has even publicly presented himself as her ineffectual benefactor, risking all humiliation to show his adulation, saying that he is the donor and father of her fourteen children (although according to Nadya, he is not). What real man publicly announces that he is a sperm donor? The actual donor keeps his distance, despite being aware of his role as father of fourteen children. One suspects that the overbearing Nadya would be hard to take.
Other mothers, like Angelina Jolie, the sperm-donor conceiving working women, and the five-time-mother Sarah Palin, are behaving a “Cybele-lite”, although it is clear that for them motherhood does not take precedence, unlike the home-bound Nadya. Their men, whether it is those anonymous sperm-donors, trailing partners like Jolie’s Brad Pitt, or even Sarah Palin’s accommodating husband Todd Palin, are forced to dance to their tune, like Cybele’s emasculated, immature men. Todd, despite his macho snowmobile treks, is forced to live around his wife’s political career and act as a babysitter when she’s not around, and Pitt is a partner in the adoption crime fulfilling the occasional donor-giving role to produce his biological children with Jolie. Both men have a strange youthful, adolescent air about them, despite their forty-odd years.
In a twist of media attention, which surprisingly didn’t happen sooner, Nadya, our reluctant Cybele, was asked if she would star in a pornographic film, where she would have eight different partners in eight different scenes. The gripping octopus from André Breton’s novel was coming to life. The focus of these “porn” films, nonetheless, seemed more on conceiving the progeny than on the erotica. Nadya will always be remembered as a mother first. Nadya coyly refused this offer, but one senses that she understood its subliminal and mythic nature.
Ordinary people, not distracted by indignant TV hosts and priggish newspaper columnists, do understand the iconic nature of Nadya the Octomom. One should read the tabloids, not the New York Times, to gauge Nadya’s popularity. Nadya the Octomom, mother of fourteen and Magna Mater, is a force of nature. She even had the intrusive and opportunist Dr. Phil, the TV mega-host and mega-man himself, momentarily ineffectual (a pattern here?) when he beseeched to his audience to support his accusations that “she has done wrong.” Nadya finally said “yes”, she did wrong, but not without telling us first a thousand reasons why she did right. She nonetheless got Dr. Phil on her side, securing his on-TV declaration that he will do all he can to help her children.
Nadya’s dealings with the labyrinthal, heathen, modern world has given her more than she bargained for. Now, it’s time to bring some propriety to her family. Throwing all myth and poetry aside, she should persuade, in her talented way, the Biblically named father of her children David Solomon to do the right thing by marrying her in a proper church manner, perhaps at the one she was filmed attending with her children. She might even convince the public that it’s fine to have more than two or three children – God provides in mysterious ways, as is happening to her. For all her mythic possibilities, I suspect all Nadya ever wanted was a house full of children with the right man to take care of her and them.
