Nadya Suleman has come out and conveyed to the world a lot of thoughts and feelings to which I can actually relate.
I would never assuage my own craving for kids by having 14 of them.
Baby craving is nothing new. It's at the heart of our existence in many ways. People who never had the opportunity to experience hunger for something -- whether it's food or biological progeny -- cannot truly know how it feels to long for something at the cellular level. I'm not sure that Nadya qualifies here, but I know a lot of people who, having stared down the specter of possibly never reproducing, can be therefore compelled toward all kinds of behavior that seem odd to uninformed observers.
In her interview with NBC's Ann Curry, Nadya is reported to have explained the origins of her own longing with references to being a lonely only child within a dysfunctional family.
She's quoted in this AP article as saying her dreams of a "huge family" were spurred by a drive to fulfill her own emotional needs. The mother of 14 says, "I just longed for certain connections and attachments with another person that ... I really lacked, I believe, growing up."
I get the need to fill in the gaps left by what a real childhood provided versus what we thought we saw (and believed we deserved) as projected by numerous outside sources -- by friends, through stories shared in books or TV or movies, by all those places where humans glean their frames of reference for living.
We all find ways of filling the gaps. Some people self-medicate with mind-altering substances so the pain of those childhood gaps doesn't hurt quite so badly. Some of us distract attention from the gaping holes by working ourselves to death. I initially chose a career path that I'd hoped would do the trick by putting me in the daily position of meeting the needs of others. Some lie on a lot of therapeutic couches, professional or not. Others run marathons. There are lots of salves, and some work well.
In the NYT's "Room for Debate" (where you can see a Today Show video clip with part of Ann Curry's interview with Nadya), fertility psychologist Elizabeth Grill says she wishes the U.S. could follow the paths of other countries and require pre-treatment counseling. Her focus, though, is on educating patients about risks and benefits of fertility treatments, along with potential outcomes.
This may sound overboard, but I've danced around it for years and the medical pros would never get away with uttering such a thing: I think that counseling about parenthood might be even more important than knowing how many babies may or may not result from fertility treatment.
I say this even though just a couple of years ago I was cocking a virtual eyebrow at the ASRM's practice guideline that fertility experts reserve the right to refuse treatment when they feel it's not in the potential offspring's best interests.
For me, optimal parenting starts with awareness of my own motives. Period. There is no other best place to start on the crucial journey of helping to create other people. If you don't understand why you're compelled to reproduce, you can rest assured there are unseen forces behind the parenting choices you'll make. Sometimes, it's ugly stuff.
How many of us know such things before we -- OOPS -- get pregnant and have babies? So for those of us who started searching our souls late in the game ("someone please tell me why I had these children?!"), the next best step is admitting to our own perplexity, owning up to what we don't know, and coming to some terms of acceptance with the shaky, imperfect ground of true love.
Like all things human, there's no black and white here.
In so many ways, Nadya Suleman hasn't done anything crazier than the rest of us. Sure, she did it in a really big and visible way. We're all just lucky to be able to hide our own misdirected foibles from everyone around us.
