Look, I had not planned on writing about Nadya Suleman again but now that she has broken her silence, I feel like I need to add my few cents.
First off, I do think that some are judging her in a harsher light than what would be case if she were a nice respectable white woman married to a socially acceptable white or Asian man like a couple of other couples that are raising football teams instead of families. When I wrote my first piece on her, it was not clear to me that she was a single Mama who is living with her Mama.
Look, I think all women should have the right to choose if and when they have babies, that said, I have an old fashioned streak born out of my own life experiences that I shouldn’t give birth to more babies then I can reasonably take care of.
Now I have caught a few snippets of Ms. Suleman’s reason for why she decided to have what she thought might be one more baby that turned into a chorus line of babies. She was an only child, who always wanted babies. I gotta be real as someone who only has one sibling who is almost a decade a younger than me, the desire to have my own brood at one point was real strong. It was especially strong after my Mom died almost 5 years ago and I realized that my close family of origin only consisted of my dad, brother, and grandma and since grandma passed 18 months after my Mom, I am down to 2 folks other than my kids and hubby.
So not six months after my Mom died, I bought a house and got pregnant, however my spirited daughter was born and while I would love for her to have a sibling close in age to her since my son is almost 14 years older than her, truth is my clock is ticking and that is not going to happen. See, where I am going with this….sometimes real life interrupts our fantasies and as adults its ok, we live with it. Shit, every day I go to work and run a center that serves hundreds of kids in the course of a year. That’s like parenting except I didn’t have to birth all those kids.
Anyway the point of this there are plenty of us, that start off wanting large families and as adults we weigh our options and make grown up decisions and I am sorry but Nadya did not make what I call a grown up decision. According to the piece I read she lives at home, is receiving disability but is planning on finishing her masters degree in counseling at which time she states she will earn enough money to provide for all the babies.
Um…..BULLSHIT…no seriously I say this as someone who almost got their masters in counseling but chose a different path, but um….a masters degree in counseling might give you a decent enough standard of living as the single Mama of a couple kids especially if you get child support but considering what the average starting salary is for a masters level clinician is, Nadya won’t even make a dent in the childcare bill.
Look, but how come someone close to her didn’t talk her out of this decision because honestly it was wacked and now that those babies are here, the reality is she will need to land offers on the level of the Duggars or the Gosselins to survive. Yet the reality is as a single woman of color of limited means, I fear she has opened herself up in ways that will impact her and her kids.
Nadya, girl may the force be with you because you are going to need it. I’m not slamming your choice but this is the same talk I would give you if you were my personal friend.