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The NY Times Magazine has a really long rather sympathetic profile of Octomom Nadya Suleman by journalist John Bowe. It’s primarily about her upcoming reality show, filmed with a British company known for “documentaries” on such subjects like the “Half Ton Mum” and “Girl with Two Faces.” Bowe doesn’t seem to question Suleman’s decisions at all, and apart from detailing the uncomfortable situations she puts her babies in for the sake of the cameras, the article is not at all critical. Bowe does mention the controversy over the fact that Suleman is a single mom who chose to have a whopping 14 kids despite the fact that she was living with her parents and had almost no way of supporting them apart from government assistance at the time.

Overall I found the article a mildly interesting way too rosy overview of a woman who deserves much more scrutiny. She’s been caught in multiple lies and really is a crazy famewhore. Consider some of the outrageous things she’s said and done, and the people who know her and have spoken out against her. It makes you wonder what kind of agenda the Times has to make her out to be this semi-normal single mom who’s just looking to support her dozen plus kids. (I know, it’s lame to question a major newspaper’s agenda on such a trivial topic, but what the hell, it’s what we do.) Maybe Suleman charmed Bowe with her fish lips and crazy eyes. The most interesting parts of the article are the kind of arty photos and the descriptions of her home, which Bowe compares to a film set and daycare center.

Octomom’s house is like a film set and daycare center all in one
On the outside, Suleman’s house is a two-story, tan-and-white tract home with Spanish tiles and dead grass to the neighbors’ green. Except for the grass problem, it’s virtually indistinguishable from millions of its Southern California neighbors. On the inside, however, several features mark it as significantly different.

The first is the sheer tonnage of children’s apparatus, to wit: trucks (dozens), balls (hundreds), books, monkeys, bears, babies, Ernies, Berts, trolls and a 70-inch flat-screen television for the Wii. In back, the yard is half-covered with AstroTurf, and then there’s a swing set, a jungle gym, a trampoline, three slides, multiple hula hoops and at least four to six each of the following items: shovels, pails, flowerpots, boots, scooters and bicycles.

The next is the number of staff people populating Mundo Octo. On the day of my first visit, in early September, I observed four nannies (a number that drops to three during the week, when the elder children are in school, and one at night), a film crew of four and a children’s-welfare representative mandated by the State of California to ensure compliance with its labor laws.

Given the toys, the staff, the overwhelming kidcentricness of it all, the home feels less like a home and more like an event, a day-care center, a film set. And that’s exactly what it is much of the time.

On her decision to make a reality show
The film crew had been sent by the British division of Eyeworks, a television company based in the Netherlands, to shoot “OctoMom: Me & My Fourteen Kids.” Suleman maintains that her octuplets were an accident, not a stunt, and that far from loving attention and cameras and fame, she hates them. Because my reason for visiting her was to observe her interaction with the British film crew, I asked her why, in the face of these protestations, she allowed us to be there. “It’s a Catch-22,” she explained. “I’m damned if I do what I need to do with the media to support my kids, and I’m damned if I don’t. If I don’t, I can’t take care of them.”

Eyeworks offered Suleman and her children a quarter-million dollars for the exclusive rights to film her family for 11 days and for the option to do so again. If the documentary is successful (it was set to be shown in Britain last week; a U.S. deal is pending), the crew will resume filming. “I made these choices out of the midst of being in survivor mode,” she explained. “I think 99 percent of people would have made the same decision.”

IN MAKING THIS set of decisions that 99 percent of us would have made, Suleman has boosted herself into the pantheon of multi-child, over-the-top television families so dysfunctional and pathologically exposed that they serve as a form of cathartic geek show for the rest of us. It’s a world peopled by such uniquely qualified “stars” as Jon and Kate and their “plus eight,” the Duggars (an Arkansas family with 18 children, all of whose names begin with “J”), the family of six from “Little People, Big World,” in which the parents and one child suffer from dwarfism — all of them willing to serve their own failings as a kind of pride-relief for the rest of us as we try, lamely, stumblingly, to raise families, pay taxes, make house payments. (The recent sad exertions of Richard Heene’s family, they of the Balloon Boy hoax, are testament to the ferocity and desperation driving those who would join this mythoscape of reality kings and queens.)

Putting velcro on the 10 month-old babies’ outfits to secure them to a board for taping
It was the third day of shooting, and Perkins and Campbell [directory filmmakers] decided to shoot the kids against a black background. The images would later be cut into a credit montage. If Eyeworks continued documenting the family’s experience year after year, they explained to me, imagine how such images might be dissolved into one another, showing eight children in formation from infancy to adulthood. Beautiful.

The ideal technical solution would have positioned the kids comfortably on their backs, facing a camera mounted directly overhead. But since “ideal technical solutions” exist nowhere in real life except perhaps on the sets of James Cameron’s films, they were forced to improvise with a simple tripod tilted downward, about 70 degrees toward the ground. What this meant was that the kids were going to have to lie on a board with a 20-degree slope. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea — until you were confronted with the sight of an 8-month-old infant in slippery pajamas, unhappy about not being held.

McLeod and Campbell began with Jonah, the octuplet with the cleft lip. The moment he was placed on the inclined board, he began to squirm and slide downward. Then he started to cry. McLeod began shooting. But a kid turning away from the camera, crying and sliding out of frame? Not so hot. The grown-ups looked pained. A strip of Velcro was attached to the board, and Jonah remounted. It helped. For a few seconds. It was hard to know whether the shot would be good enough, but the show had to go on.

Nariyah came next, a willing and even performer, looking up and smiling as if on cue. She was followed by pure pain. Jeremiah, swaddled in blue, was something of a wiggler. Evidently, he was having a hard time connecting with what a Method actor would call his motivation. He began to cry. Violently. Isaiah, the next, was equally dispiriting, and on it went. One by one, each baby was placed on the slippery, uncomfortable board, secured — or not so much — with the Velcro swatch and filmed. One by one, the babies cried.

The exertions of the grown-ups became more and more strained. As each crying baby failed to love the camera, Campbell, McLeod and Suleman gathered around the lens, each time imploring the baby to look up, even if just for two seconds.

“What’s that?” Suleman cooed to Isaiah, shaking a rattle. “What’s that?” McLeod whistled. Songs were sung. Baby noises were made.

Caleb screamed and cried. Amerah ran out of the room several times, crying. “I’m not going to do it! I’m not going to do it!”

Suleman tries to stage a photo with all the babies, they all start crying
By the time Suleman was lying on the ground with her babies, first three and then all eight octuplets were bawling at full tilt. They began to writhe around, clutching the air in their hands, eventually finding their mother’s incredibly thick hair and getting stuck there. Suleman tried more than gamely to remain calm and to keep her photo face together, but she began to panic when she realized she couldn’t even rise to her feet for fear of dragging her children into the air. She half-rose to look at her disheveled self. “Did my boobs fall out again?” She took a deep breath.

The nannies were looking around and sort of shaking their heads. Aidan, the autistic child, came along and pulled his mother’s hair. She shouted, “This is ridiculous!” She finally freed herself from her octuplets and jumped up. “Whose idea was this? This is not a good idea! I’m done.” Feeding time. As she ferried the kids back and forth to the kitchen, she gave Campbell an exasperated look. “Why did you have me do that? That was absurd.” She kissed her baby. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry.”

It was like something from a Greek tragedy, or at least something horrible, traumatic and if not antiwoman then campily celebratory of femininity gone awry, along the lines of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” or perhaps more aptly, “Aliens.” Campbell seemed distraught, even ashen. Later, he said: “We were just trying to get all their faces together for the family album. It’s a perfect illustration of how having media in your life can create what seemed to be a really distressing moment. It just felt sort of wrong. I said to Nadya, ‘I’m sometimes astonished that you just don’t say no.’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, you know, it would have been nice to have a picture like that.’ ”

On why she had IVF again, “I had six [kids] already”
She interrupted him. “You don’t understand,” she said. “If you have these frozen embryos that are there, and they were writing you letters saying, We are charging you this much, and it’s going up and up and up every month that they are stored — you can either use them or destroy them. You’re like, O.K., I have six already. What’s another? And maybe it won’t even work. So, I just decided to take the chance because I didn’t want to destroy the embryos. That was the main focus — not like: ‘Oh, gosh! I really want eight!’ People were thinking, ‘Oh, she wanted so, so many.’ No!”

Denying she’s had plastic surgery
The conversation turned to plastic surgery. Suleman looked at a photo of Angelina Jolie and herself and said she saw no resemblance whatsoever. In fact, she said, “I wanted to go on a talk show and talk about this,” trotting out an explanation she used many times before — that she merely looked as if she had had plastic surgery because of the weight gain during her pregnancy.

Suleman’s portrayal as a great mother
Among all the odd moments I witnessed during my visits with Suleman, there were genuine ones too, as when I watched her at what the family jokingly calls “the octotable,” a semicircle with eight little holes for eight babies to sit in, looking like the multiarmed Hindu goddess Kali, appearing to feed three babies at once while wiping the mouths of two others. I had seen her silence the near-constant din of eight babies crying. It happened one day after mealtime. She began to sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and suddenly, silence. One by one, the babies left off crying and looked up at her, transfixed, with total adoration. Mama!

The disconnect between her genuine-seeming commitment to motherhood and her haphazard approach to so many aspects of it was, for Campbell, the greatest paradox about Suleman. Was she exploiting her kids? No! Life had happened to her, she insisted. She studied for a master’s in child psychology. She wanted to be a psychiatrist. She hated the news media and the lack of privacy, the intrusion on her children’s innocence, the mockery. But really. “People are like, ‘Oh, why don’t you go to work?’ ” Suleman said into the camera that day. “O.K., think about the reality of that situation: I leave, I go to work, I’m away from them all day, I make — how much? $15,000 a year? O.K., I need that at least every two months. So, how on earth is that going to work? That’s absurd. You live in my life one day and you’ll see, you’ll realize: it’s ludicrous.”

Her kids, she said, understood the situation. “They’re able to conceptualize that, O.K., we don’t necessarily want this. But it’s controlled.” As long as they didn’t step over the line into doing a reality show, with cameras in the house all day, every day; as long as the cameras were present for only a few days, every six or so months, things could be made to work out.

[From The NY Times]

Bowe takes Suleman at her word at just about every turn. There’s no overview of the many ridiculous things she’s said or done or the way she’s been caught out in lies. There’s no discussion of the fact that Suleman’s lips are so swollen they look painful and that her nose is super pinched and small looking compared to earlier photos. There’s not even a mention of her bankruptcy, although the fact that she received over $160,000 in disability payments is mentioned. The fact that three out of six of her older kids were also on disability and that she relied on food stamps before having the octuplets – wasn’t.

So we’re supposed to believe that it’s not all that bad at Octomom’s house despite the fact that they’re propping babies up on boards to get the right shot? And Suleman is “like the multiarmed Hindu goddess Kali.” Give me a break. I guess this woman is better at playing the media than we give her credit for. Anyone who has seen even one of her videos on Radar knows that she’s not right in the head, and is a narcissistic person with a slippery relationship to the truth. Are they trying to sell us “Octomom 2.0: Supermom” now? At least we haven’t heard about her for a while. Maybe this was all part of her strategy – she goes away for a while to lose weight and make us forget what a deplorable person she is and then re-emerges this caring mom who is just trying to make a living. We’re not buying it.

[Thanks to Maritza for the tip!]

Here she is on 10/18/09 with some of her kids at a playground and Toys ‘R Us. Credit: Fame Pictures

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