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Julie from A Little Pregnant asked a few weeks ago if people were going to watch the Nadya Suleman documentary on Fox, alerting me to how much you miss when you don't turn on your television (why bother, I thought, now that the Next Food Network Star has been decided). I have to admit that I missed it, but the blog posts that popped up afterwards made me track it down on Hulu and like the thousands or millions--I'm not sure how many people tuned in for the broadcast--watched life in Suleman household.
Because remember, it's a person's life. It's 14 people's lives.
There were two ways you could watch the footage. One is purely out of schadenfreude, taking pleasure in her pain and watching it with human cruelty. It can be rubber necking, a thankful-it's-not-us exercise.
The other way is to use it as a lesson, an examination that while most people could keep a child--or even 14 children--alive, it is a very different proposition to raise a child. That being a parent is more than rocking the child to sleep, giving a bottle, and playing with them. It's teaching right from wrong and building self-esteem and encouraging strengths. After all, we wouldn't say a nurse in the NICU parents the child. We say that she keeps the baby healthy and alive and cares for him. And the same is true at home. Almost everyone can keep a baby healthy and alive. It is quite another thing to parent.
It illustrated why preschools and daycares limit the number of children that can be adequately and safely watched by a single person. Humans simply weren't made to be able to adequately take care of 14 children under the age of 9 at once. The Duggars have sort of perfected (if we can call it that) the idea of building a large family. Children are spaced so that the oldest can help with the youngest. The first child was born in 1988 and was over five when the fifth child was born. While life is still chaotic and busy at the Duggar house, the children have been raised understanding how they can help the family run smoothly and that system is certainly missing from the Suleman household, even with a nine-year-old present.
While family size and timing was somewhat out of Nadya Suleman's hands--there is a big difference between family building without assistance and utilizing IVF--she did make the choice to transfer all six frozen embryos at once rather than attempt several future pregnancies, donate the embryos, or destroy them. There were options that allowed her to use them that did not include transferring all at once. And despite her claim that she never thought higher order multiples could happen, the possibility was definitely there. It is like a person exclaiming that they didn't know a car accident could possibly happen when they got behind the wheel of a car, simply because they've driven before and it hasn't happened. Car accidents are not a certainty, but they are always a possibility. And multiples are always a possibility when you transfer more than one embryo. Hell, they are a possibility even if you only transfer one.
But, as Suleman keeps repeating in the footage, the past is the past, the decisions have been made and the actions taken and now it comes down to what she does in the future. As I watched it, I kept in mind that Fox edited it to reflect a certain story, with all footage to the contrary on the cutting room floor. And at the same time, no family would hold up well to the scrutiny of cameras and an outsider's editing work--especially in those early days of babyhood. I shudder to think of what Fox could have done with my own life if I allowed cameras in my house.
And maybe that's the point. I wouldn't allow cameras into my home, no matter how interested the world was about what goes on behind our closed doors.
Fox's footage was sensationalized, edited to show a woman with poor decision making skills who never considered the future. This isn't just in regard to her children; they drive the point home with showing her laughing through a story from her teenage years where she made her mother ride in the trunk of the car and how
