Addict Nation (27 page)

People were astounded that Suleman had ever finagled a way to pay for the expensive artificial-insemination procedures that resulted in all fourteen children. Then we learned she had gotten $165,000 in disability payments after being injured in a riot at a state mental hospital where she had worked several years earlier.
⁷
And there was even more disgust as Octomom was accused of selling access to the kids to media and entertainment outlets. Not that anyone was all that shocked. What else are you supposed to do when you have fourteen hungry mouths to feed, no husband, and no job?
Issues
viewers were transfixed by this freaky mutation of a family.
⁸

MIKE WALTERS, TMZ ASSIGNMENT MANAGER
: Look, it’s gone overboard and I’ll tell you . . . talk about the babies being traumatized . . . cameras inside of the nursery while they’re trying to eat.

VELEZ-MITCHELL
: When you told me the photographer wanted to take a photograph of the diaper being changed it was like, I almost got sick, seriously.
⁹

But, while we may feel oh-so-justified in attacking the Octomom, we should also come clean and admit she is but an extreme example of our cultural addiction to procreation. America has a split personality when it comes to procreation. Intellectually, we realize that many of our most intractable problems—from poverty to pollution—stem from the fact that there are just too many people using too few resources. However, on an emotional level, we glorify, romanticize, and encourage super-large families on reality shows, in movies, and on commercials.

Cheaper by the Dozen—Really?

America had about 76 million people in 1900.
¹⁰
We recently passed the 300 million mark. Do we really grasp the enormity of that? Our nation’s population has more than tripled in less than one century! This is part of a catastrophic global trend. The world’s population has jumped from 2.5 billion in 1950 to almost 6 billion in 1998.
¹¹

“Britney Spears’s first album sold more copies than the Beatles’s
Abbey Road
. That to me says:
Okay, there are too many
people on earth.
”

—Becky Heineke, blogger at
overpopulationblog.blogspot.com

In the terrifying book
Beyond Malthus,
which documents a slew of calamitous repercussions resulting from our world’s population explosion, the authors point out, “There has been more growth in population since 1950 than during the 4 million preceding years since our early ancestors first stood upright.”
¹²
Estimates are the world’s population will hit 9 billion by 2050. Planet Earth simply cannot sustain that kind of population growth. So, for our own survival, we need to take a good, hard look at why so many of us are addicted to having very large broods. Please understand, this is not a criticism of the natural desire to parent or the legitimate desire to have a family of a reasonable size. We’re talking about people who are going to extremes.

Craving Kids

What does it mean to be addicted to procreation? It means having babies for the same reasons people drug or overeat . . . to escape from painful feelings and to fill a void. Nadya is the poster child for this phenomenon. She admits that she got pregnant repeatedly to heal the trauma she experienced growing up in what she described as a “dysfunctional” home as an only child who felt isolated. “That was always a dream of mine, to have a large family, a huge family, and—I just longed for certain connections and attachments with another person that I, I really lacked, I believe, growing up (as an only child),” Nadya told NBC’s Ann Curry.
¹³
That justification for having a child, or fourteen in this case, can also be described as “using” a child or children to work out emotional and psychological issues.

“From a psychoanalytic view, there can be a deep emptiness inside and the emptiness gets filled by feeling the fantasy and the idealization of motherhood. The fantasy is that ‘I will now be loved.’ First when you are pregnant it is ‘I am full,’ and secondly, when I have these children then I will be loved and they will belong to me. No one, on another level psychodynamically, will ever leave me.”

—Dr. Judy Kuriansky, radio host
and professional therapist

Emotional trauma should be worked out on a therapist’s couch or in a Twelve Step program for codependency, not in a fertility clinic. Nadya says she suffered depression after a divorce that she believes was brought on by her inability to have children the old-fashioned way.
¹⁴
What she should have realized is that depression signals a void on the inside that needs to be fixed from the inside . . . and by that I don’t mean with an insemination.

Like all addiction, our drug of choice, be it booze or babies, never gives us the long-term results we’re seeking. When Nadya didn’t get that sought-after sense of “attachment” after having half a dozen kids, it should have been clear that she was not going to fill her emptiness by having eight more. She should have figured out that no amount of kids could ever complete her. But, to remodel that now tired Twelve Step cliché, insanity is doing the same thing fourteen times and expecting a different result. Nadya may have envisioned herself in a real-life version of
The Waltons,
but she ended up starring in a reality show so freaky it played out mostly as sporadic installments on Internet gossip sites.

“People have children for many reasons. Unfortunately, most of them are the wrong ones: because they don’t believe in contraception, to show their parents how it is supposed to be done, or to create their own little cheerleading section that will love them unconditionally. When you look at our overburdened foster-care and adoption system, and all the children waiting to be adopted, you really have to wonder what people are thinking.”

—Anne McIntyre, single, childless business executive

Natural Urge or Neurotic Impulse?

Like most addictive issues, the litmus test is the intention—the motive in picking up the addictive substance or behavior.
Am I
drinking to get blind drunk? Am I getting pregnant to distract myself
and blot out uncomfortable feelings?
Experts point to a slew of neurotic reasons for having children:

to get a sense of purpose and identity

to ease loneliness and isolation

to assuage feelings of abandonment

to compensate for insecurity, self-consciousness, and social anxiety through a cute sidekick/accessory

to get attention from the child as well as adults

to indulge in untreated codependency