All I wanted was a sweet distraction for an hour or two/ Had no intention to do the things we've done...

So, I’m kind of obsessed with Nadya Suleman (a.k.a. Natalie Denise Suleman, a.k.a. Nadya Soloman, a.k.a. Octomom, a.k.a. Octopussy, a.k.a. Crazy Eyes, depending on what news site or internet gossip rag you subscribe to). Me and the rest of the world? I don’t know, actually. I’m not sure just how much media coverage is proportional to actual public interest in certain issues. I think I started reading about her because there was suddenly a surplus of print items on her available on the Internet.

Anyway, those of you who have not been paying attention: my boyfriend won’t listen to me talk about this issue any more, so please be patient with my interpretation, because I don’t watch a lot of T.V.

Ahem! Nadya Suleman is a 33-year-old unemployed student and mother of 14. While her latest pregnancy yielded eight children, she states that she has not had sex in eight years. All of her children, aged two months to seven-years-old, were conceived via in-vitro fertilization -- a medical procedure that I don't wish to appear to express any problem with or opposition to. People who want to have kids and can afford them and can afford to undergo in-vitro can do it without any protest or opposition from me.

But in this case, it means that she has somehow afforded seven $10,000 to $15,000 cycles of treatment (along with cosmetic surgery apparently performed on her nose, lips and chin, which has created in her a striking resemblance to Angelina Jolie -- it has been reported that Suleman attempted to contact Jolie several times in 2008, but she has denied an obsession with the star). Her parents say the money came from an accident claim settlement with her former workplace, and a few sources have reported that the settlement, awarded sometime after 2000, totaled around $120,000.

The angle a lot of news agencies are taking with this story is the financial aspect of the situation, because we are not allowed to forget for one minute that the stock market is a piece of shit. Our fears about our own financial well-being and that of our families is kind of being played upon, here. I admit it was the first thing I thought of, before I knew Suleman’s particular lifestyle situation, again, because the credit crunch is all over the damn news.

Another angle that’s been ran with is that of Suleman’s supposed reality television aspirations. One site was reporting early on that she was hoping for her own show and an insinuated job as a ‘parenting expert.’

TLC, the network no longer marketed as The Learning Channel and now home to such gross and disturbing parenting/reality shows as John and Kate Plus Eight (about a neurotic and mostly unemployed couple and their eight children conceived with the help of science), made it a point to state publicly that while they were initially interested in Suleman’s situation for a show, they definitely aren’t anymore.

Now Suleman’s telephone conversations with T.V. psychiatrist and Oprah protégé Dr. Phil McGraw are being reported on. In case you don’t want to click on the link, Suleman has voiced fears that she will not be granted custody of her eight infants when the time comes for them to leave hospital care, unless her financial and habitual situation becomes stable enough, though these possible imposed standards have not been made public. I guess she was on his late afternoon talk show today but again: I don’t watch T.V., and I was probably having a life when it aired.

I’m not obsessed because I love thinking about the impending depression, or because I like reality T.V. that much or at all. I actually want to know how this all ends up, and that everybody is going to be O.K.

Who knows for sure why this woman is compelled to have children. I’ve read that she has been obsessed with being a Mom since her teens and that she is motivated by the belief that her childhood as an only child was incomplete. I’ve read that she was married at 21 and divorced at 25, and suffered several miscarriages after this separation while trying to get pregnant. It’s hard, when you’ve believed that you’ve found someone you love, to be disillusioned with divorce. You think to yourself, wow, if it didn’t work with this person, how can it ever work with anybody else? Maybe she believed that she could only truly relate to people who come directly from her own womb, and that only the love of a child is enough love to cure her emptiness. Maybe her failed marriage left her feeling that alone. Or maybe her marriage failed because she only really wanted to be a Mom and her husband required her to be a wife.

Regardless, Cher and Perez Hilton and the handful of people who have sent the Sulemans death threats really seem to want us to punish her for what has happened. True, if the world steps in to help a woman who has done something really financially and emotionally irresponsible – I do think that putting so many tiny lives in motion without the immediate means to care for and nurture them was really freaking irresponsible and, dare I say it? Yes? Selfish as Hell – who can tell the next woman who wants to try it that she shouldn’t?

The fact remains, though, that these children didn’t ask to be born, and I would really hate to see them punished for the sake of proving a point to their weird Mom. I hope they get some help. Like, some real help, and not just an opportunity to sell more of themselves to people who would dole it out to people who would like to read about it.

What do you think?