An utterly selfish mother: There's no father, her house is a pig-sty, she lives on welfare and she ALREADY has six children



Nadya Suleman with newborn octuplet Isaiah Angel Solomon



Parroting chunks of psychobabble from textbooks she once read on a college child-rearing course and throwing in a few pearls of homespun wisdom, Nadya Suleman is striving to present herself as a paragon of modern motherhood.

'There's no such thing as a supermum - but I'm trying!' this one-woman baby machine trills, as she attempts to justify her decision to undergo the fertility treatment which produced the world's first all-surviving octuplets, even though she already has six young children - but no husband, job or money.

'I've had to retrain myself with counselling programmes. You learn about children and what they really need, and how to do play therapy, and I really am able to apply that to my own children. A lot of parents don't have the advantage of that.

'People ask me how I will be able to afford to take them all on holiday. But children don't actually need holidays. They're just an adult creation. Children just need you to sit and talk to them in the beauty of nature. When it comes down to it, all they really need is grass and worms.'

Headline hunger: Miss Suleman has given a string of media interviews since the birth of her eight babies

You suspect that Suleman, 33 - who appears to have conveniently forgotten the material price of her self-confessed obsession with procreation (it will cost the Californian taxpayers up to £2.1million in medical fees and welfare handouts) - would blithely gabble on in this vein for ever if no one interrupted her.

With a child's exquisite timing, her oldest son, Elijah, does just that. 'Mom, mom, take me to the DVD store!' he demands.

Listening to Suleman as she defends her decision to raise 14 test-tube children without what she calls quaintly 'a significant other', what strikes you most is her unswerving self-belief.

She is utterly convinced that no one is better suited to the gargantuan task that will confront her next month when the eight newborns are expected to come home.

All around her, however, the evidence suggests otherwise. She may see herself as an enlightened Earth Mother, but her chaotic world is like that of the nursery rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe and has so many children she doesn't know what to do.

Take the house where the octuplets will live. With jawdropping naivety, she describes the three-bedroom bungalow, which belongs to her mother Angela, as 'one big play den'.



Earth mother? Nadya Suleman eight days before the birth of her octuplets

She has stripped away all but the most basic furniture to accommodate what she regards as the true essentials of family life: trampolines, swings, wooden horses, toy tractors and a huge playhouse.

In truth, however, it is little short of a pigsty. Nestling in one corner of a quiet cul-de-sac in Whittier - a Californian town 15 miles from Los Angeles, but which retains an air of bygone American charm - it ought to be the perfect place to raise children. Yet, in contrast with the other homes in the street, it appears rundown and neglected.

A heap of expensive but discarded toys stands beside the bins and the garden is laden with bikes, pushchairs and skateboards.

Inside, the ambience is little short of bedlam. The walls are smeared with food and scribbled writing; the windows are not covered with curtains but old bed sheets; clothes are scattered everywhere; and the six children run Nadya ragged.

For reasons that will become clear, each of these six were conceived through IVF, just as the octuplets were. They were born between 2001 and 2007 - four single pregnancies and one set of twins - and, if Suleman is to be believed, all 14 of her offspring have the same father.

'The twins are always fighting - they don't look alike and they're totally different from each other,' she says, trying to calm squabbling two-year-olds Caleb and Calyssa, who are doing their best to sabotage her first newspaper interview.

Octuplet number one: Noah, male, 2lb 11oz

Octuplet number two: Maliah, female, 2lb 12oz

Then there is seven-year-old Elijah, the oldest of the six. He suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. His condition is evidently so serious that his grandfather Edward Suleman, an Arabic interpreter who works in Iraq, generously pays £1,250 a month for him to attend a private school.

Amerah, at six, seems mercifully healthy and well-adjusted, as does five-year-old Jacob, but Aidan, aged three, is autistic - which makes him, in his mother's eyes, 'a special blessing' - and Calyssa has speech problems.

In addition to her £340-a-month state-provided food stamps, Suleman receives about £550 in benefits for each of the three children diagnosed with disabilities, giving her handouts of almost £2,000 a month in total.

As the octuplets are not yet three weeks old, and still spend most of their time in a row of incubators, no one knows what kind of long-term support they might require.

But since Noah, Isaiah, Nariyah, Josiah, Jeremiah, Jonah, Maliyah and Makai (each of whom has the same middle name, Angel) weighed only between 1lb 8oz and 3lb 4oz, and they were born ten weeks prematurely, it seems likely that Suleman will soon be applying for a lot more state aid.

At a time when millions of U.S. citizens are struggling with terrible financial hardship, no wonder that one TV interviewer described her this week as 'the most vilified mother in America'.



Nor that she has been the subject of so many death threats she was forced into hiding after the births.

Octuplet number three: Isaiah, male, 3lb 4oz

Octuplet number four: Nariah, female, 2lb 8oz

'That part has been a nightmare,' she told me. 'They had to sneak me out of hospital. I had to be away from the children for two days and I couldn't stop crying. But I needed to get out and be secure.'

She spends most of her time at home, watched by a security firm and besieged by the world's Press. When her babies leave hospital, the scrutiny will only intensify.

Even with the help of her nanny, plus the army of church volunteers who have promised to help, you wonder how she will cope when 14 children are billeted in three cramped bedrooms.

But there is, of course, a more pressing question. Why, against all the acceptable social parameters, did she choose to bring so many children into her already chaotic world?

According to Suleman, her impulsion can be explained away by her own childhood. She has described this as 'dysfunctional', but now says she regrets using that term, presumably because it has upset her parents, and prefers to call it 'not typical'.

Whatever phrase she chooses, however, her story must be treated with caution, for she sometimes appears to create her own reality.

She has, for example, changed her first and second names several times during her 33 years. She also insists that she has never had plastic surgery, even though those who see her regularly say otherwise, and she looks radically different than she did in photographs taken a few years ago.

Octuplet number five: McCai, male, 1lb 8oz

Octuplet number six: Josiah, male, 2lb 12oz

'It's weird, my face always swells up before and after I have children,' she says by way of explanation. 'I'm 5ft 6in and normally weigh about 81/2st, but my weight doubled to 171/2st when I was pregnant with the octuplets.'

Born in Fullerton, California, in 1976, Suleman portrays herself as a lonely child raised in a loveless home. During her formative years, she says her Palestine-born father and Lithuanian mother slept in separate rooms, staying together only for her sake and splitting up when she left home, aged 20.

Edward Suleman, whose values she says she shares, had wanted lots of children, but his wife Angela felt differently. The net result was that Nadya spent her girlhood plaintively begging her parents to give her brothers and sisters. During her late teens, she developed powerful urges to produce children of her own.

Her mother was so worried about Nadya's obsession that she took her to a psychiatrist, who, she says, reassured her that she was normal.

Despite the fact her parents abhor her decision to have eight more children, they have, commendably, stood by her. Both are approaching their 70s, but Mr Suleman is taking time off from his work in the Middle East to support his daughter, while his ex-wife works herself to exhaustion helping to care for the grandchildren.

Suleman's pathological quest for children began in earnest when she was 19 and met Marcos Gutierrez, a Hispanic cousin of her room-mate at college, where both were training to be nursing assistants in a psychiatric hospital. They married in 1996 when she was 21, but stayed together for barely two years and are now divorced.

Octuplet number seven: Jeremiah, male, 1lb 15oz

Octuplet number eight: Jonah, male, 2lb 11oz

'I thought at first that I loved him, but really I was more in love with having children,' Suleman tells me in her girlish voice. 'We split up, but we are still friendly. He hasn't been in touch since I had eight more, though - he's probably too shocked.'

It was during her brief marriage that Suleman discovered she could not have children naturally because of blocked fallopian tubes. Records show she had three miscarriages and was later told that her only chance was IVF.

After the marriage broke up, she claims to have explored the possibility of adoption, only to be told that she would never be considered because she was single.

In the event, she went back to a friend she had met in a nightclub in her teens and asked if he would provide the sperm that brought her 14 children. Here, the story gets murkier.

If we believe Suleman, the donor is called David Solomon - a name which sound suspiciously close to her own, though she adds cryptically, that this might not be his full name.

Was she his girlfriend? 'We went out on one platonic date, but it never became anything because I realised he was young and liked dating lots of women, and I wasn't interested in that,' she says.

But they remained friendly, and when she asked him to help her have babies, he readily agreed.

'Most vilfied': Nadya Suleman with two of her children in 2006

Where and how many times Suleman went for IVF treatment to conceive her first six children is not clear. Quite how she paid also remains a mystery, for she says she did not use the £147,000 compensation payout she received following a spinal injury sustained in 1999 during a patient disturbance at the psychiatric hospital where she worked.

But through her IVF efforts, Suleman managed to produce enough fertilised embryos to freeze some of them.

She confirms that the octuplets came about after Iranian fertility specialist Dr Michael Kamrava implanted six fertilised embryos in her womb, with two of them splitting later to produce eight babies in total.

Kamrava is a highly controversial figure, who has been sued for £240,000 by a British female employee who left his clinic after just two weeks, appalled by his overbearing personality as much as his methodology.

He is also being investigated for breach of professional guidelines - the recommended limit for implanted embryos is just two.

Suleman claims the doctor implanted so many only because he believed that, given her medical history, just one or two of them would grow to fruition.

'I would have been very happy with just one more baby,' she says.

She could have opted to 'selectively reduce' the number of embryos, but is horrified at the very thought. 'I couldn't imagine disposing of them.'

So what does she say to those who accuse her of behaving irresponsibly and even immorally? After all, she is not only single, but deeply in debt, owing at least £35,000 in student loans.

'I will admit that children need a father, I'm not going to defend myself against that,' she says.

'But I knew there was a limited timeframe in which I could have children and I had just six (frozen and stored) embryos left and I was determined to use them all.

'With the six I have no problems, but I'm expecting 14 to be extremely challenging. One human being can't possibly give enough love and emotion to each of them, so I'll have to accept letting go and asking for help - and that's difficult for me because I'm a bit of a control freak.

So what role, if any, does the mysterious 'David Solomon', who has yet to reveal himself, intend to play in the octuplets' upbringing?

'Maybe some day in the future he'll be interested in seeing them, but it's not my choice. I can't say whether he wants to play a part in their life.'

She last spoke to him when she was pregnant with what she then believed to be septuplets, she says. 'He wasn't angry but he was speechless.'

He must have been even more shocked when he learned that the sharp upper torso pains which Suleman began to suffer in late pregnancy were actually baby number eight. The tiniest child, Makai, had been lodged behind her ribs, and went undetected by the sonogram.

Despite weighing 171/2 st and being confined to a wheelchair during the final days, Suleman appears to have relished the pregnancy, with all its attendant expectation and attention.

Her only regret is that she had to have a Caesarean section at 30 weeks and three days, because the blood supply from her placenta to baby Jonah had stopped, and he would have died if the operation was not performed immediately.

Within five minutes of the operation, however, all eight had been delivered - and fought the odds to survive.

'It was amazing. It still hasn't sunk in,' their mother says so joyfully that you momentarily suspend judgment of her.

The historic event was captured on video by Suleman's best friend, whose constant jostling for better camera angles when the 46-strong delivery team were working caused 'an altercation' with one nurse.

The film will no doubt boost the fortune she is expected to receive for her story and commercial deals - if, that is, her PR image-makers can change the U.S.'s attitude towards her.

However, Suleman insists it will all go into a trust fund for the children.

So much for the mother's version of events. The story the grandmother tells this weekend in a mass-selling U.S. magazine contains significant differences. Angela Suleman says she begged the doctor who implanted Nadya's first six children not to help her have any more, and he agreed. But then she went to a second specialist - presumably Kamrava.

More damagingly, Angela claims that the sperm donor is really her daughter's besotted Mexican-American former boyfriend, who wanted to marry her, but was rejected because she was determined to have the children on her own.

The donor was duped into providing sperm in the belief that it would lead to a lasting relationship, she allegedly told the magazine. She added that her daughter was not capable of caring for six children, let alone 14.

Sadly, the disquieting scenes in that Whittier cul-de-sac this week have done nothing to dispel that stark summation.