In her Today Show Interview the mother of octuplets who all told now has 14 children vows she’ll “stop her life” for her children apparently believing that being the mother of more than a dozen small and smaller kids is a kind of Zen exercise.
All I can think is that the probability is rather high that these 8 babies may well have varying disabilities including “retinopathy of prematurity”–a form of blindness that I also have.
Being the mother of children with disabilities will require Nadya Suleman to start her life and start it and start it over and over like kicking a motorcycle.
This is a serious business. One wonders if anyone and I mean anyone is telling her where to learn about parenting children with disabilities?
Well of course its too early since the children aren’t ready for the kinds of developmental diagnoses that will confirm or dismiss the evidence of disabilities.
Yet the likelihood is very great that Nadya Suleman will be looking after children with compound physical problems.
Does Ms. Suleman know about the National Association for Parents with Visual Impairments NAPVI?
Does she know about online resources like Special Child?
How about Rights and Responsibilities of Parents who have children with disabilities?
Perhaps more than anything I worry that Ms. Suleman’s poor judgment will leave her children at a supreme disadvantage throughout their lives assuming as I must that they may well have disabilities. Our culture is judgmental in such neo-medieval ways about people with disabilities–will the poor judgments of their mother and the uncomprehending actions of her doctors put the children in a lifelong position of abjection, a position that might be worse owing to matters that are entirely beyond their control?
I certainly hope not. I’m praying for all concerned. I hope, as all people of faith must that my prayers have outcomes beyond my wildest flights of optimism.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
While national press sources are not making connections, the bloggers in L.A. are wondering at the fact that Nadya Suleman delivered eight babies at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower, and the next day, two recently terminated, former employees of Kaiser in West Los Angeles and their five children died in a murder-suicide at their home in Wilmington. Their employment as X-ray techs was terminated by Kaiser for forging a supervisor’s signature on an income verification application for childcare assistance. They were in debt way over their eyeballs, and lied about their income on the application in an attempt to make ends meet.
Their story is at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-children-killed29-2009jan29,0,1026866.story
One of the most haunting postings related to this tragic juxtaposition of events was:
A busy week for Kaiser Permanente.
“…There’s Seven breezes a blowin’
All around the cabin door
…Seven shots ring out
Like the Ocean’s pounding roar
There’s Seven people dead
…Somewhere in the distance
There’s Seven new People born”
“Ballad Of Hollis Brown”- Bob Dylan
A net of One.
Posted by: A Scanner Darkly | January 27, 2009 at 05:31 PM at
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/a-man-who-had-r.html
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Just caring for one or two children, especially those with disabilities, is very difficult. I can’t imagine how she can do it without significant support, but it doesn’t seem to be forthcoming. Each one of these children will need extensive help.
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