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Natalie “Nadya” Suleman’s kids are revealing what it was like to welcome octuplets into the family in 2009.
On the March 24 episode of Lifetime’s Confessions of Octomom, Suleman’s 21-year-old son Joshua — her second child — opened up about the family going from six kids to 14. Looking back, he admitted he questioned his mom’s decision to have so many children.
“When you’re six kids deep and you just had twins, I couldn’t imagine why you’d want another one, but, here we were,” he said, adding: “I remember [at] the house we were in before they were born, it was late at night, I went out to the backyard and then I found [my mom] crying. I asked why she was crying, and she just hugged me.”
Noting that he didn’t know if Suleman was “nervous or scared” after finding out she was pregnant with eight babies, Joshua explained that things felt “all out of my control.”
“What I could control is where I was and what I was doing,” he shared. “With everything that was going on, my escape was to be on my own, spend time by myself, kind of isolating from the whole thing.”
Initially, Suleman said she underwent another round of IVF hoping for just one more child because she thought that her now 18-year-old son Caleb was left out of the group dynamic that existed among his siblings.
“I started to project onto Caleb, thinking back in my childhood, I wanted a sibling to connect with,” she explained. “Then [I thought], ‘I’m just gonna try to have a seventh child so that I could give Caleb that playmate,’ believing that he wants it, when in reality, I wanted it for him.”
The first six kids were hit the hardest by the backlash Suleman received for having octuplets as a single mother, she said. Her oldest, Elijah, revealed that he was even visited by Child Protective Services at school.
“I remember multiple times being in school, where I would get pulled out of class by the staff to go into a room,” he recalled. “[I had] no idea why, [and the school would say that] CPS is there. They want to talk to me about something going on. And every single time, I didn’t say anything.”
Things only got worse when Elijah, who was 7 when the octuplets were born, became “out of control” at home, breaking walls and vandalizing the outside.
“Because of what they’d been through, the trauma they experienced, Elijah started to act out,” Suleman said. “Just screaming a lot. He started to graffiti the house, spray paint. He was acting out out of trauma. That was trauma. He was catapulted into the public eye with me, and then, due to that trauma, of course, he was acting out.”
“All sense of normalcy was ripped out from under him,” she continued. “His life was hijacked by mainstream media, not just tabloid media, all the media. He was resentful, which is understandable.”
Her oldest daughter Amerah said she also saw where Elijah’s behavior was coming from.
“If [our mom] were in his shoes, she’d be mad too,” Amerah said. “We all, in a sense, feel like things were taken away from us and stripped from us because our lives went from one extreme to another. He acted out in anger, and I took my anger out in sports, and Joshua took his out in gaming. We all had our own little escapes. But for him, I feel like it was more of a cry for attention.”
Acknowledging he was “rebellious” and “mean” when he was younger, Elijah explained that it was never due to a lack of love for his family.
“I just kind of learned to adjust [by telling myself], ‘It is what it is,’” he said.
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Confessions of Octomom airs on Mondays at 10 p.m. ET on Lifetime.
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