Octomom Natalie ‘Nadya’ Suleman Says the World Had Her Family All Wrong: ‘Success Despite All the Odds’

It’s small and crowded, but Natalie Suleman’s home runs like a well-oiled machine. At least it appears to on a sunny weekday morning in February. Her 16-year-old octuplets — Noah, Maliyah, Isaiah, Nariyah, Jonah, Makai, Josiah and ­Jeremiah — quickly and quietly move around one another, tidying their Orange County, Calif., townhouse apartment in preparation for People’s cameras for this week’s cover story.

Out of sight are Suleman’s 18-year-old twins Calyssa and Caleb, along with her 19-year-old son Aidan, who has autism and is in school that day. Her three oldest children — Elijah, 23, Amerah, 22, and Joshua, 21 — have moved out but live nearby and visit often. One mom, 14 kids and not a hair out of place?

“I don’t like anything out of control. I’m a control freak,” says Suleman, 49. “And I’m addicted to productivity.”

In 2009 Suleman made history and countless headlines after giving birth to the world’s first surviving octuplets, conceived via IVF. But what began as a novel news moment devolved into chaos as word got out that the woman behind the maternal feat was single, unemployed, living with her parents and, most notably, already a mother of six children conceived via IVF. Cue the recession-era media firestorm that birthed the term “Octomom.”

“There was this false narrative spun, like I was this unemployed welfare recipient,” says Suleman. “It was not the case at all.”

Still, for years she leaned into the wild persona the world had created, selling photos and interviews, even participating in an adult film — all, she says, in an effort to support her family. Now, after stepping away from the spotlight in 2013 to reset, heal and focus on her kids, she’s ditched the nickname Nadya (the name she used during that previous era) and is telling her side of the story in Lifetime’s biopic I Was Octomom and docuseries Confessions of Octomom.

“My family and I are taking our life back,” she says. Despite the show titles, “I’m not Octomom. I’m not this compartmentalized caricature. I’m a mom. [This is] a story of strength, survival and success despite all the odds against us.”

An only child herself, Suleman was close to her father, Edward, a chef and military translator from the Middle East, but struggled to connect with her mother, Angela, a teacher from Northern Europe. “It’s not enough to say I wanted a big family because I was lonely,” she says. “There is an amalgamation of factors as to why I wanted kids, to create maybe a safe and predictable little world that I lacked growing up.”

She excelled in school and earned her bachelor’s degree in child and adolescent behavior from Cal State Fullerton before pursuing her master’s. But outside of class “I was painfully shy, always in my own world,” she says.

Never really interested in a romantic relationship, she briefly married in 1996 “to pacify my very old-fashioned Middle Eastern family and just to fit in,” says Suleman, who identifies as asexual. “My dad was like, ‘Nadya, why don’t you get married and do it the normal way?’ It certainly didn’t work. I had to talk with him and say, ‘This isn’t who I am. I’m different.’ He eventually accepted it.”

But nothing was going to stand in the way of her pursuit of motherhood. “When I set my mind to achieving a goal, I am laser-focused,” she says before adding, “I may have possibly overachieved with kids. I didn’t intend on having this many.”

Suleman once feared she couldn’t have any kids. As a student living at home and working 70 hours a week, she learned she had endometriosis (a disease that can affect fertility). Enter Dr. Michael Kamrava, then a respected 30-year veteran reproductive specialist she began seeing for in vitro fertilization.

Suleman used the sperm of a platonic friend to fertilize her eggs. Rather than implant the standard recommended two embryos, Dr. Kamrava would implant six. At the time “I was grateful,” says Suleman. With the help of Kamrava, she had back-to-back successful pregnancies with Elijah, Amerah, Joshua, Aidan and twins ­Calyssa and Caleb. Successful and expensive.

“Instead of buying a house I bought in vitros,” she says. And contrary to popular belief, “no taxpayer dollars went to [my procedures]. Working at a hospital, I saved well over $100,000, and I paid for everything.”

With six little ones already at home with her parents in 2008, she says, “I only wanted one more.” Using savings as well as an inheritance she received, she purchased sperm from an anonymous donor and went for it. But this time, instead of six embryos, Kamrava transferred an unprecedented 12.

“I wasn’t aware that that was happening,” she says. “I was sedated on the table.”

When she learned she was pregnant with seven, she panicked. “But I didn’t believe in selective reduction [a procedure to reduce the number of fetuses in a multiple pregnancy], so what was I going to do?”

Kamrava eventually lost his medical license as a result of his actions.

Looking back, “I kind of threw myself under the bus to cover for him,” she says. “I definitely regret not suing him because his insurance would have been paying, and it would have been helpful. But I didn’t have the heart to. I wouldn’t have had any of my kids if it weren’t for him.”

On Jan. 26, 2009, Suleman gave birth to not seven but a record-breaking eight healthy babies after an additional fetus was discovered during delivery.

“In the beginning it was an unbelievable pandemonium,” she says of fielding countless interview requests while dodging claims she was an unfit mother and even death threats. “I was fighting for my survival.”

Back at home Suleman’s daughter Amerah recalls feeling “confused more than anything. It’s a lot for a 6-year-old to take in. It was frustrating, upsetting, all of those things.”

Aside from the grandparents, Suleman had the help of nannies, but only for a few years. “We were really struggling financially. Then it went from bad to worse,” Suleman says.

Amerah adds, “I remember just having a lot of anger. Like, what do you mean I can’t keep cheering because you can’t afford it?”

Around that time “I had to sacrifice my integrity repeatedly,” Suleman admits of posing for suggestive photos and participating in a solo adult film to make ends meet. “There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to provide for my family,” she says, adding, “I’ve never wanted fame. I sued the hospital because they’re the reason I ended up in the public eye.”

By 2013, she says, she couldn’t keep up the facade any longer. “It took a toll and started eating away at my soul. I just had to lean into my very strong faith in God. It wasn’t until I did that that everything fell into place beautifully.”

She checked into a treatment center for anxiety and PTSD stemming from the entire ordeal, leaving her kids in the care of friends and nannies, and stepped away from the spotlight. When she was well, she returned to work as a counselor.

“I finally was able to escape all of that — the attack, it felt, from the world, that global scorn and condemnation, being the target of misplaced hate — and go back to the life I had known before,” says Suleman. “Having a positive impact on people’s lives gave me a sense of joy.”

By far the biggest impact she’s had is on the lives of her own children.

“I focus on raising them to the best of my ability. And that’s all-consuming,” says Suleman, whose mother died in 2014, followed by her dad in 2021. “When you think about one child, two children, four, they take all your energy. And when it’s 14 kids, they all have different needs.”

With her son Aidan, who is nonverbal, “I’ve been his sole [caretaker] since birth,” explains Suleman. “He monopolizes the majority of my time and energy. When he was really little, he was just like one of the eight [developmentally]. Now he’s big, so he requires a lot more.”

In 2018 she left her job and began receiving income as his caregiver through a government program. “He’s like a full-time job for four people,” she says. Thankfully, his many siblings step in to help too. “The kids all look out for him,” she adds.

Suleman says she took a different approach to raising the octuplets than she did with their older siblings.

“She’s very strict and disciplined,” says her daughter Nariyah, known as the leader of the pack, “and she educates us a lot.”

Adds Suleman: “With my older kids I failed to implement all of what I learned in college and graduate school. I was just nurturing and learned the hard way that you inadvertently raise self-entitled kids when you do that.” With the younger ones “it was a combination of unconditional love, positive regard and structured discipline consequences.”

A few of her rules include no meat, no phones and no social media. The children all have assigned chores and attend church regularly. They’ve opted to take virtual classes rather than go to school in person, in part because when they did go, “kids would show me pictures of myself and of Mom on the Internet and ask us if we’re from different dads,” Nariyah recalls. “We’d just ignore them and 100 percent protect Mom.”

Still, the children had their share of questions for their mom over the years.

“They’ll joke, ‘Oh, so we’re test tube babies?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, but you’re more than that,’ ” says Suleman. “I’m very transparent with everyone.”

Neither her older kids nor the octuplets have expressed a desire to meet their donor. Nariyah says there’s no need: “I think our mother takes over the mother role and the father role, and she is fully capable of doing that.”

Says Suleman: “I’ve managed to raise them into healthy, well-adjusted children that are grounded, that are humble and above all kind and compassionate to everyone. So I’m very grateful.”