Kate Plus 8 words to live by
Roberto M. Esquivel/HeraldStandard.comrd.com
Kate Gosselin, the famed mother of twins and sextuplets, spoke before an audience recently at the Maggie Magerko Auditorium at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, and shared her life experiences.
Roberto M. Esquivel/HeraldStandard.com
Kate Gosselin, the famed mother of twins and sextuplets, spoke before an audience recently at the Maggie Magerko Auditorium at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, and shared her life experiences.
Roberto M. Esquivel/HeraldStandard.comrd.com
Kate Gosselin, the famed mother of twins and sextuplets, spoke before an audience recently at the Maggie Magerko auditorium at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, and shared her life experiences.
Kate Gosselin seems to live her life in eights.
The mom of twins and sextuplets made famous by a reality television show told an audience at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, this week that she can sum up her life in eight simple words.
Gosselin, a former nurse, used the terms determination, strength, perseverance, courage, focus, passion, resilience and endurance in a vocabulary list that she said defines her.
The beginning of her “cast-iron determination” came when she entered nursing school, she said, and realized the academics didn’t come easily to her. Her determination kicked in again when she faced fertility issues that ultimately led to the carrying of the sextuplets when she was forced to eat 3,000 calories a day and remain on bed rest hoping to reach 30 weeks in her pregnancy.
“It was the building of my determination in my early days that shaped who I am today,” she said.
After the birth of their sextuplets, Kate Gosselin and her former husband, Jon, starred for several years in a reality show “Jon & Kate Plus 8” on The Learning Channel that featured the daily lives of the Berks County couple as they tackled child rearing of eight children all under the age of 3. The couple also authored several books in that time. After a very public divorce in 2009, Kate Gosselin returned to television minus Jon when the show was renamed “Kate Plus 8.” The last episode of that show aired in September.
“All the details of my divorce, whether I wanted to keep them quiet or not, came out,” she said. “I feared that people wouldn’t be able to see the real me because of all the crap that was written about me. But early on, I decided I wasn’t going to allow the opportunist to determine my destiny. Through all of it, I realized I have courage I didn’t know I had.”
Gosselin had come under scrutiny throughout the course of both shows when some said she was exploiting her children for financial gain. She also found criticism early last year during a stint with another popular reality show, “Dancing With the Stars,” that sparked reports of meltdowns with her dance partner amid custody battles with Jon.
“The paparazzi was creating a person that doesn’t exist. I am not that person,” she said. “A resilience to bounce back from the criticism just became who I was daily. It made me stronger.”
Since leaving television, Gosselin, 36, has been touring the country for speaking engagements where she shares about her life as a single mom raising eight children and dealing with the morning rush, school work, dinner, bath time and bed time and balancing all of that with work to provide for her family. She has also recently started blogging on the website CouponCabin.com.
Gosselin told the audience of fans and college students to use the vocabulary list of terms to find their destination in life.
“My destination is being the best mom I can be,” she said. “I don’t care what the world says. There’s eight people on this planet that matter. I want my kids to grow up and look back on their childhood and say, ‘You made good decisions. I am proud of you.'”