SECOND FAMILY : More Middle-Aged Couples Feel Like Kids Again--So They Start a New Generation

The pitter-patter of little feet had grown into the clip-clop of big Nikes--trotting out the door for college and jobs and independence.

Suddenly, Bill and Marilyn Bauserman’s spacious Yorba Linda home seemed like a spacious empty nest. “We looked at each other and said, ‘We’re going to be all alone,’ ” recalled Marilyn, 39.

So, 16 years after the birth of their youngest child, they decided to have a baby. And 17 months later, the sweet reward of that decision--their daughter Ashleigh--pitter-pats about on all fours.

The born-again parents are not the spring chickens they were when they hatched their first brood. Marilyn was 21 when she gave birth to two children, a son and a daughter, just 10 months apart. Two decades and a full head of hair ago, Bill--now 47--handed out “It’s a Boy” cigars to celebrate his son’s debut.

That was another lifetime, another set of families. Bill and Marilyn, then recent divorcees, met and joined forces in the mid-’70s.

As children go, their three didn’t cause any major headaches: “None of us have a police record,” Eric Bauserman, 20, offered as evidence. But even the best of children make for terminal work, excruciating worry and constant noise--especially when the whole gang reaches adolescence in unison.

Why, with freedom knocking at their door, did Mom and Dad Bauserman start all over again? Why not sit back and say, “We’ve paid our dues--now we’re going to enjoy the peace and quiet”? Why stretch what could have been two decades of child-rearing into four?

Because, well . . . because they wanted to. “We like having kids around,” said Bill, who owns an air-conditioning shop in Fullerton. “We’d talked about it for a while, but there was no way we were going to have a fourth kid with three teen-agers in the house.”

So they waited until they were down to one adolescent-in-residence. The last of the originals, 18-year-old Rachelle Strauss, leaves for college next fall.

A 40ish couple like the Bausermans retreading the beaten path of parenthood is still a rarity. While the birth rate among women age 35 to 44 rose by almost 50% from 1977 to 1987, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, many of those women are either first-timers or moms who did not take lengthy breaks between babies.

However, Orange County obstetricians and Lamaze instructors do report a slight upsurge in recycled parents.

“It’s certainly occurring,” said Dr. Kirk Keegan, vice chairman of the UCI Medical Center’s department of obstetrics and gynecology. “Part of the reason may be that we now have technology we didn’t have five or 10 years ago to help these women achieve pregnancy again; in some cases, they are women who had infertility problems after their first pregnancies. So in the years to come, we may see more families with a disparity in their children’s ages.”

Carolou Munson, an Orange-based Lamaze teacher, also has seen an increase in second-time-around parents. “I’ve noticed it more in recent years,” she said. “I wonder if it’s an offspring of the cocooning phenomenon--people are happy to spend more time at home.”

Latter-day pregnancy has an increased risk of genetic disorders. But except for the heightened danger of Down’s syndrome, a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that healthy women who bear children after age 34 are no less likely than younger women to have successful pregnancies.

And a study by UC Irvine obstetrician Dr. David Lewis indicates that over-34 women who have had babies in their young 20s are likely to enjoy an easier pregnancy than first-time older moms. “Even a woman whose pregnancy occurs more than 10 years after her last delivery probably will experience the benefits of having already had a baby--shorter labor and a decreased risk of Cesarean section,” Lewis said.

Born-again parents are people who had to confront the empty-nest syndrome years before many of their generational peers, observed Lamaze instructor Munson. “They parented young, and now they’re in their late 30s or early 40s and are questioning life without young ones around,” she said. “They feel that they still have enough energy and love to devote to a second generation.”

Quite literally, the latecomers are a “second generation,” with siblings old enough--if not mature enough--to be their parents.

“The (elder) children sometimes are embarrassed by their mother’s pregnancy,” said Sharron Harcarik, who coordinates the expectant parent classes at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Anaheim. “Teen-agers don’t like to deviate from the norm, and when you’re 16 it’s not ‘normal’ for your parents to be having a baby. In their perception, their parents are old. Also, children don’t tend to think of their parents as sexually active, and the pregnancy proves otherwise.”

Nineteen-year-old Heather Ferneau had just heard the most outlandish news, so she stopped by her father’s and stepmother’s Dana Point house seeking solace: Her boyfriend’s parents were expecting a baby . And they were in their, like, 40s. And their kids were in college .

“I kept saying, ‘I can’t believe they’re doing this--they’re crazy,’ ” Heather remembered. “Finally my father said, ‘Well, we can relate to that.’ ”

“Her eyes got as big as saucers,” interjected her dad, Bill Ferneau. He and his wife, Geri, 38, explained to Heather that they, too, would be welcoming a new bundle of joy in six months. “For the next half-hour Heather just said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ ”

Heather admits that she was shocked. “The first thing I thought was, ‘My dad is 45--what is he doing? When the baby’s 20, he’ll be 65,’ ” she said. “You think things like that right off. And then you think, ‘That’s great--a baby. They may be older, but they have more money than when I was growing up. And (the baby) will have seven parents (counting five adult siblings) instead of two.’ ”

Scott Falconer Ferneau is the name of the month-old newcomer--the first boy born to a family with five sisters. Bill has three college co-eds from a previous marriage--Heather, 19, Carrie, 20, and Laurie, 22. Geri has Chelsea and Heather Drake, 16 and 19.

After four years of marriage, Bill and Geri decided to have a baby. “It took me a bit longer to warm up to the notion,” Bill admitted. “To parent a kid at 45 is a fairly serious decision.”

“If we didn’t have this baby, in another six years we’d have all our kids through college and we’d be footloose and fancy-free--we could retire,” said Bill, a representative for Dushkin Publishing Group. “The baby gives you a whole new set of priorities.”

Geri, on the other hand, had long hoped for another child. “I was only 22 when I had my second daughter, and the kids were still small when I divorced,” she said. “I hung on to their furniture because I thought, ‘Geez, if I ever remarry . . . .’ Then it ended up in storage, and eventually my thinking became: ‘Well, now I have this stuff to give to my kids when they have kids.’ ”

As did the Ferneaus and the Bausermans, Jerry and Diana Greco planned their second brush with parenthood. But the Grecos’ experience differs in that all five of their children come from one 27-year marriage.

When the youngest of their three handsome sons was 15, the Anaheim couple were overcome with the longing to have babies around the house again.

“We didn’t want an only child; we worried that he would be lonely,” Diana said. “I was already 41, so we figured we’d better get busy.”

Within two years, they added Matthew and Melissa, now 6 and 4, to their family.

Jerry witnessed their deliveries: “I would give anything to have the opportunity to redo the first three (births of his children). For the other boys, the hospital stuck me out in the boondocks; I didn’t know if my wife was living or dead, for God’s sake, they kept you so isolated.”

As was their parents’ hope, the children appear to be best friends--giggling over private jokes, sneaking one another secret hand signals, scampering off together when adult talk becomes too tedious.

“At 40, we had wondered, ‘What do we want to do now?’ ” said Jerry Greco, who owns Stadium Motors automobile dealership in Anaheim. “We’re homebodies; we didn’t want to travel or anything like that. So we thought, ‘Let’s do what we do best--let’s have more children.’ ”

Jim and Linda Rose definitely wanted to travel. When their daughter, Riki, took off for college, they took off for Hawaii and the Mexican Riviera. They also put a down payment on an ocean-view house with a yard too small for a swing set.

Then Linda started feeling queasy. And the home pregnancy test came up positive.

She and her husband scrubbed their dream to buy the house. “There was no driveway for handball,” laughed Jim, a technical representative for Toyota Motors.

Having another baby at the joint age of 43--after purposely raising 21-year-old Riki as an only child--was not what the Laguna Niguel couple had imagined for themselves. But once they sifted through the initial befuddlement, Jim and Linda became excited about their surprise package--due in August.

“If Riki had been a difficult child, I probably would have more trepidation,” said Linda, a vice principal for Capistrano Unified School District. “But she’s the joy of my life. When someone has brought you so much joy, it’s hard to say, ‘I don’t want to go through that again.’ ”

Her sentiment seems common among these veteran parents: Whether by sheer luck or parental skill, child-rearing for them has held infinite pleasure and little heartache.

“We keep marveling that out of five kids, each one has ambitions to go to college, none of them smoke, none of them have gotten into trouble,” Geri Ferneau said. “We ask each other, ‘What did we do right?’ ”

Clearly, they did a lot right. Still, knowing now what they didn’t know then, how might they approach parenthood differently?

More calmly, the parents concurred.

Geri Ferneau: “When my kids did something wrong, I tended to jump to anger quickly. Hopefully, I won’t do as much yelling.”

Linda Rose: “As you get older, you see there are few things that are truly an issue--whereas when you’re young, you think everything is big stuff. I feel much more centered, not as emotional. I’ll probably have a more relaxed kid.”

Jerry Greco sounded as though he could write a dissertation on discipline: “I was stern with Jeff (now 26) in ways that would almost seem gruesome by today’s standards. I was always anticipating what he was about to do wrong, I was always there to say, ‘Don’t do that, don’t touch that, don’t budge, don’t move.’

“Jeff didn’t do anything goofier than these two kids, yet I have a different relationship with Matthew and Melissa. I’m a lot more patient with them; I treat them more as individuals and free spirits. If I snapped my fingers at Jeff, he was at full attention and pretty panicked--whereas these two might look at me as if to say, ‘Hey, lighten up. We haven’t done anything real big time.’ ”

Hearing his father’s self-critique, Jeff said he harbors no resentment about his strict upbringing: “My parents always had good intentions. But I think it’s neat that they are able to relate to these two little guys in a way that is much better.”

Melissa and Matthew’s other big brother, Chris, believes that the youngsters have strengthened family ties. “As kids grow up they grow apart from their parents--they can’t wait to leave the house when they reach 18,” said Chris Greco, 21. “But for me, this has been an opportunity to grow closer to my parents. It’s given me reason to spend more time around the house.”

Age brings with it not only wisdom but also a sense of mortality.

“Sometimes I think, ‘My goodness--this child is not going to have anyone if we die,’ ” said Linda Rose. “But then I think, ‘Well, our child will always have Riki.’ ”

Her husband chuckled over her fear. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on checking out any time soon,” Jim Rose teased.

Then, more seriously, he added, “The crux of it is that when you get to be 40, you realize you’re not going to live forever.”

Recycled parents, of course, have a few more wrinkles and gray hairs than they did the first time around.

“I hope that Ashleigh will not be embarrassed because I look older than her friends’ dads,” Bill Bauserman said. “Everyone thinks she’s my granddaughter. We were out at a restaurant the other day and Ashleigh started fussing, and a man across the way said, ‘She’s giving you a hard time, huh, Grandpa?’ That’s the negative, but you roll with it.”

Bald spots and all, the parents have discovered a rejuvenated inspiration to act and think younger. “I’m watching my weight and dressing spiffier,” Bill Bauserman said. “I guess it makes me feel sort of macho to be a new dad.”

Thanks to little Scott, Bill Ferneau is determined to stay fit and active. “When he’s 15, I’ll be 60--and I don’t want to be out to pasture,” Ferneau said. “I’m getting to the health club more often.”

“This baby might do me a lot of good,” the proud but weary father concluded with a laugh, “or else he’ll be the death of me.”