A Parent Solution : Thousands of Bleary-Eyed Orange County Moms and Dads Are Working Opposite Shifts to Cut Back on Child-Care Costs

“Momma! . . . MOMMA!” It’s 6 a.m., and a keyed-up Susan Cennamo hasn’t slept since getting off work three hours earlier. Forcing a tender smile from an exhausted face, she lifts baby Miranda from her crib, grabs a diaper and confronts the morning.

Another “day after” the night shift.

“Last night, I didn’t take off my makeup, and didn’t go to bed,” says the 29-year-old Costa Mesa woman. “I just stayed on the couch.”

While Susan tries to recuperate after shuffling drinks by night, her husband, Jerry, works in the oil fields by day.

“I didn’t even see him go to work,” she says with a sigh. “It’s hard.”

It’s called “sequential parenting,” the growing phenomenon of parents working different shifts to earn additional money while cutting child-care expenses.

It’s a sleepless answer to the rising cost of child care in the United States, yet more people are heading into the night to make ends meet in a sagging economy. About 15% of the nation’s 80.5 million full-time employees opted for flexible hours in 1991, increasing from 12.3% of the work force in 1985, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More than 62,000 working Orange County residents have joined ranks with the estimated 15.1 million American employees who work non-standard hours for various reasons. Whether it’s evenings, overnight, rotating shifts or split shifts, workers everywhere are juggling sleep with responsibility in the 24-hour world of the ‘90s.

The Cennamos, and others struggling like them, are flesh-and-blood examples of the American Dream outrunning the pace of today’s hard-working parents. Owning a home, creating a better life for your kids--things that were once expected--are more difficult to achieve than ever as the standard of living continues to slip in the United States.

National statistics show that women choose to work non-daylight hours for better child-care arrangements, while men simply work night shifts as a requirement of the job. However, both men and women who live in the nocturnal workplace find it a difficult solution to their problems.

While balancing a tray of cocktails at the Airporter Garden Hotel, Cennamo said the decision to swap rest for tips at the Irvine lounge has strained the couple’s three-year marriage.

“We fought for four months about me working nights,” she yelled to be heard above the din. “He’s such a good-hearted guy, though, he’s gotten better about it.”

The Cennamos are currently watching marriage counseling videos “because we don’t see each other that much,” she said. Although they’re saving money for the down payment on a house, the couple’s 15-month-old daughter, Miranda, was the primary factor in the job decision a year ago.

“We don’t want anyone else to take care of her, but it’s hard. . . . We’ve actually put aside ourselves for her,” she said.

On the nights she doesn’t serve drinks, Cennamo has just started a job selling roses in local nightclubs--now bringing her to an exhausting, seven-night workweek.

“I’m just tired of being broke,” she said.

Jerry Cennamo, 25, is not crazy about his wife working every night, all night.

“How much time can you spend together if you’re just a zombie,” he said. “I mean, not intentionally, but she’s always half asleep.”

Jerry Cennamo says he remembers how it felt to have parents who worked at their own business all the time, and it wasn’t easy.

“I was at baseball practice, and all the other parents were there, and mine weren’t there; I rode my bike home alone,” he recalled. “The resentment just grows and grows, and I said I would never do that.”

Susan says the night shift is a necessity that her husband reluctantly accepts.

“He would love me to be a housewife and stay at home,” she said. “That would be his dream, to support his family. But if we lived on his income alone, we would have to use coupons. We couldn’t go out to nice dinners or to the movies when we want to; we couldn’t do anything.”

Parents give a variety of reasons for working nights, according to a study conducted by the University of Maryland. Mothers are five times more likely than fathers to give child care as the motivating factor for working evenings and nights.

Harriet Presser, the sociologist who wrote the 1989 Maryland study, says she was surprised to find that one-third of all two-income families have one spouse working nights but noted that there are benefits as well as drawbacks to this increasingly popular way of life.

“One of the things it does is it gets men involved in child care,” Presser said.

The average weekly cost of child care has increased 58% from 1985 to 1991; adjusted for inflation, it has climbed 21%. Inflated child-care costs puts a major strain on the household budget and forces many parents to seek alternate shifts, says Martin O’Connell, chief of fertility statistics for the U.S. Census Bureau.

Poor families are hit especially hard. A 1991 study showed that working parents living below the poverty level pay 27% of their total monthly income in child care, as opposed to only 7% for those above the poverty line.

“The cost of just being able to get to work is a significant load that they have to carry before they even get their paycheck,” he said.

Because more women are expected to enter service industry jobs in the future, non-daylight working hours are likely to become a common alternative for American employees, O’Connell said. New mothers are among those workers, for statistics show that 54% of women with infants were in the labor force last year, contrasted with only 36% in 1976.

Presser said it is important for night workers not to ignore the dangers of sleep deprivation--even though they may think it just comes with the territory.

“Working nights and rotating schedules has a negative effect on sleep, and it creates digestive problems. You sleep and eat at the wrong times,” she said, adding that people generally sleep better at night when the temperature drops.

Susan Cennamo agrees. Despite her most cheerful efforts to conceal it, the lack of sleep often gets the best of her, especially when she gets home at 3 a.m. and is too “wound up” to sleep before the baby wakes up and her husband leaves for work.

“Last night was a bad night,” she said early one afternoon. “My mom kept calling me on the phone (this morning) to keep me awake . . . she worries that I’m going to fall asleep and Miranda’s going to get into something.”

Saving several hundred dollars annually on child care is tempting for many parents struggling financially, but some parents say they have paid a much higher price than just the dark circles under their eyes.

“We got a divorce because of it,” said Cheryl Osband, a Costa Mesa systems analyst. “My husband couldn’t handle taking care of the baby. He said it killed his freedom.”

Osband worked graveyard and swing shifts at a casino credit company in Las Vegas, leaving her year-old son with her husband.

“He told me to quit my job. He’d get home from work and take care of the baby all night long, and he would rather be out with his friends partying,” said Osband, 34.

Many fathers enjoy the time with their children, welcoming those hours typically reserved for mom.

“I like it because it forces me to play Mr. Mom,” said police Sgt. Trent Harris, who occasionally has to work night shift.

When Harris gets off work, he loves to play with his little boy, relax and have a beer. The problem is, the neighbors tend to stare when you’re on the front lawn sipping a brew at 8 a.m.

“But when you work graveyard, that’s your nighttime,” said the 36-year-old father of four.

Trent’s wife, Diane, is used to sleeping alone at night and hushing the children during the day. Every few years or so, the Huntington Beach couple are forced to steal kisses in the hallway and pass the parental baton before yawning out the door to their jobs at the Newport Beach Police Department.

“He’s just that type of person that doesn’t mind sleeping during the day,” she said. “He’d sleep during the day, work nights, and try to be normal on the weekends; that would drive me crazy.”

Despite tiptoeing around the house while Daddy sleeps, Aaron, 12, Tawny, 11, Sara, 7, and 3-year-old Brett don’t seem affected by the periodic bouts with the night shift at the Harris home. In fact, the family faces it again in November.

“I’ve never really noticed it really bothering the kids,” Diane said. “The hardest thing is to get the kids to be quiet while Dad’s sleeping. That’s a trick.”

Joanie Evans, a Seal Beach preschool teacher, recalls working for 36 years to supplement husband Jim’s income with a string of nighttime jobs. She says she wanted to be there when her four children came home from school.

“We didn’t have enough money to afford baby-sitting, and I didn’t want anyone to baby-sit my children,” Evans said. “It was something that had to be done.”

Evans said she began working nights at the Lafayette Hotel in Long Beach in 1957, where she stayed for nine years until it closed. She then worked at several gas station convenience stores until she was robbed at a store in 1980.

“Somebody came in to buy a beer, and I guess I tried to stop him” because he was under age and it was after 2 a.m., she said, still haunted by the experience. “I guess they were gang members, and they beat me up pretty bad. They hit me with a bottle and left me there. I was unconscious.”

Evans tried to go back to work a week later, “but I was just too scared,” she said. “I didn’t trust anyone who came in (the store).”

However, the safety concern was almost secondary to the overwhelming fatigue of working the night shift, Evans said.

“It got to the point where I was falling asleep. I wasn’t getting anyplace with the family,” she said. “I was falling asleep driving home, I was falling asleep in a chair. . . . I’m really pretty lucky, because the kids turned out pretty good.”

These days, Evans said she’s happy and relieved to be working her 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. shift at the Under the Rainbow Children’s Center with her 38-year-old daughter, Barbara. She said working nights all those years was a sacrifice she had to make.

“It was a necessary decision. . . . All the time wasn’t quality time, but I got to see my children growing up, and working nights was the only way to do it.”

Hauling laundry downstairs with Miranda at her heels, Susan Cennamo watches the sun rise from her living room and turns on some country music.

“Jerry’s hating me these days because I work so much. . . . But I want to buy a house,” she says. “Once we get all our bills paid, no one will be able to turn us down . . . and I guess we’ll trade a little debt for a big debt.”