Split-Shift Parenting : One works days, one nights. It’s a sleepless solution to child care.

“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 smile, 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,” the 29-year-old Costa Mesa woman said. “I just stayed on the couch.”

Susan Cennamo is a cocktail waitress by night; her husband, Jerry, works in the oil fields by day.

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

It is “sequential parenting,” the sleepless answer to the concern over quality and the rising cost of child care in the United States. It is also a growing phenomenon: 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 non-traditional hours (which takes in everything from the graveyard shift to flex time) in 1991, up from 12.3% of the work force in 1985, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More than 212,000 working residents of Los Angeles County and 62,000 in Orange County have joined ranks with the estimated 15.1 million American employees who work non-standard hours for various reasons.

The Cennamos, and others struggling like them, are examples of the American dream outrunning the pace and the pocketbooks of today’s hard-working parents. Owning a home and creating a better life for the kids are ever more difficult as the standard of living continues to slip in the United States.

While balancing a tray of cocktails at an airport hotel lounge in Irvine, Cennamo said the decision a year ago to swap rest for tips has strained the couple’s three-year marriage.

“We fought for four months about me working nights,” she confessed, speaking above the band’s rendition of “Satin Doll.” “He’s such a good-hearted guy, though, he’s gotten better about it.”

But the arrangement has taken a toll. The Cennamos are 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 decision.

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

On the nights she doesn’t serve drinks, Cennamo sells roses in local nightclubs, which means she works seven nights a week.

“I’m just tired of being broke,” she said. The couple’s combined income is about $40,000 but would be less than $30,000 without Susan Cennamo’s nighttime jobs, 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 said he remembers how it felt to have parents who worked at their own business all the time.

“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 Cennamo said the night shift is a necessity.

“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 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, citing concern over the cost and quality of someone else taking care of their children.

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

“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%.

Poor families are hit especially hard. A 1991 study showed that working parents living below the poverty level pay 27% of their monthly income in child care, as opposed to 7% for those above the poverty line, said Martin O’Connell, chief of fertility statistics for the U.S. Census Bureau. These parents find themselves working just to pay for the child care that they need while they’re working, O’Connell said.

Statistics show that more new mothers are working these days--54% of women with infants were in the labor force last year, contrasted with 36% in 1976. Because they are the primary caretakers of children, the number of women carrying lunch pails into the night is also expected to rise.

Presser said it is important that night workers not ignore the dangers of sleep deprivation--even though they may think it 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.

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 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. Her child is now 7, and Osband said she prefers to work days now.

But 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 accustomed to be being alone at night and hushing the children during the day. Every few years or so, when Trent Harris pulls night duty, the Huntington Beach couple steal kisses in the hallway and pass the parental baton before yawning out the door to and from their respective 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 (routine) would drive me crazy.”

The Harris children--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 sometime this month.

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

Joanie Evans, a preschool teacher from Long Beach, worked a string of nighttime jobs for 36 years to supplement husband Jim’s income. She said 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 in 1957 at the Lafayette Hotel in Long Beach, where she stayed for nine years until it closed. She then worked at several gas station/convenience stores until she was robbed 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).”

But 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 in Seal Beach 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 watched the sunrise from her living room and turned on some country music.

“Jerry’s hating me these days because I work so much. . . . But I want to buy a house,” she said. “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.”