Fear of Separation Grips Parents, Children Alike : Emotions: Some won’t go to work; others sleep together. But such anxiety is healthy, a therapist says.

Elizabeth Park stands so close to her youngest daughter, Candice, that their slight shadows mingle in the flickering light of a campfire at the tent community in Petit Park. Across the street, her quake-damaged Granada Hills apartment is laced with cracks, perhaps to be condemned.

Park and her two daughters sleep in their car, a Pontiac 6000 that for many would be too close for comfort. But when they are together in that small steel bedroom, at least Elizabeth Park can hear her girls breathe, feel them toss and turn, and know they are all right.

She will not leave the girls to go to work and risks losing her job as a liquor store clerk by week’s end--a sacrifice to her new fear of separation.

As Southern California trembles slowly back to normal, one aftershock at a time, separation anxiety is an unexpected obstacle. Fearful parents bring their children to their jobs. Teen-agers ask to sleep with mom and dad again. Families camp near their ravaged homes--just to be close by, just to keep them safe.

Others won’t leave their pets or their damaged possessions. It’s a temporary paralysis with a simple mantra: I cannot leave my family, my house, my pets, my things. Not now. Not yet.

“I’m worried so much,” Park said. “But what can I do? I worry about my children. I need to go to my job. I need living-life money. But I cannot leave them.”

At Granada Hills High School, where the Red Cross has set up a shelter, Marietta Sova puffs on her cigarette and cries. She has just dropped her cat, 10-year-old Cricket, off at the West Valley Animal Shelter. Both are homeless since Monday’s 6.6 earthquake smashed Sova’s Northridge apartment complex.

The vet, Sova says with a sniffle, said her cat would die if it continued to live in a cage in her car--close enough for reassurance on these long, sleepless nights, but hot and cramped during the days. Cricket, Sova said, “is like a child to me.” When she dropped the animal off at the shelter, “I felt like I was taking a child to an adoptive home.”

Far from being irrational, flashes of fear at even the thought of separation are very realistic and often healthy, said Margaret Taylor, a licensed clinical social worker who has been counseling the quake-rattled at the Pasadena Mental Health Center this week.

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Although separation anxiety blossoms differently in everyone, what it amounts to is a belief that a loved one or cherished object is not safe alone, Taylor said. The reverse is true, too: “If (my loved ones) are not with me, I am not safe either. . . . Some people get a little overexcited about these things, but they’re not crazy. They’re realistic.”

One woman Taylor counseled after the quake insisted on sleeping in her car with her dog in her driveway, where she could be warm yet keep an eye on her damaged Pasadena home. “They were safe, and so was her house,” Taylor said. “The bottom line is that it’s not OK to be separated.”

Michelle Gates, a Palmdale elementary school teacher, knows this firsthand. She was spending the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend with her mother and stepfather in Northridge when the quake hit Monday morning.

She finally went home Wednesday evening after scooping up piles of broken glass, making runs for groceries and water, walking two frightened Dobermans, and answering phone call after phone call from concerned friends and family members. She stayed, she said, for all three of them: herself, her mother and her stepfather, who spent much of the week searching for a lifesaving kidney dialysis center.

“It was hard to leave,” she said of her family and the ravaged ranch-style house where she grew up. “I wanted to stay another day. I would rather be there and suffer than not know if something happened.

“At the same time, you want to be out of there, be where it’s safer and you have water and heat. I almost feel guilty leaving. What if they need me?”

And what if she needed them? After all, she had not visited her apartment since the quake and had no inkling of its condition. She feared the crippled freeways, the long, slow drive and the threatening overpasses. And the return to work Thursday was rough.

“I’m afraid to turn the news off for fear something happens,” Gates said. “I’m still emotionally drained.”

The more vulnerable the loved one, the greater--and more reasonable--the fear of separation, Taylor said. That fit Andrea Thompson Adam and her firstborn, Andrew, a 4-month-old child she left with a sitter for the first time just 10 days ago to return to work.

She has not left the baby’s side since 4:31 a.m. Monday and hates to even leave the boy alone with his father. Thompson Adam works at the Hollywood-based Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, an office damaged badly enough to keep the staff away this week. Working from home “is like a prayer answered,” she said.

On Saturday, however, the commission has a retreat for its staff and board of directors, an event that Thompson Adam cannot miss--and dreads. To get through that daylong separation, she plans to position her husband and son at a co-worker’s house across the street from USC, where the retreat is taking place. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the closest she can be to Andrew.

“He has not been out of my sight since the quake,” Thompson Adam said. “We’re camped out in the living room because of the mirrors in the bedroom. John and I are on the sofa, and Drew’s in his basket next to me. He’s laying here on my shoulder right now, snoring his little heart out.”

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Lilli Friedland, a psychologist with the Los Angeles County Psychological Assn.’s Disaster Response Team, calls separation anxiety “the bottom line fear that people have, simply because your fear is that the ground is going to open up and swallow you or your parents or your family.”

In Noeline Spaulding-Brown’s case, the family is large and sprawling, if unconventional, and the concern is warranted. Spaulding-Brown spent her 73rd birthday Wednesday evacuating the residents of four apartment buildings she manages at the hard-hit corner of Devonshire Street and Hayvenhurst Avenue in Granada Hills.

As darkness fell and her family of tenants hustled belongings out of the crumbling buildings, she grabbed each person, demanding a hug and a forwarding address. Embraces were the simple part, addresses more complicated because many were living outside or in carports.

Some of her tenants, for example, were staying under the carport in some apartments behind the International House of Pancakes a few blocks away. Spaulding-Brown knew the location of each improvised situation. It was her way of holding on.

“I can’t change what happened, but I can make it less painful,” she said. “When home is refurbished, they want to come home. For now, no one leaves here without a hug.

At the Westside Jewish Community Center’s nursery school, parents are the clingy ones, not the children, said Frankie Meppen, director of early childhood education. They stay a little longer when dropping off their children, they call a lot, they want to know that the center is well supplied.

Although attendance was more or less back to normal Thursday, on Wednesday, its first day open after the quake, only about 75% of the children showed up.

Meppen deals with separation fears at home, too, where her fiercely independent 13-year-old son insists on sleeping on her bedroom floor. He is “very, very frightened,” she said, and “doesn’t want to be in a room without us.”