COVER STORY : Joan and Jerry McMillin thought their child-raising days were done. But when their daughter was slain, leaving two grandchildren, the McMillins had to become. . . : Twice the Parents

Like a lot of people in their late 50s and early 60s, Joan and Jerry McMillin had a retirement plan: Travel the country in a camper, grow old with friends, put some money aside for their grandchildren’s education.

Six years ago, those plans evaporated when their daughter was stabbed to death by her husband in front of their two children in an Orange County motel room.

Today, the McMillins are parents again, raising grandchildren George, 11 and Audrey, 10, in a white bungalow in Bellflower after a five-year custody battle that exhausted their life savings and left them in debt.

“Neither of us wanted to do this,” Joan McMillin said. “We had a beautiful picture in front of us that we were moving toward. But the glass broke and the picture was destroyed.”

The McMillins are among a growing number of grandparents thrust into the job of raising children for a second time, missing out on long-awaited retirements. According to census data, in 1990 three times as many grandparents were raising their grandchildren as in 1980.

What happened to the McMillins was an extreme case; more often, grandparents assume child-rearing roles while their own children deal with drug addictions, spousal abuse, divorce or financial pressures that limit the time they can devote to parenting.

Dozens of support groups have formed throughout the United States to help grandparents such as the McMillins cope with the financial, physical and emotional demands of raising children. One of the country’s first groups--Grandparents as Parents--started in Long Beach eight years ago.

The McMillins say they found kinship and solace at the weekly meetings. The organization brought in experts in family law, the social welfare bureaucracy and financial matters to give grandparents advice. At picnics, holiday parties and counseling sessions, grandparent members shared information--from cooking tips and child-rearing strategies to horror stories about battling their own children for custody of the grandchildren.

The McMillins met a retired Los Angeles nurse with colon cancer who is raising five grandchildren, all born addicted to drugs. They met a couple from Lakewood who have been battling for custody of an 8-year-old grandson abandoned at birth by his drug-addicted mother. Another member of the group, a single grandmother, had won custody of her grandson from his drug-addicted, abusive mother, only to learn that the boy’s father, who is in prison for attempted murder, might gain custody when he is released in a couple of years.

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Grandparents also learn to cope with guilt stemming from their own children’s problems.

“We learned we weren’t bad parents, and we’re not failures,” McMillin said. “Some of the guilt was lifted and we could go on.”

Joan McMillin, 58, a beautician, appears to be flourishing in her role as mom. On a recent afternoon, the aroma of chicken soup wafts from the kitchen where she is standing in front of a pot, stirring. Jerry McMillin, 60, a former refrigerator repairman, sits in an armchair in the living room, overseeing George Gallagher Jr. and Audrey Gallagher as they do math homework.

On the living room wall is a portrait of their mother, Barbara. She looks radiant, youthful, her head cocked, her smile self-assured.

The picture is deceiving, though. Barbara’s life was never as easy as the photograph suggests.

Barbara was the youngest of Joan McMillin’s seven children. When Barbara was still a baby, McMillin left her abusive first husband in Massachusetts, packed the kids in the car and drove to California. She moved to Bellflower in 1970, working at odd jobs to keep food on the table. She went back to school but continued to work nights and weekends. She often had to leave Barbara in the care of the older children. Joan met Jerry, a divorced father of three grown children, in the late 1970s. They married a few years later.

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Barbara met George Gallagher when she was 14. He was 20, with the looks of a TV anchor, and had a well-paying aerospace factory job. Almost immediately, Barbara became pregnant. In 1983, at age 17, she was married and the mother of two children.

During the marriage, George Gallagher drank, smoked marijuana and beat Barbara, according to Joan and Jerry McMillin. The two children lived on and off with their grandparents.

In February, 1986, Barbara and George divorced and the court gave custody of the children to Barbara. But Barbara kept returning to George, despite the pleas of Joan and Jerry McMillin to leave him for good.

Barbara exhibited the classic symptoms of a battered woman, said Sylvie de Toledo, a licensed clinical social worker who founded Grandparents as Parents in Long Beach.

“Somehow the man still has a lot of power and control,” de Toledo said. “When there are children involved, and you’re dependent on an abusive man emotionally and financially, it’s very hard to break away because you’re wondering how you’re going to survive.”

In January, 1988, Barbara, George and the children moved into the Twin Cypress Motel in Orange. One day six months later, Audrey and George Jr. were helping pack the car for a trip to the beach. Their parents started arguing about money. George Gallagher pulled out a knife and stabbed his wife repeatedly in the head. Audrey was 4 at the time. George Jr. was 5.

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George put the children in the car and went to his mother’s house in Yorba Linda. In front of Audrey, he stabbed his sister Mary in the chest, killing her. He put the kids in the car again, drove onto the Costa Mesa Freeway and crashed into the center divider. He left the kids, who were uninjured, took off his clothes and ran naked through a nearby neighborhood, where he was arrested without a struggle.

After a two-day trial, a Superior Court judge ruled that Gallagher was insane when he stabbed his wife but was sane when he stabbed his sister. Gallagher was ordered confined to a state mental hospital, where he remains. Even if he is declared sane in the future, however, Gallagher will face a prison sentence of 26 years to life in the death of his sister. After Gallagher’s trial, Joan McMillin told a reporter: “Now I know there’s a safe future for our family and my grandchildren.”

But their problems were far from over.

Despite the McMillins’ objections, Orange County social workers placed the children with Gallagher’s teen-age sister. A few months later, the McMillins won temporary custody of George Jr. and Audrey, but George Gallagher’s mother and brother sued for permanent custody.

There followed a five-year battle in Orange County Juvenile Court involving the McMillins, George Gallagher’s family and social workers. Although the children remained with the McMillins, a series of hearings were held to determine whether they would be suitable parents, and to determine how the children were adjusting.

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At various times, Joan McMillin says, she was blamed by some social workers and the Gallagher family for her daughter’s death and denounced as a bad mother and grandmother.

“The stress was horrible,” McMillin said. “I couldn’t eat or sleep. You start even wondering about yourself. Maybe they’re right, maybe you’re wrong.

“The kids are not a problem,” she said. “I can do 10 kids. I roller-skate, I ride bikes, I do all that stuff.”

It was the custody battle that took its toll.

In 1990, Jerry McMillin suffered three strokes, causing mild brain damage that forced him to give up his successful refrigerator-repair business.

The McMillins now live on Social Security and what Joan McMillin earns from three part-time jobs: cosmetologist, demonstrator of grocery store products on weekends, seasonal worker in a marmalade factory.

The children, who were aware that a court might force them to leave the McMillins, also were having problems.

Audrey talked like a baby. She lay on the sofa in the fetal position. She wet the bed every night. She forgot how to read and write and had to repeat kindergarten. For a time, she refused to go to bed unless the windows and doors were covered with blankets. She kept saying she was afraid that “daddy would come get me,” according to Joan McMillin.

She said George Jr. “would get angry and throw and break things. He would hit Audrey and she would hit him. When I tried to get him to talk to me, he would say, ‘Why can’t we just live with you? Why do we have to go to court? Maybe they’re going to send us away.’ “It was very hard to convince this little boy that he was going to stay with us.”

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Even so, neither Joan nor Jerry ever considered giving up.

“I had to do what I thought was right, to stand by my wife and take care of the kids,” Jerry said. “I promised the kids I’d be as good a father as I could. When I make a commitment, I do my best to keep it.”

Court Commissioner Gale Hickman said the case dragged on partly because he was concerned whether the McMillins were up to the task of raising children who had experienced such trauma.

“Anyone who had the kids, including the McMillins, would have a difficult task raising them,” Hickman said. “I never had any doubt about the McMillins’ energy and willpower but (doubted) whether they had whatever it might take to cope with these kids.

“I’d have thought that about anybody,” Hickman said. “These kids were very disrupted.”

Last year, Hickman ruled that the McMillins should have permanent custody of George and Audrey.

Breaking the bond between the McMillins and their grandchildren might cause George and Audrey irreparable damage, the commissioner decided.

“What happens to kids who . . . have bonded only to have the bond destroyed? They stop trusting,” he said. “And when they stop trusting, they get angry and they carry their anger around. It disrupts them forever and ever.”

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In the year since the McMillins were awarded permanent custody and the court terminated its monitoring, George and Audrey “have done 10 times better in attitude, in feeling secure, in school, than they had in the previous six years,” Joan McMillin said. “They’re calm, they’re happy, their lives turned right around.”

George, a sixth-grader, does well in school, plays the saxophone and complains about not being allowed to go to the mall unattended or stay out after dark or see R-rated movies. Audrey loves math, reading and talking to her grandmother about clothes, boys and the latest hairstyles.

McMillin sews Halloween costumes for herself and the kids, and bakes cookies with them at Christmas for teachers and neighbors. She takes them to school the first day, monitors their studies closely and encourages them to do their best.

She worries, though, about allowing George and Audrey outside after dinner, about letting them ride bikes alone, about whether their clothes will inadvertently offend gang members, about what might happen if they walk through the wrong neighborhoods. She acknowledges that she didn’t have to worry about most of these things with her own children.

Audrey and George rarely see their paternal grandmother, Janine Phillips, 61, one of the Gallagher family members who sued for custody. Like Joan McMillin, Phillips was a single mother who raised seven children alone after her first husband left her. Now, she is helping raise three other grandchildren.

Phillips said the custody dispute also left her in debt, forcing her to declare bankruptcy. Though she is unhappy with the custody ruling, she is resigned to it.

“The main thing is that the children are doing well,” she said. “I hope and pray the kids are all right.”

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Audrey still thinks about her mother at times. “Sometimes I wish I had a mom,” Audrey says. “Kids at school ask me, ‘Where’s your mom?’ So I brought in a picture of her grave.

“When people ask me what happened, it brings back bad memories. I just say, ‘My mom’s dead. My dad killed her.’ And I leave it at that.”

George Jr. says, “I just don’t talk about it.”

Although the children are adjusting, Joan McMillin says, “I see heartache when they reach puberty and the parents of a girlfriend or boyfriend want to know about their parents. What happens when (someone) finds out their dad’s in prison? What if (the parents) say, ‘You’re not going out with my son or daughter?’

“That’s why we talk about it. So they aren’t devastated by it.”

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Joan McMillin says she has few regrets about forgoing her retirement dreams and becoming a parent again. She feels best when friends compliment her about the job she and Jerry are doing with the kids.

“Some of them are envious, the women especially, because their kids are married and gone and they’re left with the old man.

“We listen to our friends and, since they’ve retired, they don’t do anything. Some are sick; some have died; some, their backs went out, some have bad feet.

“But we’re as crazy as we were. It’s just that we don’t have money, so we can’t go too far,” she joked. “And now we need a baby-sitter.”