When Grandparents Must Rear Children : Families: More than a million U.S. youngsters are raised by their moms’ and dads’ moms and dads. It’s a confusing role for those who give the care.

Visiting Grandma and Grandpa often means a homemade dinner, lots of kisses and hugs, and returning home with your parents while clutching a bagful of things you don’t want.

But, today, more than a million children in the United States don’t go home with their parents. They’re being raised by their grandparents. And, in many cases, it’s not a pretty picture.

It’s a tapestry too often shredded by drugs, alcohol, fear, anger and danger. In the middle are the children--confused and innocent--trying to make sense of all the adults who say they love them.

Grandparents as Parents, which meets every Monday night at the Reiss-Davis Center in Mar Vista, is a group that gives sometimes equally confused senior citizens a chance to sit down and commiserate.

Many say their own children are strangers to them. They refer to them as drug addicts and prostitutes, as if they were someone else’s offspring. They blatantly accuse them of being abusive and incompetent parents, ravaged by drugs and doing anything--even trying to get their children back to qualify for welfare checks--to get money for their habits.

They don’t come by these opinions easily.

Whatever sanity they have preserved is a result of the realization that their own children will probably never be whole again. Many are fighting for custody of the grandchildren; others live in fear that they will lose the children they are trying to save.

Jim and Fay Strassburger have been through it all. They are representative of the group. Middle class. White. Hard working. When the Strassburgers faced a choice between retirement or raising two of their grandchildren, it forced them to examine themselves as parents and test the strength of their commitment to each other.

Fay and Jim are in their 60s and have four adult children--Steve, Kenny, Lisa and Patricia. “Kenny became an addict at 15. He’s 29 now. All his friends were addicts, and he was the one with the big heart who helped them, and then he changed,” said Fay from her home in Westchester.

“He stole. We bailed him out. When I heard sirens in the middle of the night, I would wake up and vomit, thinking that he was hurt or dead.”

Jim Strassburger was a volunteer with the Los Angeles Police Department at the time.

“It sure as hell didn’t feel wonderful when I walked in and saw my son’s picture on a wall with known drug addicts and 459s (burglars),” Jim said. “My mother and father raised nine children and no one was out of line.”

“Kenny survived a head-on collision, an explosion at close range, he drove off a cliff, a gas can blew up in his face, he was beaten beyond recognition with a chain by another addict, he was pulled out of his car by the Jaws of Life. He probably had seven or eight close-to-death experiences,” Jim said.

The Strassburgers say Kenny’s girlfriend, Tanya, took drugs throughout her pregnancy and even brought PCP to the hospital when her baby, Shawn, was born just a few days before Christmas in 1986. Fay remembers him as a frantic infant whose little tongue went in and out like a serpent’s. He was identified as drug-addicted, which meant that he could become a ward of the county.

Jim remembers a “shotgun” deal in which social workers told them that “if you don’t take him, then we will.” The Strassburgers asked for a delay of a couple of days.

“We didn’t speak all the way home,” Fay said, “and when we got home Jim asked me ‘What are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean me?’ Fay recalls, “I just knew that I couldn’t have a Christmas not knowing where the baby was, and so Christmas Eve we brought him home.”

Jim and Fay had made plans to buy a motor home and see the country after Jim retired from Grumman Aircraft, where he was a quality-control specialist. But, instead of touring Montana, the Strassburgers went to UCLA Medical Center 27 times the first year of Shawn’s life.

He became part of the Pediatric Research Intervention for Development and Education program, which tracks drug-addicted babies.

Jim admits that, at first, he wished he had never seen the baby. Fay felt the child was finally safe with them. She believed he would eventually be all right, but raising a drug-addicted baby presented problems that they had never anticipated.

“First of all, we thought it was going to be temporary and that after Tanya came out of the drug rehab center that she would want the baby back. My son was incarcerated in Arizona and still is,” Jim said.

For most of the early months of Shawn’s life, Jim was angry at himself for getting into this mess, and he was angry at his son for creating the situation. Two months later all that would change. Fay tells the story with tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Shawn screamed for 52 straight hours. I called UCLA for medication, but because he was a drug-addicted baby the side-effects were too dangerous. We tried everything. We were advised to bundle him tightly and keep him in a dark room. I filled the tub with tepid water and floated him in it.

“We turned the music on and we held him and swayed him to the rhythm. Nothing helped. It was hell. And then I saw Jim holding the baby--tears in his eyes--singing a song about a fly and I knew Shawn had him. They were bonded, and finally he slept.”

They were wrong about being able to give Shawn back to a woman still on drugs--even though the court seemed willing. By the end of the year, it was clear that Shawn’s mother didn’t want the baby. The Strassburgers decided to adopt him.

That was just around the time that their daughter Lisa, also a drug addict, gave birth to Brandon. She was not on drugs throughout her pregnancy, however, and the baby was healthy.

“I gave up saying, ‘Why me? Where did I go wrong?’ I stopped hating myself,” Jim said. “That’s when I finally came out of the closet and stopped feeling the guilt and shame. . . . I also found out I wasn’t alone.”

Cousins Shawn and Brandon have been raised like brothers. Fay goes to PTA meetings and Jim takes Shawn, now 8, to Holy Communion lessons. “He got me back in church,” Jim says.

The Strassburgers credit Grandparents as Parents with helping keep them sane. Said Sylvie DeToledo, the clinical social worker who runs the group:

“These children have no rights, and the drug addicts do. Their only hope is their grandparents, (but grandparents are sometimes) treated as meddlers by the courts. That has to change for the best interests of the child.”

Grandparents as Parents: (310) 924-3996.