Single Father Finds Heaven on Earth With His Little Girl : Parenting: Since John Silva got custody of Cassondra, now 9, he has struggled to make ends meet, but to him it’s as good as being in heaven.

At night, Cassondra Silva eats first. Always.

And John Silva always waits to serve himself until after his daughter has eaten--a habit that has stuck from the day he was awarded sole custody of Cassondra more than eight years ago.

Patiently, Silva cooks a simple supper of chili beans, potatoes, salad, toast and milk to Cassondra’s orders. He carries it on a TV tray to his daughter’s bedroom where she perches on the bed, rapt, watching Bugs Bunny.

Then Silva returns to the kitchen to squeeze in a nightly round of sales calls for his flooring company while whipping up his own meal--a fragrant goulash of leftovers, carne asada and Spaghetti-Os.

“I’m in heaven right here,” he says, finally hunkering over dinner with an inexpensive beer, a dog-eared paperback thriller and a happy sigh. “This makes everything worth it.”

Like the other 3,718 single fathers and 11,213 single mothers counted in Ventura County in the 1990 U.S. census, John Silva is raising his child by himself.

Cassondra’s mother still visits her daughter every two to four weeks. And the girl’s grandfather and uncle help with food bills occasionally.

But Silva has vowed to live as independently as he can.

“I think, by raising my child for the last eight years by myself, I was never a deadbeat dad,” Silva said. “We’re no different from any other family, we’re just missing a piece.”

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Alone together in quiet mid-town Santa Paula in a neat, tiny duplex filled with his books and bowling trophies, with her school awards and stuffed animals, the 41-year-old sales manager and his 9-year-old girl must live cheaply.

They are kept poor by something in John Silva’s past that costs more than half his weekly wages: his first family.

Silva says he married his first wife when he was 19 and she 17, and pregnant.

She bore him a son, he says, then left right after the birth of a daughter as the marriage dissolved in quarrels.

By the time Silva tracked them down eight years later in Bakersfield, the state had taken away the children and she was living on welfare.

Silva fought in court to have the children returned to their mother, he says, but then the state latched onto his wages to repay the government aid.

Then he met another woman who became pregnant with Cassondra; she ceded custody to Silva when the baby was 7 months old, Silva says.

Silva’s first daughter and son are now grown, and it has been ages since he talked to his former wife, Silva says.

But he still shells out thousands of dollars a year--plus interest--to pay back the government agencies that supported his children and his former wife in Oklahoma and in three California counties: Yolo, Kern and Ventura.

Stacks of bills show the monthly bite that leaves Silva and Cassondra with barely $800 for utilities, food, school fees and the $600 rent.

“I don’t have any credit cards, and I can’t have a bank account,” he says. “I get paid on Friday, and I’m broke on Saturday.”

But Silva is intent on giving his second family everything it needs.

He dotes on Cassondra and she on him.

“This is the fruits of my labors, right here,” he says proudly, waving a recent report card that Cassondra paved with good grades. “You’re talking about pride. You’re talking about chest swelled. That’s my little girl.”

Asked if her father loves her, Cassondra grins, ticking off the evidence, the used furniture and appliances with which he has lined her sunny bedroom: “If he’d buy me a TV, a lamp, a bed, a desk, a dresser, a phone, a boom box, he sure does!”

When he can afford the gas, Silva takes Cassondra to the beach or to the movies--instead of the more frequent flop on the floor to watch rented videos.

“When I have money, there’s a bottomless pit,” Silva adds solemnly. “I’ll do anything for her.”

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John Silva is among a growing number of fathers who are raising their children alone, said Ventura County Family Court Judge Robert C. Bradley.

“Your ‘90s dads--as opposed to ‘70s dads and even ‘80s dads . . . are for the most part convinced they can be at least as good as or a better parent than the mother,” he said.

The ones who succeed most often, Bradley said, willingly take parenting classes, avoid laying their divorce problems on their children, and stay sensitive to their sons’ and daughters’ needs.

Raising a child alone is hard enough for women, but single fatherhood can be doubly tough, said Jean Ferguson, a Thousand Oaks family counselor.

Unlike single mothers, she said, single fathers often fail to let their children express emotions or learn independence.

“Women are more listeners [and] men are more problem solvers,” Ferguson said. “They want to fix their kids’ problems rather than really listen.”

In weekend custody situations, single fathers often become “Disneyland dads,” Ferguson said--they entertain their children rather than spend time with them. “It’s their needing to be looked at as a friend, and they’re not doing a good enough job,” she said.

But some single dads rise to the occasion.

Those who can face being the only man at a PTA meeting or the sole father in a Girl Scout troop, who can be emotional with their children while maintaining authority, Ferguson said, can be terrific parents.

“I think men do a really good job if they make it a priority,” Ferguson said. “The biggest problem for them is their belief that they can’t do it. . . .If they really decide to give it that much time and effort and learn more skills, I think they do really well.”

Silva says he had to learn parenting the hard way--alone and one step at a time.

At first, he tried to raise a baby while holding down a job at an Oxnard equipment rental shop.

“I got up at six, got her ready and dropped her off at the baby-sitter’s, then I’d come to get her again at 8 [p.m.],” Silva says. “But 6 to 8 with a baby-sitter, that was no life for her. I found myself in an impossible situation.”

He quit.

For a while, Silva was able to support Cassondra and himself on his savings, he says, but they soon fell onto the welfare rolls.

After nearly five years of welfare and odd jobs, Silva got a kick in the pants: The county Public Social Services Agency pushed him into Gain Employment Services.

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That county-run job training program put Silva to work on clerical and, later, administrative chores helping other welfare recipients get off the dole.

And finally, three years ago, Gain’s job counselors helped Silva hunt down and land a steady job. He manages customer service, installations and the warehouse for Howard’s Carpet One, a Ventura flooring company.

“Thank God for Gain,” he says. Then he grins, adding, “Now if it weren’t for child support, I’d have it made.”

Silva admits he is bitter that he is paying child support for his two grown children, while struggling to support his youngest.

“If I were by myself, I’d have no beef,” he said. “I’d get out of here and go live in a tent and pay [the child support bills] off. The fact is, I do have Cassondra, I need a two-bedroom home, and I have to give her everything possible.”

Money is vital for the home-and-hearth necessities, and for programs to help Cassondra grow and learn, like Brownies and Girl Scouts.

Riffling through a Girl Scout catalogue, Cassondra sprawls on her bed while Silva looks over her shoulder.

She picks out pictures of “Try-Its,” trying to identify the triangular, embroidered merit patches that she earned before graduating last monthfrom Brownies.

And he scopes out the new Girl Scout uniforms that she must wear when Scouting resumes this fall.

“That’ll probably be your outfit here,” Silva says, pointing. “We’ll probably see if we can get it used. They’re really expensive.”

Cassondra leans close, poring over the snappy blouse and grown-up looking pleated skirt.

“All riiight,” she says, pointing out a feathery brass merit pin. “See, daddy? There’s the Wings.”

When her father leaves the room--to phone in more customer appointments for the carpeting company--Cassondra confides that the arrangement is not always perfect.

“I hate when he has to work till 5 p.m.,” she gripes, because she has to spend most afternoons at the Kids’ Club after-school program at Glen City School until her father picks her up.

“I don’t like it that much because I have to wait for my dad,” she says. “Especially if I get hurt or I throw up. I have to go to the office and wait for him for 20 minutes . . . Ooughh.”

Cassondra says she wishes she could see her mother more often, particularly because she just gave birth to Cassondra’s half-sister.

“Sometimes,” she says, still flipping through the Scouting catalogue, “I cry for her.”

But at the same time, Cassondra admits she likes the little freedoms: Bedtime is 9 or 10 on school nights, but she gets to stay up late on weekends.

She loves Scouting, and the fact that her father works as a volunteer with her Scout troop--even coming to the nursing home with her to visit a lonely elderly woman she chose as her “adopted grandmother.”

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And when she does something wrong and dad gets mad, Cassondra says, they are able to make up.

“I’ll always say, just to calm him down and get him to stop yelling, I say, ‘Dad, will you always love me?’ ” Cassondra explains. “And he says, ‘Yes, I’ll always love you.’ ” Cassondra, her father says, has taught him patience.

“She’s helped me focus, she’s helped me with my patience,” he says. “She’s slowed down the world for me. She’s responded to the way I’ve tried to raise her. The more successes I have, the more I want to teach her.”

There are life lessons, like shopping trips when Silva sends his daughter off to pick out the cheapest ketchup not by the price tag, but by the lowest price per ounce.

And there are the more long-term, intangible lessons of growing up.

Over Cassondra’s bed hangs a poster titled “As I Grow.” It is a guide to patient child-rearing and a constant reminder of patience that Silva calls “Our constitution.”

“Please understand that I am growing up and changing very fast,” it says in part. “It might be difficult to keep pace with me, but please try.”

As Cassondra grows, her father says, it will be hard for him to let go.

For now she lives on a tight leash.

While Silva does all the cleaning, cooking and laundry, Cassondra must clean her room whenever company comes, and play with prescribed friends for prescribed amounts of time, he says.

Proudly, he has festooned her bedroom wall with plaques and proclamations she has earned--Young Writer’s Contest, First Prize, Outstanding Student of the Month.

But when Cassondra got a D on a test recently, Silva says he made a beeline for a meeting with the teacher to find out what went wrong. Then he spent extra time working through her homework with her.

And when Cassondra walks to the corner convenience store, Silva says, she had better be back within 12 minutes or he will come looking for her.

But he admits, “I can’t keep her in a plastic bubble. What am I going to do?”

*

After supper, Cassondra walks out to the living room, cradling a blue plastic ball.

“Daddy, can I go over and play with George?”

“OK, go ahead.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Daddy, something’s burning.”

“No it’s not,” he insists.

“Smells like it,” she says, then skips out the door, sneezing twice and dribbling the ball across the quiet street to meet her friends in the fading light.

Silva makes a few more calls, then ponders her future.

“How am I going to feel when she starts dating and getting interested in boys?” he asks. “That’s a toughie. That’s gonna be tough. But I look forward to the day of her wedding when I get to give her away.”

Silva walks into Cassondra’s bedroom to retrieve her tray, scraping untouched salad onto his own plate.

Then the single father frowns into his daughter’s half-empty glass.

“She didn’t finish her milk!” he grouses. “Grrrr . . . .”