DATE: Tuesday, May 6, 1997                  TAG: 9705060037

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
                                            LENGTH:   70 lines

TWO-TIME MOMS OLDER WOMEN AS MOTHERS - SOME HAVE NO CHOICE

WHEN SOMEONE first asked me what I thought of a 63-year-old California woman having a baby, a one-word response came to mind.

Why?

Which seemed to be the reaction of most people. It took me a minute to even get past the painful prospect of a woman that age giving birth.

But once I did, other questions came to mind. How will she survive those 3 a.m. feedings, the swabbing of strained apricots off the kitchen walls? Will her daughter's friends confuse her for her grandmother when she goes to PTA meetings? Will a mother near 80 be able to tackle those teen-age questions like ``Why are you the meanest mom in the world?''

Will she live to see her child graduate from high school?

Judging from the hullabaloo, most of us hope that mothering by women old enough to be grandmothers doesn't become a trend. We're outraged by the thought.

Well, guess what? It's already happening.

And not necessarily by choice:

More than 3 million children in the United States are living with grandparents or other relatives, a figure that's risen by 40 percent over the last decade. In one-third of those households, neither parent is present and the grandparent is the primary caregiver.

And yet there is no uproar over that.

There's no one questioning the injustices of grandparents taking on a second shift of child-rearing because the real parents flamed out on the job.

Perhaps, speculates 64-year-old Bobbie Karpaitis, who with her husband is raising their 7-year-old granddaughter, that's because the public doesn't know how many grandparents are out there doing just that.

They are, too often, invisible saviors.

These are not folks who came by children through donated eggs or fertility drugs or artificial insemination, but by phone calls in the middle of the night.

Telling them to come, or face sending their grandchildren to foster care.

Karpaitis knows because she and her husband ran a group in Virginia Beach called Grandparents Raising Grandchildren for six years.

While some of the members took in their grandchildren because the biological parents had died, most inherited them because of the parents' irresponsibility.

Drugs. Alcohol. Child abuse.

My generation, too often, has failed the children we delivered.

One woman I talked with several weeks ago said she was raising three grandchildren all from the same daughter, who she says is a drug addict. A month ago she got a phone call saying her daughter had given birth to yet another child.

``The hospital called me at 2 a.m. and asked if I could come get him,'' the woman said.

So she did. But not without a little regret: ``I would love to be a visiting grandmother and not a permanent mother,'' the woman said.

This second tour of duty for grandparents comes with a hefty pricetag: Retirement dreams put on permanent hold. A second job to pay for expenses and college funds. Worries about dying too soon to see grandchildren reach independence.

But the grandparents also often raise these boys and girls with a dose of patience and wisdom they may not have known the first time around.

While a 63-year-old woman having a baby raises a lot of moral and ethical questions - from whether a woman has a right to do it to whether science and technology should be used to that end - the question of whether a senior citizen is up to the task of parenthood has been answered by many a grandparent.

They already are.

Whether that's fair and best to them - or the children they're raising - is another question.

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