Conference quokka::non_custodial_parents

235.0. "Globe Article - Second Family, Second Thoughts" by LJOHUB::KBROWN (KEN BROWN DCC/CIS DESKTOP CONSULTANT) Tue Oct 06 1992 12:08

		"Second families, second thoughts"

			BY DANIEL GOLDEN

	from the Boston Globe Magazine, Sept 20, 1992, page 14

Few divorced dads begin a second family lightly or easily. They
agonize about money, exhaustion, rivalries between old and new
families, and abandoning their retirement dreams.  And they dread
another divorce, anather fractured fatherhood.

On Paul David's right biceps, two bright red hearts embrace two names
inked in blue script: "Frankie" and "Alish." But these tattoos are not
souvenirs of romances. Frankie and Alish are David's children.

"Women come and go," the 37-year-old David explains.  "Your children
are forever."  David should know. He and his wife met as teenagers at
a Waltham dance. They were married in 1974, when he was 19 and she was
17. She was also eight months pregnant with their daughter, Alish.
Their son, Frankie, was born in 1976.

The couple split up in 1978 and were divorced three years later. His
ex-wife kept the children, and David was alone. Resolved never to
remarry, he had a vasectomy and satisfied himself with one-night
stands. His jobs included everything from making pizza to shoveling
swill at a pig farm.

His children provided the only continuity in his life. Every Sunday,
which was when the divorce agreement entitled him to see Frankie and
Alish, he would take them to the movies, the beach, or a cookout.
Since they loved to roller-skate, David made a deal with a local rink:
He worked as a floor guard while Frankie and Alish skated for free.

He also paid child support which started at $45 a week and was hiked
to $80 in 1984. Sometimes he fell behind, but he usually made up the
arrearages - and once, mistakenly, overpaid them. Gradually, David
settled down. He found a steady girlfriend and regular work as a
chauffeur. In 1989, when she was 15, Alish moved in with him after a
quarrel with her mother.  Frankie followed this past March. "I was
always there," says David. "I'd never say,` Daddy can't come on
Sunday.' If you do right by your children, your children will come to
you."

Soon Frankie and Alish will have a stepmother. Discarding his vow to
remain single, David plans to marry his girifriend, who manages a
dental office. And that's not all. He and his fiancee, who is 30 and
childless, hope to have a baby.

They have told Frankie and Alish about their plans. Alish, an aspiring
beautician, says she will be thrilled to have a sibling of either
gender. Frankie, a junior at Waltham High, wants a brother. "I already
have a sister," he says.

David needs surgery to reverse his vasectomy. If it fails, the next
step is artificial insemination or adoption. One way or another, he
says, a third name will be tattooed on his arm. And maybe, someday, a
fourth. "I could never replace my two kids," says David. "I could
never try. But it would be nice not to be a part-time father. I had no
say in where they went to school, what they wore to school, what they
did after school. I'd find out they were sick after they were well
again. It would be nice to hang around and see a kid grow."

Many divorced fathers follow the same emotional cycle as Paul David.
At first, they profess to be finished with family life. Some undergo
vasectomies to commit themselves to avoiding commitment. Yet these
fathers, who are equivalent in number to the more-publicized deadbeat
dads, never turn their backs on their offspring. They see their
children often and support them financially. And as their bitterness
over divorce fades, these fathers contemplate not only remarriage but
also another emotional rebirth: starting a second family.

Few divorced dads begin a second family lightly or easily.  They
agonize about the financial burden of providing for two sets of
children and the emotional strain of mediating between them. They
weigh the yearnings of their childless wives against their own longing
for leisurely retirement or their reluctance to undo their
vasectomies. In the backs of their minds, they dread another divorce -
and another fractured fatherhood. Their worries may be well founded:
Studies show that remarriages between people aged 25 to 44 end in
divorce more often than first marriages in the same age group.

Some divorced dads welcome a second chance. "I didn't bring much to
fatherhood other than the ability to procreate," says 44-year-old
Joseph Mokler, of Malden.  After having a daughter and a son, Mokler
had a vascctomy in 1975. Then he was divorced and later married a
childless woman nine years his junior.  In 1990, his vasectomy was
reversed. Now Mokler and his wife have a 6-month-old son. "I'm not
going to be as active a father this time around," he says, "but I'm
able now to see the kind of consistency that's needed."

Other dads have second thoughts. Back in 1976, in one of the few
studies exploring fathers' attitudes toward second families, Harry
Keshet surveyed 130 divorced dads in the Boston area who remained
involved with their children.  According to Keshet, a psychologist at
the Riverside Counseling Center, in Newton, nearly three-fourths of
the respondents said they intended to remarry someday. But when asked
if they wanted more children, the same proportion said no. "For men,
having children is not a simple, acceptable condition in remarriage,"
Keshet concludes. "They worry about it."

When a divorced father weds a divorced mother, the couple often agree
not to procreate, although one or both may desire children to cement
the marriage. But when a divorced father weds a younger, single woman,
the issue of children often becomes paramount.

To satisfy his 30-something fiancee, one divorced father in his 40s
promised to have a baby. "I decided it would be unfair for me to say
no," says this middle-class suburbanite, who requests anonymity.  "I'd
had a kid and she hadn't. Who was I to play God with her life
experiences?"

After marrying in 1990, the pair stopped using birth control. But his
wife has not yet conceived, and the husband still feels ambivalent
about having a second family. He worries that a baby would deflect
attention from his 9-year-old son, who stays with him on alternate
weeks, and whose behavioral problems demand time, energy, and therapy.
And what if the new child were to have problems, too? "Much as I love
my son," he says, "it scares me to think of having another child like
that."

His wife says that her stepson probably receives too much attention
and, as an only child, would benefit from having a half-brother or
half-sister.  "My infertility has made this a wrenching issue," she
says. "If I'd gotten pregnant right away, it would have been a done
deal."

The couple tried a fertility drug, and they are considering a hormonal
treatment that regulates ovulation.  The wife has also suggested
adoption. "Suddenly we've become the stereotype, the frantic couple
using any means possible to have a kid," her husband says.  "And yet,
I don't really want a kid."

Many women do not feel the maternal instinct until they have been
married for years and are nearing menopause. "The closer a woman gets
to 40, the more she wants children," Keshet says. "The closer a man
gets to 40, the less he wants them."

A 50-year-old Boston artist, who recently spent $140,000 to put a son
and daughter through college, is engaged to a 35-year-old professional
woman. His fiancee acquiesces to his desire for what politically
correct usage terms "child-free living." But he is wary of what
playwright Gcorge Bernard Shaw called the "life force."

"At this point, the biological bells haven't started to chime," says
this man, who, like some others interviewed for this article, feels
the subject is too personal to reveal his name. "Her job is very
demanding. Five years from now, she may want children. Should it
happen, we'd have a real problem. I know I can't do it. I just don't
have the energy."

Once upon a time, it was a spouse's death that most often led to
remarriage and a second family. Jamie Keshet, Harry's wife and a
fellow psychologist at the Riverside Counseling Center, says that step
families have been commonplace for centuries; what is new is the
baby-boom generation's obsession with relationships.

"I read somewhere that when Abraham Lincoln's mother died, there was
no soap in the house, because it was her job to make it," Jamie Keshet
says, "So the father went off in a covered wagon and came back in two
weeks with his new bride.  `Here's your new mom,' he told Abe. 'She
can make soap.'"

Today, most remarriages and second families stem from America's high
divorce rates. According to "Remarriages: A Demographic Profile," a
1992 joumal article by Barbara Foley Wilson and Sally Cunningham
Clarke, 19 percent of all marriages in the United States are between
divorced men and divorced women.  About half of the women are
childless.

Eleven percent of marriages involve a divorced man and a single woman,
up from 7 percent in 1970. On average, the divorced man is 34.5 yars
old, and the single woman is 27.9. (Another 11 percent of marriages
unite a divorced woman and a single man, up from 6.4 percent in 1970.
For these marriages, the mean age is 30.9 for women and 29.7 for men.)

We might expect that the family dynamics would be affected by such
aged differences," write Wilson and Clarke, demographers at the
National Center for Health Statistics, in Maryland. "Divorced men who
marry single women may be fathers already and feeling a little old to
cope with the new babies that their (presumably) childless brides
might want."

These statistics omit couple that break up before marriage. One
5-year-old broadcast journalist, who has a son by his first wife, has
dated a 3-year-old professional woman for six monts.  When he proposed
marriage, she issued an ultimatum. She would marry him only if he
would agree to have a baby.

They have been arguing ever since. She says she never particularly
wanted children but she loves him so much that she wants one with him.
("That doubles the pressure," he says.)  More cold-bloodedly, she
points out that he might be dead in 20 years, and a child would ease
her loneliness.

He's tempted to yield. "I and my wife did a damn good job of raising
our son," says the man, who requests anonymity. "But there's part of
you that says, `Maybe we can do it better. Maybe it'll keep me young.
Maybe there will be someone to keep my memory alive after I'm gone.' "
A connoisseur of the arts, he fantasizes about taking his child to the
symphony or the Museum of Fine Arts.

Then practicality punctures his daydrams. He's still paying for his
son's education. If he has another child, he may never retire.  Rather
than use his last years to write and travel, as he had hoped, he will
remain a slave to college tuition.

While he exercises regularly and considers himself young for his age,
he wonders if he has the energy to be a parent again. "It's not going
to be easy, getting up early for feedings, wondering if your son or
daughter has been in a fight or an accident," he says. His girlfriend
"has no experience" he explains. "If I tell her, she sees it as being
negative."

Now their relationship is at an impasse. "It's at a very critical
point, because of her insistence" the man says. "It probably,
unfortunately, is not going to work."

Other couples invent compromises. A divorced writer in Cambridge,
whose son is in college, was reluctant to bear the expense of another
child. His fiancee overcame his doubts by agreeing that, in the event
of their divorce, she would pay their child's college tuition by
herself.

The only trouble with this pact is that it is unenforceable. According
to divorce attorneys and probate court judges, parents cannot bargain
away their obligations to support their children.

After having two daughters and a son, Charlie, a teacher and
basketball coach in Maine, had a vasectomy in 1978, at the age of 30.
"I didn't feel I had it in me emotionally to have another child," he
says.  "Life was hectic. Three was enough."

Not so fast. Three years after Charlie's divorce in 1985, he married a
22-year-old woman whom he describes as a superb athlete.  Both wanted
a child.

Charlie, who asked that his last name be withheld, went to Maine
Medical Center, in Portland, for a vasovasostomy, popularly known as a
vasectomy reversal.  There are no statistics on how many of the
300,000 to 400,000 vasectomies performed cach year in the United
States are later reversed; estimates range from one in 100 to one in
10. But patient case histories show that like Charlie, at last 75
percent of patients are divorced fathers who are or are about to be
remarried. In more than 6O percent of the #aq#, the wife or fiancee
has no children.

Frequently, urologists say, the woman spurs her waffling mate to
undergo the reversal. "I've had men come in with their fiancees, "Says
Robert Kessler, a professor at Stanford Medical Center in California,
who has performed 1,500 reversals in 20 years. "When I ask them, 'When
are you getting married?' she says, `We're waiting for the results. If
we can have a baby, we'll get married.' I counsel the guy, `If I were
you, I'd say the hell with it now. That's no way to start a marriage.'"

Reversals, which are rarely paid for by insurance, cost from $3,000 to
$10,000.  Surgeons use either local or general anesthetic. "I was
awake through the whole thing," says Joseph Mokler who was given a
local. "I recommend the general."

Success is far from certain. Although 90 percent of the recipients
subsequently show some sperm in their semen, only half of their wives
become pregnant. The more time that has passed since the vasectomy,
the less likely a pregnancy.

The 10-year interval between Charlie's vasectomy and his vasovasostomy
was longer than average, and the operation failed. His wife never made
him feel guilty after this disappointment, but he noticed that she
became sad for a couple of days whenever she menstruated. "I felt if
we had no kids, it could cause problems for our marriage down the
road," he says.

So Charlie tried again.  He underwent a second vasovasostomy at
University Hospital in Boston. Today, his wife is eight months
pregnant. This child, Charlie says, will be his last. "My wife is
going to want a second one," he says. "I don't.  One will be plenty."
But this time he's hedging his bets.  He won't reverse his reversal.

When they were married, Jim and his wife planned to have four
children. They had two daughters and she became pregnant again. He was
hoping for a son. Instead, telling him that she want to concentrate on
her job, his wife had an abortion.

Jim, who does not want his last name used, soon was divorced and
paying 57 percent of his net income in child support. His ex-wife and
daughters stayed in their suburban home. He moved in with his parents
to save money but ran up debts anyway. He quit his job as a tax
specialist rather than become a target of his employer's practice of
firing workers with unpaid bills.

But he found another job - and another wife. She was 28 and childless.
Jim was 38 and eager to make up for lost time. They had a son, and now
Jim's middle-class income is supporting two families.

Except for magnates and movie stars, few fathers can afford multiple
families especially in a recession. "This isn't a problem for the
Rockefellers," says Judge Christina Harms, of Norfolk County Probate
Court. "But it is a problem for working-class and even upper-middle
class families. If you're going to have a couple of kids in a second
family, there probably won't be enough money to go around."

While studies show that divorce has a harsher economic impact on
mothers and children, some fathers suffer hardships, too, especially
in Massachusetts.  According to Diane Dodson, deputy director for
family law programs for the Women's Legal Defense Fund, in Washington,
D.C., Massachusetts' guidelines for support awards are among the most
generous to children in the United States. Noncustodial parents must
pay 25 to 27 percent of gross income for one child, 31 to 33 percent
for three children.

Fathers who pay support often complain that they can't afford to
remarry. Although a second wife may bring a second salary, it may be
indirecdy funneled into higher support payments.  Judges often grant
increases in support on the grounds that the second wife's paycheck
frees up more of the fathers income for his children.

William Levine, a Boston divorce attorney, says second wives are often
outraged to find themselves supporting their husband's first family.
"People who marry people with dependents don't understand what they're
getting into," Levine says. "Just like you wouldn't go into a sexual
relationship without knowing where your partner has been before, you
can't go into a second marriage without knowing where they have been
financially.  A lot of marriages fall apart because of economic
surprises."

Having a baby squeezes the remarried couple's resources still more
without much help from the courts.  Traditionally, the law has held
that a first family, like a first mortgage, takes priority over any
subsequent obligations.

In recent years, the first-mortgage approach has been criticized for
punishing the second family. One lawyer has labeled it "vasectomy by
dollar bill." According to Dodson, 13 states and the District of
Columbia now provide separate guidelines for men with two or more sets
of children. Another 18 states including Massachusetts give judges
discretion in these cases to depart from the regular guidelines. (The
remaining states make no special provision for second families.)

In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, it remains rare for a judge to reduce
support because a father starts a second family. Such relief is given
only when the new family has unforeseen expenses, as in a 199O case in
New York in which a father's stipend for his first family was lowered
after his second wife had twins.

It is when the first family seeks more support, usually because the
father's income has risen since the divorce, that the second family
comes into play. Rather than give priority to the first family, many
Massachusetts judges seek to equalize the standards of living of both
sets of children. "I can't just say I'll sacrifice the new family and
grant the increases," observes Eileen Shaevel, a Norfolk County
Probate Court judge.

A lawyer for the state Department of Revenue, the agency responsible
for collecting support, adds that judges in Suffolk County `don't
follow the guidelines in second-family cases. And we're not going to
fight strenuously for something the man can't afford."

Judicial concerns for second families helps explain why Massachusetts
fathers who comply with court orders still may pay less than the
guidelines stipulate. According to Department of Revenue statistics,
these fathers on average pay only 14 percent of their income in child
support. Some have second families whose needs are taken into account;
others under-report their incomes to the court or have had salary
increases since the court order.

But the flexibility of judges to make allowances for second families
is in jeopardy, because new federal regulations urge states to limit
deviations from guidelines. The US government is also requiring states
to review support cases every three years which could trigger more
battles between first and second families.

As if trying for two families weren't enough, Jim, the tax specialist,
spent $12,000 in legal fees in a fruitless custody battle for his
daughters. His second wife, who had wanted to use the money for a down
payment for a house, was so frustrated that she took their
18-month-old son and left.

Under state guidelines, if a twice-divorced father forks over a
quarter of his gross income for a child by his first wife, he pays a
quarter of what's left for a child by his second. "I was looking at
double-barrled child support," Jim says - after taxes, "69 percent of
my take-homepay."

His wife and son returned six months later. But Jim is still
struggling to raise his second family to the standard of living of his
first.  "My ex-wife and my daughters live in an eight-room, two-bath
home on a half-acre of land," he says. "We live in a three-family
house."

Dale Duouette's girlfriend told him that she couldn't have children.
But she was mistaken.  In 1978, she gave birth to a daughter. Because
their relationship was rocky, she decided not to name him as the
father on the birth certificate.

After they split up, eight months later, she discouraged Duquette from
visiting their daughter. According to court documents, she felt that
he drank too much and she couldn't trust him with the baby. Gradually,
he lost contact with his child.

Duquette married in 1983 and had a son the next year. He put his
daughter out of his mind. "I made so many efforts to visit her, and it
came to nothing," says the 39-year-old Duquette. "I really considered
it gone."

This year, "it" returned when his ex-girlfriend sued him for support.
"I never thought I would do this," she told the court. She changed her
mind because she realized that she could prove his paternity, and she
needed to pay for their daughter's medical bills and education.

Due to a rapid increase in out-of-wedlock births, and better
techniques for determining paternity, more single mothers are seeking
child support. Often, they come forward years after the father has
married and started a family. Although the state erased legal
differences between legitimate and illegitimate children in 1986,
cases such as Duquette's have provoked widely varying rulings by
Massachusetts judges.

Some judges argue that fathers ought to pay the maximum allowed by the
guidelines, because they have had a free ride for so long.  In 1991, a
Middlesex County judge went even further, ordering a transit employee
to contribute support for his illegitimate child retroactive to the
date when he learned that he was the father.

Other judges, while agreeing that the father owes some money, argue
that the legitimate children must be considered equally. They point
out that, unlike a divorced dad, the father was not under a court
order to support his prior family when he married and started a second
one.

Middlesex probate judge Vincent Leahy has another justification for
awarding lower support in paternity cases. After granting one
illegitimate child less than the guidelines prescribe, Leahy defended
his decision on the grounds that child support in practice means
supporting the mother also. Yet, Leahy wrote, the father had no such
obligation because they had never bean married. "I think the
distinction between a married and an unmarried couple is a valid one,"
Leahy wrote.

Leahy bemoaned the plight of the father forced to provide for an
illegitimate child according to the guidelines.  "I can easily
envision a scenario where a man marries, has children, buys a home
and, like most people, lives from paycheck to paycheck," the judge
wrote.  "He is then ordered to pay support that is so much higher than
he was paying that he can't pay his mortgage, and he loses his home."

Duquette's judge in Brockton was not as sympathetic as Leahy. The high
school maintenance man was ordered to pay $123 of his $480-a-week
salary for what he calls "a stupid thing that happened 14 years ago."
He and his wife have fallen behind on the mortgage and have drawn on
her income as a retail store supervisor to support his daughter. "I
don't think it's fair, because it's not my child," says Judy Duquette.

Less quantifiable is the impact on Duquette's children. His daughter
was distressed when Duquette followed his lawyer's advice and had a
paternity test. And Duquette had to tell his stunned 7 1/2-year-old
son that the boy had an older sister whom he might never get to know.

Micah Goldberg, 8 1/2 months old and 25 pounds, crawls around a
childproofed Cambridge living room cluttered with teddy bears and
toys. He presses a play phone to his check, then crumples a magazine.
His father picks him up, and Micah exclaims, "Da-da."

Micah's parents, Steve Brown and Terri Goldberg, describe themselves
as politically active ex-hippies. They were married last year, and
Micah is the 36-year-old Goldberg's first child.  Brown, who has been
married twice before, has a 22-year-old son, who came to stay with his
father after being abandoned by his mother at the age of 13.

At first, Brown consented to have another child only to please
Goldberg. "If I had connected with a woman who didn't want a child, I
wouldn't have had one," he says. "But Tem did want one. My feeling
was, `I just did 18 years, and it wasn't a lot of fun.' "

Then Goldberg thought she had conceived, but it was a false alarm. "I
was very disappointed," says Brown, who is 44. "I realized I had
bought in. I said, `Get a thermometer.' The next month, she got
pregnant."

Brown's older son was less enthusiastic. He felt somewhat jealous of a
baby who would enjoy more attention and playthings than he had ever
received. Saying that it was time for a change, he moved out of the
house just before Micah was born.

Such reactions are typical. When a divorced father and his wife have a
baby, according to therapists and child advocates, the blessed event
often strains their relationships with his children, his ex-wife, and
each other.

Like Brown's son, other children may resent the baby. "The kids are
crushed," says Boston divorce attomey Hariey Gordon. "They weren't
getting attention in the first place.  Now their father says, `I want
you to see Dawn Marie, my new child.' "

Trying to mollify his older children, the father typically rushes to
their Little League games or school plays, leaving his wife with the
baby. She feels abandoned, and her insecurity only grows when her
husband, the more experienced parent, scoffs at her anxieties about
the baby's health and development.

"The mother's fantasy is, `Our new family will be you, me, and the
baby,' " says Cambridge therapist Pamela Papernow, who has played
three roles in this psychodrama: stepmother, mother, and ex-wife. "His
fantasy is, `Now I have a whole family: me, my wife, my kids, our new
kid.' These fantasies can collide painfully."

The ex-wife's life is disrupted as well When Papernow's ex-husband
remarried and started another family, she says, "it felt very odd.  My
daughter was having a brother, but I had no role in a new member of
the family.  It wasn't my pregnancy."

By now, Brown's older son has forgotten his jealousy. He refers to
Micah as his brother, not half-brother, and baby-sits for him
occasionally so that Brown and Goldberg can go out. They need the
break. Like most new parents, they never get enough sleep or enough
time alone together. Their fights are tenser, because the stakes are
higher.

Yet Brown, like many divorced fathers, has no regrets about his
decision to start a second family. Micah makes the emotional
adjustments and turmoil worthwhile.  A massage therapist turned Nynex
programmer, Brown works Tuesday through Friday. On Mondays, he stocks
up on baby food, bundles Micah in a backpack, and heads for Fresh Pond
or the Blue Hills. There, Brown relaxes in the shade while his son,
ever curious, discovers grass, twigs, dirt, and other wonders of
nature.