Daddy’s Little Drifter

She was daddy’s little girl, and when daddy died a long, agonizing death from cancer, it left her feeling alone. He’d had great dreams for her, but without him they didn’t seem important anymore. Her life began a slow downward spiral.

I think about her perched on the edge of a chair telling me all this. She’s 15 now, a pretty girl with large dark eyes, her hair pulled back from her face into a tight ponytail. She wears jeans, a T-shirt and socks.

We talked the other day in the family home in Monterey Park. I had heard about her before, a supremely bright girl who earned A’s and Bs in school, but who had suddenly slipped off the edge to become a user of narcotics, a school dropout and a runaway. I wondered why.

I hadn’t known about her father. I was simply pursuing a case history of an adolescent who had turned to drugs. I wanted to chronicle the details of her addiction, because I have known others who had traded their lives for temporary pleasures which, in adulthood, had become permanent burdens.

Robin was different. The thrust of the interview veered from self-gratification to loss. There was something about her story that profiled a drift toward realization, and she wanted to talk about it, to tell others.

She was one who had made it.

*

Robin was two when her father became ill. She remembers his pain, but she also remembers his hope for her to become something he could no longer be.

There was nothing specific to his dreams, only a longing that she somehow shape her life to complete his. She was his favorite and would do anything to please him. Absorbing his dreams for fulfillment was one way to do it.

But when he died, her loss was too great to understand the underlying optimism of his wish. And there were other factors too.

One was her father’s consuming desire to build a dream house for them to live in. He had gotten it under way, but in the race toward completion, cancer had won.

“He never got to live in it,” Robin tells me in the immense solitude of a quiet room. “But my mother’s boyfriend did. I hated him for it, and I hated her.”

A new man had entered her mother’s life, and to Robin it seemed as though the union mocked her father’s memory. There was no tolerance for her mother’s needs, only her own. And when friends offered a temporary release from pain through marijuana, Robin, then 13, took it.

“It was a good feeling,” she says, looking off toward the memory. “I felt giddy and giggly. Nothing else mattered. Just that.”

Elements sometimes coalesce in our lives to force new directions. In Robin’s case, the elements were loss, anger and despair. The direction was downward.

*

Weekend parties with marijuana through a long summer became everyday parties with marijuana and amphetamines when school began. Predictably, the A’s and Bs disappeared. Robin began living her life in a fog.

“The stuff was always there,” she says. “It seemed no one ever had to buy it. My sister had it or friends had it. We’d get in a car and go to the beach and just hang out.”

Her sister, two years older, was another factor in Robin’s slow descent. Robin idolized her. But the sister had also turned to narcotics, justifying Robin’s own usage, validating her method of escape from loss.

Meanwhile, fights with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had intensified. She left home three times, but can’t decide today whether she was kicked out or just ran away. There are blank places in her memory.

A flash point of change might have been Robin’s own fractured sense of morality. Using a variety of drugs that could have killed her, she nonetheless clung to her virginity as a last link with a self that existed when she was still daddy’s girl.

Discovering that her sister was sleeping around, Robin broke with her, even to the point of denying her existence. When the sister was arrested for dealing, Robin took a long, hard look at herself.

It was a person she knew her father would dislike, and by becoming what she was, she was denying his dream. Like a character in the movie “Heart and Souls,” if her life went unfulfilled, so would his.

Robin went into rehab, re-established contact with both her mother and sister and is living at home, in the dream house. Her mother’s boyfriend is gone. Robin has re-entered school and is taking night classes to make up for those she failed.

Loss was the factor that almost sent her into permanent oblivion, but recovery is proof that she can deal with her father’s wish. In that sense, I suppose, she will always be daddy’s little girl.