My daughter is a teenager filled with secrets, adolescent angst and enough inner drama to fill the pages of a Harlequin Romance novel. She tells me everything — except the things she doesn’t want me to know. I worry and I fret, symptoms of a disease called Mommyhood.
But at some point, I have to let go. I must trust that she won’t break her neck on the back of a motorcycle or make the kinds of really bad choices I made at her age (but will never admit to). Moms have secrets, too.
The once-adorable baby with the big brown eyes and blond hair seems to have grown overnight into an inscrutable, unknowable almost-adult — one who plays with computer games one minute, then the next slams her bedroom door and exchanges texts with someone who, I’m sure, is not a 40-year-old man with bad intentions. She has a good head on her shoulders, my kid.
But how much do I really know?
When did it happen? At what precise moment did Elliot Rodger, who started life as someone’s darling baby, turn into an irredeemable degenerate? When did he become a sexually obsessed and murderous miscreant without a speck of conscience, empathy or restraint, but armed with plenty of powerful weapons?
This will haunt the “Hunger Games’’ second-unit director, Peter Rodger, and his ex-wife, Li Chin. They will go to their graves knowing they did everything possible to stop their 22-year-old son who had grown into an unrecognizable psycho killer. He carried out a sickening rampage near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara last Friday, May 23 — killing six innocents and injuring 13 others before evidently firing into his own head following a shootout with cops.
And it serves as a wake-up call to any mom or dad who ever ignored a kid’s fevered cry for help, who looked the other way when a child acted like a flipping loon.
How can we know when enough is enough?
Peter and Li Chin lost their son. But they don’t speak of him. It is the young people who got trapped in their spawn’s twisted revenge fantasies whom these parents will mourn until their dying breaths.
This mom is no Nancy Lanza, a gun nut who took her son Adam to a shooting range and allowed him access to her large arsenal of weapons. She even wrote him a check so he might buy a new gun for Christmas. Nancy Lanza died after her son shot her in bed in 2012, then proceeded to Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he shot dead 20 children, all 6 and 7 years old, six adults and himself. He was 20.
No, Elliot Rodger’s parents saw to it that he had psychological therapy since childhood. His mom got worried last month after seeing a rambling YouTube video her son posted online, talking about revenge, death and dying. She worried that he was suicidal and called a mental-health professional. But when seven Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies arrived at his apartment on April 30, they found a polite, if shy, man who called the whole thing a “misunderstanding.’’ They saw no threat and left. Authorities never watched Rodger’s disturbing videos.
Rodger, who had dropped out of Santa Barbara City College, had for nearly three years plotted revenge against his enemies — from sorority girls who never slept with the self-described “virgin’’ to his annoying roommates. He vowed to kill his stepmother and his 6-year-old brother, of whom he was jealous because the boy had been signed to appear in TV commercials — and Rodger feared he’d be popular with girls.
When his parents saw the e-mailed manifesto, they rushed from Los Angeles to Rodger’s apartment in Isla Vista. It was too late. He stabbed to death three men in his apartment, including two roommates, and drove his black BMW to a UCSB sorority, shooting three women outside, killing two. Then he drove to a deli, where he shot and killed a male student, then struck and injured a bicyclist, all the while shooting at and injuring people on the sidewalk. He finally died of what authorities call a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Inside his car, cops found three semiautomatic handguns, all purchased legally, and more than 400 rounds of ammunition.
I grieve for Rodger’s parents, who likely never really knew the stranger they raised.
And I’ll be having some long, awkward chats with my daughter.
Count on it.