A Woman's Flight Chapter 6

  After she had passed; his father made it his personal goal to torment and abuse Richard as much as possible. In his father's eyes; he held Richard responsible for her death. He was heartbroken as well. His mother had been the only good thing in his life and his protector. He had thought of her as an angel. Not the she had passed, something broke in Richard. He started to severely hate his father. He would imagine him dying in various gruesome ways and he started acting out more in school and causing trouble in general. Where as before, he used to be somewhat quite and reserved at school and around other people; he began to act out and started to pick fights with the other kids and break things in class. By the time the teachers started to see the switch it was too late. Richard was already gone.

         It almost seemed like overnight he went from the quiet reserved kid in the corner to completely acting out and looking for reasons to fight or to question the teacher's authority. When they tried to bring it up to his father he just looked at them and said, "What do you expect? The boy has always been a little retarded and slow anyway. He is a freak. He is better off in a home far away from me anyway. He has never been normal and the sooner you take him off of my hands the better." When the teachers saw that Richard's father was serious; they started making arrangements for him to be sent to a home for the deliquent. In the meantime Richard's behavior began to digress further and he often began to have rages and panic attacks out of nowhere. He would often lash out at the person or think nearest to him and would throw and break things just to hear them break. Nobody really knew how to deal with his behavior problems; so he ended up sneaking through the cracks. He stayed in the center until he was 18 when he aged out of the system. Without anywhere to go, he ended up on the street for a while until he was finally able to find a job working at the local construction yard. The foreman hired Richard more out of pity than anything else, but at least he was willing to work and he needed an extra hand. It was 6 years later that he met her mom.