Who's Gonna Love Me

By A. McKenna

WHO’S GONNA LOVE ME? is the true story of one man’s journey to overcome the effects of a lifetime of abuse. It is the story of how abuse as a child can lead to abuse as an adult. It is a lesson of how abuse victims are often ill equipped to recognize and remove themselves from abusive situations be it physical, emotional, or psychological. People who are abused young often lack the tools necessary to recognize abusive people. A. McKenna experienced each of these types of abuses over the course of his lifetime. His last experience shattered his life completely and almost took his life. It was only then did he seek out the necessary help to understand the abuses of his past and the people he was always drawn to. It is an inspiring story of one man’s struggle to find redemption from a life that had been so cruel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369400357

Book preview

Copyright © 2023 by A. McKenna.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/28/2023

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

852337

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Who’s Going to Love Me?

Chapter 1     Misplaced Childhood

Chapter 2     Damaged

Chapter 3     Children’s Aid Society

Chapter 4     Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans’ Home

Chapter 5     Crazy Step-Monster

Chapter 6     My Escape

Chapter 7     Mother Fails Again

Chapter 8     Re-enlistment

Chapter 9     Success Is Often Lonely

Chapter 10   Love and Deception

Chapter 11   A Nontraditional Marriage

Chapter 12   A New Beginning

Chapter 13   Teaching Was My Destiny

Chapter 14   Another Poor Choice

Chapter 15   How Politics Upended My Life

Chapter 16   My Comeback

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I never imagined I would ever write a book, much less a book about my own abuse. I have kept my abuse a private matter for my entire life and it was only after being catfished on Twitter and almost dying before I began talking about it. I told my story to a friend who told me this was a story I needed to write. Writing this story not only helped me deal with some of my trauma, but it also introduced me to some new friends while cementing my relationship with some old friends.

To my friend and colleague Diane. This book would have never happened without you. Thanks for listening to my stories and helping me realize that not everything is my fault.

To my friend Heidi, who I am going to visit 3 days from this writing. We fight a lot, but through it all we have remained friends despite what Rebecca would have had you believe. You have been a wonderful and amazing addition to my life and I am grateful.

To my friend NB, who has taught me more about Twitter and its deceptive purposes than I care to know. Thank you for inviting me into your life and the life of your family. You are 100% legit in my book and I think you are awesome.

To my friend and colleague April, who convinced me to write a second edition. The first edition contained my entire Twitter experience because I had this need to get the poison out of my system before I was poisoned to death. The second edition put the focus squarely on my abuse and truly marginalized those who abused me on Twitter. I made them more of a blurb. Thank you April for convincing me to write it again as I think i wrote the story as it was meant to be told.

To my friend Nadine who I fight with all the time and yet she is still here 2.5 years later. She came to me a week after my Twitter experience came to an end and told me I had done nothing wrong. She said she would stick around long enough for me to feel better and then she would be on her way, and yet she is still here so thank you for sticking around to see the healthy version of me.

To my friend Koolie who was my sounding board for much of this book and helped me make sure my book was not an attack on women, but to highlight the attacks I faced from women as a result of my poor choices. I find most women wonderful, and most of my friends are women. I just made bad choices on who I got involved with. I was however quite angry after being catfished and Koolie made sure that I kept that anger focused where it belonged. Thank you Koolie for all your time and your friendship.

I want to thank my friend Beth who has taught me that we can live our life without making abuse the dominant focus in our lives. She has taught me that I am not alone in my suffering and has reenforced in me that I have value outside of my suffering.She is an amazing friend to me as well and I am grateful to have her as my friend.

I want to thank Miss Trocano for helping me become the decent person I am in spite of all my obstacles. You will forever be a mother to me and if you happen to read this please contact my publisher to get in touch with me. I have missed you for forty years.

Finally, I want to thank my followers on Twitter who have watched me struggle as I tried to redeem myself and come back stronger than ever on the platform. I never would have climbed back if not for them. They have been so supportive in helping me back. I would not have a presence without them and they played a big role in helping me return to a positive emotional state with their kindness. They matter a great deal to me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. McKenna is a veteran, former businessman, and currently a special education teacher. His BA is in history and education and his master’s is in education with a focus on special education. He currently has his license in educational administration as well. He resides in Cleveland, Ohio.

The life of A. McKenna has been a journey of painful lessons that have taken him to heights in his career but to some very dark lows in his personal life. As a product of horrific childhood abuse, he has encountered many obstacles along the path to success. This inspiring memoir is the story of the challenges he faced navigating harsh environments and abusive relationships to eventually find a place of joy. Because he was never given guidance at an early age or taught how to deal with or identify obstacles, he had to learn many painful lessons the hard way. His was a life of giving and never receiving while still searching for the love he never had growing up. It is the story of one man’s journey to self-actualization.

We can all be successful regardless of our circumstances if we are willing to work hard for success, but it is imperative that we seek help or ask questions long before our concerns consume us. Abuse does not have to define us, and we need not let it control our daily lives or influence who we choose to associate with. We can rise above and recognize when people simply do not fit into our lives. We must learn to trust ourselves and not others when we know changes in our lives must be made. We can make our lives as we want as we begin to understand who we are and what we want.

Educators, victims of abuse, social media victims, financial abuse victims, and anyone who has ever endured making poor relationship choices will find Robert’s story especially empowering.

WHO’S GOING TO LOVE ME?

I awoke last night having the worst panic attack I have had in years. Sweat was pouring down my face, my heart was racing, and my body was trembling all over. The events of the past year, but especially the last few months, took me to places I thought I would never return to because I thought there were only so many cruel people one could encounter in a lifetime. I was wrong. In the last year of my life, I encountered the worst kind of person. The one who listened, sympathized, and used my deepest darkest secrets to her advantage as she psychologically destroyed me for two years of my life. I thought I had escaped this life, but the reality was I was only hiding from my demons. I was safe if I remained alone, but if I let the wrong person in, I was in danger of breaking from their intolerable psychological cruelty. I was not equipped to recognize bad people, nor how to remove them from my life until my life was in danger, or I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. This experience forced me to take a good look deep inside myself and get to the root of my struggles and seek the help I desperately needed.

I have been a victim of abuse my entire life in some form or another. I was recently diagnosed with PTSD, adult ADHD, and a panic disorder. My abuse consisted of physical, emotional, and psychological. It would also include sexual harassment and cyberbullying. My inability to ward off these abuses can be traced back to my desire to just please women, which may be a substitute for pleasing a mother who just found no use for me. Somehow, through all of this, I have found success both as a business owner and a successful schoolteacher, all while living through the worst forms of abuse imaginable and keeping it all a secret for so long. A teacher friend of mine heard my story and said there are a lot of sad stories out there, but yours is one that needs to be heard, and by telling it, I might provide hope to others while healing myself, so that is my hope.

CHAPTER 1

Misplaced Childhood

A friend of mine asked me what my first happy memory was as a child. I thought long and hard but could not think of any before the age of seven. However, there are many memories of the most vile and disgusting forms of behavior ever put upon a child. The kind of behavior that should be criminalized, and in many cases is criminalized today. When I was a child, they never talked about such behavior, or they blamed it on things like postpartum depression or some other form of mental illness. Not once did anyone call child services or the police to report such abuse, and it would take a nervous breakdown for people to understand the depths of the kind of abuse I was enduring and would continue to endure for most of my life. I am fifty-six years old and am only just now beginning to understand why the behaviors continued for so long and how I contributed unwittingly to my own abuse.

My earliest childhood memory of abuse was sitting at the dinner table where I was not allowed to leave the table until I finished my vegetables. It was always spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, or Brussels sprouts. Sometimes I would be there four to five hours before my mother would try and force them down my throat, often making me throw up. I remember her saying things like, You are going to eat these if it’s the last thing you do. I, however, would not eat them and finally be sent to my room for the rest of the night.

One night while I was still sitting at the table for many hours, our neighbor came banging on the door hard. My mom let her in because her boyfriend was coming after her, and he was mad. My mom refused to let him in, so he fired a gun into our window. That was a traumatizing event for me. Having the police come to the house, hearing the screaming and yelling, and watching a man being taken to jail was so emblematic of my childhood. There was nothing good in my childhood. Every day served as a reminder that my life, my family, and most of all, my mother was not well. There is a reason I have no stored happy memories throughout my first eight years of life. When I look at my childhood photos, I see nothing but sadness or anger except when I am with one of my sisters. That was the only time I was happy, and those moments were infrequent.

I remember being locked up in my room at night staring out the window to see this man across the street looking out his window at me. He was holding a mirror that would reflect off the streetlight somehow, and a beam of light reflected into my window. I did not know if I had an overactive imagination or if this really happened, but I remember every time this beam of light came through the window, my stomach would hurt so badly, I would crawl into bed under the covers and cry.

When I was five or six years old, I had to walk home from school, which was a good distance from home, and if I did not make it home in time, I was sent to my room without supper and I was not allowed out of my room until the following morning. I was not even allowed to use the bathroom. It was an impossible task for a small child like me to make it home in the time allotted. Therefore, I spent most of my time in my room. The only good thing about that was I did not have to eat those nasty vegetables.

I would be in my room most nights by dark, and in the cooler months, darkness came early. I was not allowed to have a light on, so I was alone in the dark most weeknights. For a little boy, that was extremely traumatizing. If I came out of the room, I would get a beating. This was not the life any child should have lived. I was in such a bad way that if I had to pee, I peed out the window. If I had to poop, I did so in the closet.

There was a lot of animosity in my parent’s relationship, and in my opinion, my mom blamed my dad for ruining her life and leaving her with five kids. I think my mom had better plans for her life that never materialized. This may also have been a trigger for her abuse. Why was I the one? Only she can say, but my sisters rarely if ever felt the brunt of my mother’s anger.

I remember a day when I was supposed to go into the kitchen to see what time it was as I was just learning to tell time. My aunt had been teaching me, and every time I got the time right, my aunt would give me a kiss. Kisses were rare for me, and I embraced the affections of my aunt who was still a senior in high school at the time. When I came back and gave my mom the time, my mother thought she smelled smoke and accused me of playing with matches. I swore I did no such thing, and she refused to believe me, instead (according to my recollection) she turned on the burners and stuck my hands over the stove until I had these huge blisters on them. I was screaming so loud as I never experienced such agony in my life. I would have taken an ass whipping any day of the week over that. My mom wrapped my hands up, stuck me in a corner, and told my father when he returned on the weekend, I did it myself. I could not imagine my father believing such nonsense. What child in their right mind would stick their hands willingly on the stove to burn them? I did not need that kind of attention or suffering. My mom would tell me later that I had set my bed on fire once and that is why she thought I was playing with matches again. How psychologically damaged was I before I had even reached seven years of age? I was lashing out in ways I do not even remember.

My father worked during the week in Chicago, and we lived in Cleveland. Times were hard for a tool and die maker in the seventies as jobs kept fleeing, so my dad went wherever the work was. He would come home on the weekends and my mom would pretend everything was all right. I would eat and play as if nothing were wrong. I remember one day my mom let me out on a Friday and gave me a banana and said, Do not tell your father anything. The secret would not last long as my father came home one day and saw pee stains down the side of the house. He went upstairs to the bedroom where he smelled something awful. He opened the closet to find that I had been defecating in there. I had been locked in my room the whole week while he was away. I remember my father screaming at my mother, grabbing my clothes, and taking me to Chicago to stay with my grandma while he worked.

In my dad’s opinion, my mom was not a good woman. She was jealous that my dad spent so much time with me when he was home because it meant little time for her with him. This made no sense to me. I have one memory of my dad spending time with me and that was when he would take me to the fairgrounds to ride a pony. Otherwise, he was in his chair watching TV all the time. I cannot remember him ever mowing a lawn or washing his car. I just remembered he smoked a lot and watched TV all the time.

I must have lashed out more than I remember. My mom said I set my bed on fire, and I do not recall this incident. If that is true, then I set my bed on fire on two separate occasions. One will come later. I do remember my dad pulling into the driveway with me and my sisters in the station wagon because he had forgotten something. This was one of those station wagons where the seats faced