In my youthful years of life, I would easily be classified as what society would call a “devil child.” Listening was not my favorite hobby, I hated my younger sister, Lauren, and every want or need that was put to my mind was quickly enforced by a variety of screaming and many temper tantrums from my tiny body. Normally, little girls at the age of five or six were more interested in barbie dolls and polly pockets instead of tormenting their siblings and parents. I, however, was not of the ordinary. I was the troublesome child of the family for the time being.

    At the age of three, there was no one I hated more than my little sister, who was a year old at the time. In my opinion, everything that she did was a mistake to me, because with her living in the house, I was given less attention from my parents and more attention was paid to her, the baby of the house.

One day I had decided that it was my turn to be “rewarded” with the attention in the house, so I had gone on a rampage filled with sinful actions to make sure that my sister was the less important child in the family. I regret to inform you that my actions were not successfully completed, and I was put into more mischief than I was in before. From pulling hair, scratching, spraying her with lysol, yelling, painting her with green sharpies, stealing her toys, eating her holiday treats, cutting her hair, ruining her birthday cakes, etc., it was beyond evident that I despised my sister, and she had clearly came into my life to make it worse.

Out of all of the stories that I remember and have previously been told, one of my favorites include the day when I felt that it was necessary to illustrate a Dora map on the inside of my house, with no boundaries whatsoever.

    Covered in black sharpie and tears streaming everywhere, my dad was yelling at me, and asking me over and over again why I had chosen to do this… this is how it went down.

It all started on one innocent evening, with my dad at home to watch me and Lauren, and my mom on her way home from her 9am-9pm shift at the hospital. My older sister, Danielle, was at her “birth giver’s” house for the week, who has no intention of being called the loving word “mother.” So it was just us three alone in the house, along with my German Shepherd puppy wandering around the general area. At the time, my dad was occupied with laundry downstairs and was not worried about leaving the two of us alone in the living room, a floor above him. I was unusually minding my own business away from my sister, when I witnessed a wide-tipped black sharpie laying on the dining room table. The TV was displaying another episode of “Dora the Explorer,” and I was interested in recreating a map like Dora had, around the house. The explorer of my very own episode was, you guessed it, my little sister. I was determined to make this map the most interesting map the TV series had ever seen, with the best clues permitted throughout the house.

    With my dad still engaged in laundry, and prior to that, on an intense phone call, I believed that I had more than enough time to show him my artistic ability around our home.

    With my sister always getting into the fridge looking for snacks, I chose this destination as the first step. Standing at the dining room table, I dragged the inky marker across the linoleum floor. As it squeaked effortlessly through the planks of my mom’s new hardwood floors, I had finally reached the refrigerator, the start of my path of destruction, and just a few feet to the left of the dining room. I rounded the marker up the appliance, and quickly made my path toward a lower position, and connected the lines back down to the floors. My first destination was completed.

    Next stop, the stairs. Lauren was learning to go up and down the stairs in her first year of life, and was curious to see the many different sectors of the house to explore. After I crossed paths in the dining room, I turned left around the corner of the railing, which connected downwards to the staircase. Eventually, the tile had ended and the ivory white carpet had interrupted my course. This had not affected the map though, because I had plowed through it like a tractor ready to harvest its crops. The thick tool had created a mark on the carpet, and my map was on its way to completion. Soon enough I had crawled backward on the staircase, making sure to not miss a single stair on my way down the “track.” As I was making my way down, I had made sure to leave a line down the wall, in case Lauren’s peewee sized brain seemed to miss the marks on the stairs. Surprisingly my dad had not yet noticed the wrecking of his house, made possible by a 3-year-old terror.

The closest and final step of the not-yet finished project was laying right in front of my eyes. My mom’s work desk. I crawled to the left of the staircase over to the desk, remembering to outline the lines of the map as I was making my way to the last destination. I carefully traced up the light oak drawers and circled around the handles, to ensure a smooth clue to be evident in my plan. Finally, once the lower half of the desk was properly marked up, I started my way on top of the shiny desk surface, up the computer monitor, and down the other side of the “treasure chest.” Here it was, the finishing touch of the map, and my final destination. The short but sweet map was completed, and I was excited to see how my sister would react once she followed my path.

Before I could grab her attention from upstairs, my dad had conveniently walked out of the laundry room down the basement hallway, and witnessed the monstrosity that had destroyed his house, but to me, I viewed it as an artistic gift. His first instinct was to yell at me and punish me for the actions I had done, but I had seen it as a craft for my sister to follow and have fun with. His second action of discovering my map was to call my mom, who was still on her way home from the hospital. My mom was speechless when she first walked in the door, and was disappointed to see her carpet destroyed with permanent marker, with no knowledge of if it could ever be removed from the floor. At the time I wasn’t sure if my mom was going to yell or cry at the condition the house was in, so I didn’t stick around to see which reaction she would choose from.

From my recollection of memories on that specific day, I realize that there is a reason why I am not allowed to handle black sharpies around the house. My punishment was not as horrific as you would imagine, because I wasn’t put in charge to clean up the mess I had made, and the only thing I was instructed to do was apologize for ruining the house. When the map was first discovered, my dad was furious. Eventually, he was able to scrub the house free of sharpie marker, and the white carpet was cleaned to perfection, as if it had never happened. The saddest part of this story has to be the fact that my sister, Lauren, was never able to find nor finish the map that I had originally created for her enjoyment.