My home life is pretty lame. My twin sister and I have been arch-rivals pretty much since we were born. We are 14 years old and we are nothing alike. The way we behave is very different. She says she’s more mature than I am, but that is a flat out lie. She throws temper tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, even with the smallest things. There is no balance in rules and expectations between me and my sister. I’m expected to obey every little thing I’m told, while my sister just whines until my parents get annoyed and make me do her chores. If I do one little thing that they don’t like, I can expect punishment, usually consisting of groundings for however many days or weeks. If I show any disrespect, I’m grounded. I can’t put one toe out of line without being punished. Then my sister comes along and screams at them and gets all violent as soon as I open my mouth, and still my parents yell at me for “instigating” even though I didn’t get one word out.

When I’m at home I use my time wisely. I do my homework, practice my trombone, and read for a little while. After I finish with this, I like to watch television and relax for a bit. About half an hour after I turn on the TV, my sister comes home and she expects to get the remote as soon as she walks through the door, but she knows the rule is homework first. After I tell her that I just started watching, she raises her voice. A lot. When I refuse again, she tries to take it by force; all the while my parents are sitting right there and not doing anything about it. My mom eventually gets annoyed and yells at me to let my sister watch her shows, and when I try to explain that she hasn’t even started her homework and that there’s a perfectly good TV in the basement, I end up having to hustle downstairs to avoid punishment.

A few weeks ago my dad and I were watching Minority Report while The Bachelor was on. We made sure to record it ahead of time but that wasn’t good enough for my sister. She threw a huge tantrum about “never getting to watch what she wants to watch” and tried to turn off the DVD player while there was still thirty minutes left. When we finally turned on the show she would scream at me and my parents to shut up and shoot us all the death glare whenever we tried to say something, then she would go off and start talking throughout the entire episode, so not only is she a huge brat, she is also somewhat of a hypocrite.

Similar things happen in the car. She and I have completely different ideas of what qualifies as real music. I like to listen to 80s rock, which she can’t stand, and she listens to the new stuff that can be made with the average home computer. Whenever I want to listen to the radio station I like, she starts screaming and whining and kicking the chair of the unfortunate parent who happened to be driving. One time when we were on our way home from Grand Haven, my dad was driving and he turned on the news. Neither of us likes listening to news stations but I at least know how to deal with it. My sister, on the other hand, flipped out. She started kicking the seats, screaming, whining, threatening me, punching the roof of the car, and she even told my dad she hated him.

Now do you see what I’m dealing with? And this is only a little bit of what I have to live with every day. I could write a book of stories like this one if I wanted to! Nobody believes what I’m telling them is true and my friends are kind of sick of hearing it, but that’s okay because I know the truth and that’s what matters. I really hope she can grasp the idea that she can’t always get what he wants soon. If not, life is going to be that much worse for my entire family, and all that drama will drive me insane.