When I arrived to tee my house for Thanksgiving, the party was already over. Mom said, perfect ....

When I arrived to tee my house for Thanksgiving, the party was already over. Mom said, perfect timing. Clean this up. I told them to GET out, but my sister laughed. You let us use the house, we're staying. So I taught them a lesson. I'm Penelope Mitchell and I'm 26 now. Growing up, I had parents, obviously Jennifer and Robert Mitchell, and I had an older sister, Olivia, who's four years older than me.
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 She's 30 now married to some guy named Derek, and they've got twin boys who just turned four. But here's the thing about my childhood that really screwed with my head for years, from the moment I could understand words, I was compared to Olivia every single day. She was the golden child, the one who could do no wrong.

When she brought home straight A's in fifth grade, my parents threw her pizza party and bought her a new bike when I brought home straight A's two years later. My mom just said it was expected and that Olivia had done it first anyway. I remember when I was eight and Olivia was 12, we both played soccer.

She scored three goals in one game, and my dad wouldn't shut up about it for weeks. He told everyone at his office, all our relatives, even the neighbors, when I scored four goals in my game the next month, he just nodded and said, that was nice. At home, it was even worse. Every decision, every family discussion, Olivia's opinion was what mattered.

When I was 13, I really wanted to paint my bedroom this light blue color. I'd been saving up my allowance to buy the paint myself, but Olivia said it would look ugly and clash with the hallway, and my parents immediately shut down the idea. Meanwhile, when Olivia wanted to knock down a wall in her room to make it bigger when she was 16, they hired contractors and did it without question where the time we were picking a vacation spot.

I'd been begging to go to the science museum in Boston for months because my class was studying astronomy and I was obsessed with it. But Olivia wanted to go to some beach resort in Florida. Guess where we went? Yeah, Florida. I didn't even get to bring a book about space because my mom said it would be too heavy in the luggage.

Family dinners were the worst. I'd try to talk about something that happened at school or something I was interested in, and my parents would listen for maybe 30 seconds before turning to Olivia and asking about her day. It was like I was just background noise in my own family. The only place I felt like I actually mattered was at my grandparents' house, grandma Margaret and Grandpa William Lived about 40 minutes away in this beautiful house, right on the lake.

Honestly, that place was more home to me than my actual home ever was. Every weekend I could. I begged my parents to let me stay with them. Sometimes they'd say yes just to get me out of their hair. At grandma and Grandpa's, everything was different. They actually listened. When I taught, I could go on and on about whatever I was into at the moment, whether it was dinosaurs or poetry or learning to skateboard, and they'd sit there genuinely interested.

Grandpa would hang up my drawings on the wall in his study. Not just stick them on the fridge with a magnet where they'd fall off in a week, but actually frame some of them and put them up like real art. He told me once that my drawing of a sunset over the lake was his favorite piece in the whole house.
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