In July of 1997, I was born into the McDevitt family.
I am the youngest of the five kids in the family and the sibling closest to my age is eight years older than me. I have one brother and he is the oldest in the family. My brother was the person in my family that I looked up to the most and of course, I always wanted to hang out with him even though I was a lot younger than him and his friends.
My siblings helped me grow up a lot and quickly. My brother would take complete advantage of when my parents left him in charge to baby sit me when they would go away. At a very early age for me, he would be having parties while babysitting me. He rarely got away with it but they were some really funny times looking back at it since him and his friends were in high school and I was maybe four or five years old. We always had good times in our suburban town right outside of West Philadelphia.
Since we lived right outside of the city, me and my siblings were very into hip-hop and the culture of it. I would wake up to my brother and sisters all crowded in our family room watching MTV Jams, MTV Cribs, and plenty of other shows. My parents didn’t really like me watching MTV, so I was always chased out when my parents realized they were watching it with me in the room. My siblings had given me a taste for the genre of hip-hop pretty early.
They have influenced me in a very positive way. I have learned from them to just enjoy life to the best of my ability and work hard to get where I want to be. My siblings really taught me to have fun, but be smart at the same time. Some of them may have went through struggles but they were learning lessons for them and me at the same time. My parents were strict so we were all taught to be scared of the consequences and, at times, I do very much appreciate that my parents instilled that in me.
I was the little brother that would hit all my siblings friends as they walked in the house. Whenever I see my siblings friends today, they always remind me about how far I have come from beating them as soon as they walked in the door. I guess watching WWE when I was younger really had a bad affect on me as a kid. At least we all can laugh about it now.
We all went through Saint Bernadette of Lourdes School in Drexel Hill for our grade school years. When I was in school there, most of my siblings had already went onto high school. Being a catholic school, me and my friends had some adventures because of the strict rules that the nuns in charge of our school had enforced. At my grade school, I met most of the people that are still in my core group of friends today.
One of my best friends that I had met at Saint Bernadette’s had a sister that went to the same high school as my
brother and because of that we clicked instantly. We both loved hip-hop, both of our siblings had parties when they were just supposed to be babysitting us and because of all that we are still very good friends today.
Me and my friends from middle school were pretty regular kids. We always were out walking the streets of Drexel Hill trying to find things to do to have fun, whether it was ding-dong ditching houses in our neighborhood, playing sports or going to grade school dances. We have a good amount of stories that we still look back at and laugh about today.
Most of us all went to the same high school and kept things going as we got later in our teen years. We all still meet up from time to time. I can never really complain about my youth and how I grew up. It made me who I am today and I would say that I am proud of it.
